The first thing Ginna Álvarez noticed when she got off the bus soon after arriving in Ireland was how different the air was. It was lighter and cleaner than any she had breathed in before.
“It smelled like the landscapes I saw on the films, which created a huge impression on me. You start romanticising the place you’re going to go to and I think I got that postcard thing of these very green fields and all that in Ireland,” she says.
“That was like a moment where I thought yay, this is the place I want to be in.”
Originally from Mexico, Álvarez moved to Ireland almost a year and a half ago to pursue her love of theatre and literature.
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She began working as an actress and puppeteer in Mexico but says it was difficult to make a career there. As a result, she relocated to Argentina.
“I found working as an actress was going to be a bit complicated. We have very different accents and you could tell I wasn’t an Argentinian. That’s how I started to meet other immigrants, and we founded this project, a troupe in which we started to do our own thing,” she says.
“I directed the troupe, and I also studied playwriting in Argentina, where the public education is particularly great and welcoming.”
Álvarez found like she had identified a path that was working. But the Covid pandemic threw another spanner in the works.
“At that point my troupe dissolved because the theatres closed and a lot of us had to return back to our home country because suddenly we found that we had not enough work to do which made it really tough,” she says.
“The economy in Argentina made it impossible to get a sense of the future. After the pandemic, that was the first time I thought I might have to emigrate again.”
She started to look at other options available to her, and thought Ireland was interesting and “rich with literature”.
“I’m a fan of Samuel Beckett’s work. What started out as kind of a joke started to shape up as a possibility just because of the landscape. A lot of things that seemed impossible before the pandemic, suddenly they weren’t any more,” she adds.
She returned to her home for a short while to put plans in place for the move to Ireland. Even still, she said it wasn’t as rational or calculated as she normally would be when making big life decisions.
“It had to do a lot with being driven by the little things I knew about Ireland, which was its literature. It was going to be something very, very different from what I am used to and it just seemed like an adventure. That was it,” she says.
“I had an intuition it would be a good place to write and read, and, after the pandemic, I just felt that’s what I really needed: a change of landscape and a place to read and write, something that would be a 360-degree turn from what I was used to.”
It was a difficult decision to leave Latin America, she says, as the countries in which she had lived were both “great in different ways”.
“Mexico is very, very welcoming. We love foreigners. You immediately get a sense of familiarity with people,” she says.
“Argentina became like a second home too very quickly. You would think because of the economic crisis that nothing works but that’s not really the case. There’s a good health system in function. They have huge careers, particularly in literature and theatre; it’s prolific.”
While it has worked out with me in a great location, and a studio apartment, I’m very aware that my life quality is not the same that I had in Argentina
One of the biggest changes since leaving those countries has been the number of hours of brightness, which in Ireland is significantly less than she is used to.
“The weather and hours of sunlight. I started missing the sun very soon and that wasn’t something I didn’t really think about but it was kind of immediate. It’s something you take for granted,” she adds.
The housing crisis was another shock to the system. Although she read about it before arrival, it was very different to be confronted by it.
“While it has worked out with me in a great location, and a studio apartment, I’m very aware that my life quality is not the same that I had in Argentina,” she says.
“It’s tricky to make a comparison economically because being able to get paid for working in theatre, Ireland is better definitely because of the crisis in Argentina and it being an impossible career in Mexico. But my life quality is not the same.”
There are similarities too, however. Particularly between Mexicans and Irish people, says Álvarez.
“We’ve got a big country next to us and we have a difficult relationship. Then also the religious backgrounds, which in many ways has shaped how we interact or feel guilt. So we can relate. In general, I think we have more in common than different. It’s been very fascinating to discover that.”
I just really like my character in the play because she is sort of like an outsider and I think that suits me at the moment
— Álvarez on her role in Richard Walsh’s new play, Drainage Scheme
Despite this, Álvarez still feels a little bit lost in terms of finding her own community and network. Irish people, she says, are very friendly and kind but the depths of the friendships are different from those she made when living in Argentina and Mexico.
This has been alleviated in recent weeks, since she started rehearsing again, and more work opportunities have come her way. One of her present projects is a stage adaptation of James Joyce’s Dubliners viewed through the lens of contemporary immigration.
She will also perform in Richard Walsh’s new play, Drainage Scheme, which premieres at the Abbey Theatre on the Peacock stage from September 11th to 17th, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival 2023.
“It was quite a turn of events for him [Richard Walsh] to select me as an actress because of my accent, the language and the lack of knowledge about culture and what shaped the country,” she says.
“I just really like my character in the play because she is sort of like an outsider and I think that suits me at the moment. In the past month, I started feeling better [about making friends] because I went back into the rehearsal room and I started feeling like I had purpose again, and I had that human contact.”
We would like to hear from people who have moved to Ireland in the past 10 years. To get involved, email newtotheparish@irishtimes.com or tweet @newtotheparish
