Compañeros provides a fascinating and, at times, heart-rending counterpart, or parallel history, to a century of exploitation and indifference. When Canadian and québécois writers began to visit and imagine South and Central America and the Caribbean, exciting new links were formed. Malcolm Lowry, P.K. Page, Earle Birney, Hugh Garner, Nicole Brossard, Al Purdy, Louis Dudek, Patrick Lane, Paul-Marie Lapointe, Pat Lowther, and Tom Wayman were among the many writers to be touched by the peoples, landscapes, and contemporary events shaping Latin America. They were followed by waves of refugees from poverty and the military terror, who settled in Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and other cities north of the 49th parallel and began to tell their own stories in word and film. Out of this exchange of testimonies, observations, and imaginings has been woven a richly textured fabric, a many-coloured coat, to which Compañeros pays tribute. This anthology contains the fiction, poetry, memoirs, and travel writing of eighty-seven writers, many of whose work makes its first appearance here in English.

Includes texts translated from Spanish and French.