Caroline is seven when her family flees Pinochet’s regime, leaving Chile for Montreal on Christmas Eve, 1986. She fears Santa won’t find them on the plane but wakes to find a new Barbie doll, her mother preserving the holiday even amidst persecution and turmoil.

Once in Canada, Caroline accompanies her parents as they clean banks at night; she experiences racist micro aggressions at school, discovers Québécois popular culture, and explores her love of reading and writing in French. Slowly, the Andean peaks disappear from her drawings. As her family increases their wealth and status―moving to a better apartment every six months in Montreal’s working-class east-end neighbourhood and then a house in the suburbs―the fracture between her parents’ identity and her own grows. When Caroline realizes an apartment she’s partying in is one her mother cleans, the division between her parents’ life and her own becomes explicitly clear.

This expansive coming-of-age autobiographical novel probes the plurality of identity, elucidating the interwoven complexities of immigrating to a new country. As the Andes Disappeared tenderly reflects the journey of millions and is a beautiful ode to family commitment and the importance of home―however layered that may be.

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Caroline Dawson was born in 1979 in Valparaiso, Chile. She is a professor of sociology at Cégep Édouard-Montpetit in Longueuil and author of Là où je me terre (2020) published by Éditions Remue-ménage