Old Country Ties

At Momentum, a not-for-profit group currently addressing poverty in Calgary by teaching disadvantaged people, including recent immigrants, needed skills to enter the workforce, self-employment facilitator Eva Pettinato might agree with Krahn’s assessment. “There are not a lot of Canadians,” she says, “that would think, ‘I’m going to live where I don’t know the language, culture or food, and I’m going to bring my whole family.’ These people have already taken risks, so being self-employed isn’t necessarily more risky than putting the fate of their families in the hands of the manager of a grocery store.”

Though immigrants like Herrera, a Canadian citizen for eight years, have developed an enabling confidence from familiarity with local culture, laws, markets and of course language, vestiges of the recent immigrant’s attitude remain. Even in his career path, there’s an element of reinvention, not unlike what a more recent arrival undergoes during the upheaval of trading one life for another. “I needed to do something for myself,” says Herrera. “I didn’t want to keep being an employee.” And with that, after some simple online market research by way of Survey Monkey and upon finding a distributor linked to 300 Colombian growers, he set up in the hall down the street from his house for $70 a week, taking his chances on his own sort of roadside kiosk.

Barry Lewis, who’s lived in Canada with his wife, Maureen, since the early 1970s, never had a plan like Herrera’s. Instead the pair, who spent their pre-retirement years roving around North America as freelance managers salvaging slumping hotel operations, have taken an approach to self-employment that would probably work just as well in Barry’s native Jamaica: they’re keeping it simple. “We didn’t do market research,” says Barry. “We jumped in with both feet. Once you get into it, you realize how many people are looking for it.”

Back in the fall of 2000, the Lewises weren’t planning on becoming goat herders, even while driving to nearby Acme to buy their first five kids to fatten up on their 12 acres near Three Hills, an hour and a half drive northeast of Calgary. But as it turned out, the order for the goats, placed by a Calgary cousin connected to the city’s Caribbean community, represented an unsatisfied demand that in 2004 saw Canada import 800,000 tonnes of goat meat. And really, the Lewises already had some hands-on experience. In 1951, after Hurricane Charlie pelted Jamaica, a young Barry offered to care for his neighbour’s three goats while she rebuilt shelters. When he showed up at his parents’ Kingston home with the goats, they simply asked, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” and left him to it. “After that,” he says, “I was cutting grass all over the damn place for them.”

This spring, Balmaur Farms was hopping with 60 kids, around 40 does and a sire. They hope to keep 50 breeding does over the winter, with the rest sold either for meat or breeding for $140 to $200 each. Considering it a hobby business, the Lewises will grow Balmaur according to the amount of grass Barry can grow and to meet demand. With the numbers of West Indians, Fijians, Indians, Nepalese, Pakistanis and Africans bringing a taste for goat meat to Alberta, not to mention the Greek- and Italian-Canadians already here and occasionally indulging, you’d never get stuck with too many goats, Maureen says.

Arthur Vaquilar, despite dealing in a nearly outlawed product for the past five years, manages a similarly positive outlook. Owner of Humo Cigars just off the northwest corner of downtown Edmonton, Vaquilar visited a southside smoke shop called La Tienda in late 1995. For the seven years that followed, whether working the counter or just hanging out, he developed a passion for the pricey, and – to a guy then in his early 20s and looking to broaden his horizons – seemingly sophisticated pastime of cigar smoking. When the shop changed hands, Vaquilar decided to open his own place. Distributors he knew through La Tienda gave him product on term and friends pitched in to tile and paint his new shop. He even built a cedar humidor to protect $15,000 to $20,000 worth of tobacco, retailing from $1.50 to about $90 a cigar. Then the city cracked down.

After repeated fines for violating the Edmonton smoking ban implemented July 1, 2005, municipal officials took him to court, threatening to revoke his licence. Humo has been smokeless ever since. Sales have dipped but, maybe since there will always be births and graduations to be celebrated with a stogie, Vaquilar’s not complaining.

Apart from a few Filipino cigars, most are Nicaraguan, Honduran, Brazilian, Dominican and, of course, Cuban. There is little at Humo that links Vaquilar to the country he left at the age of three with his mom, a brother and a sister, to join Dad, who’d immigrated here a year earlier to work as a heavy-duty mechanic. But, if you consider some of Harvey Krahn’s work describing heightened motivation of immigrant post-secondary students as compared to native-born Canadians, Vaquilar maintains a distinctly immigrant outlook, regardless of long-standing citizenship.
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