From working for Michael Jordan to finding a missing friend: Two lives of an exiled designer who made it in Canada

The library of 70-year-old Martha Fernández Ontivero takes up an entire wall of her small apartment in the Congressional District. Half the shelves are filled with books, such as: dictator, Biography of Jorge Rafael Videla, written by journalist María Seoane; santa evitaby Thomas Eloy Martinez. Montoneros: Resistance after the End, Marissa Sadie. Politics and history. “My whole family is Peronist,” Masha said one summer afternoon, sitting in the dining room. “When I started studying literature at the Faculty of Philosophy in the seventies, I was a member of the Peron Youth League,” he said. The other half of his library contained no books on politics or history. They are written in English. One is about the architecture of the Canadian city of Toronto. The other is marketing and design. Also on the riverbed in Ottawa, Canada’s capital. Martha (an employee of the Library of Congress) This difference in the library also marked her life. He has two.

One of them is from the 1970s and 1980s, when he was in exile in Canada after escaping the dictatorship, where She designs clothes for the Michael Jordan brand, while her other outfits dazzle at high fashion shows. people in the North Country and appearing on the covers of major fashion magazines. Elsewhere, trying to save today, Martha searches for Virginia Brizuela, her friend in the Peronist movement and colleague at the Library of Congress who disappeared in 1977 during the last military dictatorship. “My memory is separate from what I experienced in Canada and what happened in Argentina,” Martha said. For years, one life got in the way of another. Buenos Aires’ clandestine militants were biased by photos flashed at marches and interviews they gave. Until one day, Martha remembered and could no longer forget.

exile

Martha began working at the Library of Congress in 1974. She was 21 years old at the time, a member of grassroots Peronism and studying literature at the University of Buenos Aires. Virginia Brizuela, like her, was a literature student and worked in the library. “Virginia came from a conservative family, but she was sympathetic to popular causes,” Martha said. That same year, the two became friends, and at Martha’s insistence, Virginia began participating in marches and meetings organized by the Peronist movement. “We shared a lot. Work, teachers, militancy. She even met her boyfriend at a party meeting,” Fernandez recalled.

Two years later, in 1976, following the military coup, conditions at the Library of Congress, like all public institutions, became intolerable. If the library was heaven to Borges, the Library of Congress was purgatory. “The colonel and the sergeant arrived as intervenors and began investigating everyone,” Martha said. “They locked us in our offices and asked us personal and political questions,” added Hugo Faciolo, a former congressional employee at the time. “Many people have been fired and fired without reason,” he added. Others, however, had a different fate.

While the Interveners are busy investigating staff and hiding “subversive” material in the library, Martha and Virginia continue their confrontation. “We noticed more and more of our colleagues going underground,” Martha said. One day, she and her mother attended a meeting at the Santa Cruz church, which had been a meeting point for militants during the dictatorship. There, between the benches, Dr. Sara Ponti, a social work doctor on the library staff and a member of a left-wing organization, was waiting for them. Two years earlier, in 1974, Ponti had saved Martha’s life after detecting a heart murmur during a consultation. At that meeting, he planned to do it again. “You’ve been marked, Martha,” the doctor told her in church. “They put you on the list. “You have to go. ” Both of them fell silent and left talking and laughing. They didn’t know it, but it would be the last time they ever spoke to a doctor.

“Dr. Ponti is a trustworthy person,” Martha described. “So I listened to him and started preparing for my exile.” Furthermore, a few days after that meeting, the library’s auditor informed Martha that she had been fired. Martha was out of a job, and with the potential threat of the task force having her name on the list, she had to leave quickly. An acquaintance of his was going to Canada and he decided to accompany him. The young activist had to figure out how to raise money and buy tickets to exile. His mother was a seamstress and owned a semi-industrial machine.. So she started making clothes. “I made 300 kilts for girls and sold them all,” Martha recalls. In 1977, at the age of 25, he landed in the Canadian city of Toronto. It was not until many years later that she heard from her friends Virginia Brizuela and Dr. Sara Ponti.

“I always knew”

Martha quickly adapted to the North Country. Some friends who were already there put him in touch with a clothing boutique in an upscale area of ​​Toronto. His fluency in English also allowed him to get around. His first job was designing yoga pants. “They were widely used in the 1970s and meditation was very popular,” she said.

After a few months, her clothes started appearing more and more on different shows without her knowledge. “Suddenly, I found myself working with the most important clothing brand in the country,” says Martha, who began using her mother’s surname to present herself as a designer. “Fernandez is not for the fashion world,” he explains. Danier, The Leather Ranch, Royal Leather, Haines Canada and other high fashion brands all adopted Martha Ontivero’s designs at that time.

“I was disconnected from what was going on in Argentina,” she said. “I just kept working on designing and making.” A young South American woman arrived in Canada almost alone and began setting trends in the fashion world. This was news that the local media could not ignore. “Spunky Latin Lady” (Spanish for “Spunky Latin Lady”) was the title of a 1978 fashion section of Toronto Life magazine, one of the most popular publications at the time. That same year, “Don’t Break Her Heart” was featured in Toronto Style magazine.

Before each presentation, the question was the same: How does she know what clothes will be popular next year? “I always knew it,” Martha replied. always.

Models would knock on his door in Toronto and ask to borrow clothes. Makeup brands advertise their fashion shows with their new designs. Buenos Aires and the clandestine militants were left behind.

In the mid-1980s, Martha launched one of her most memorable designs. Basketball player Michael Jordan, the greatest icon in American basketball at the time, launched his own line of underwear. To promote the brand in Canada, the brand owner turned to Martha to increase production. “We had a problem because the fabric came from an Asian country that was at war and they couldn’t export it,” he recalls. “But we worked it out and it sold well.”

Martha saved all the newspaper clippings promoting her clothing. There are also interviews. He put it in an old black folder with several pages inside. But among these clips, there are a few titles that fall out of fashion. In 1998, the Toronto Star headlined “Terror Orphans” while interviewing the children of those who disappeared during Argentina’s dictatorship. “Argentina: Ghosts of a Dirty War,” reads a clipping from the Toronto Sun, which is dedicated to the history of the secret detention center in Buenos Aires. The past assails Martha, despite her insistence on forgetting it.

It wasn’t until 2008 that Martha reconnected with her radical roots. With the advent of the Internet, he sets out from Canada to try to find his friends in Buenos Aires. He wrote a name into the search engine: Virginia Brizuela.there he found Her friend and former colleague was kidnapped and disappeared in 1976, the same year she was exiled. Something unraveled in his memory. “The news made my head spin,” Martha said.

In 2015, after leaving the fashion industry due to work reasons, she finally returned to her home country and settled in Buenos Aires. In the same year, she was invited by the Association of Legislative Staff (APL) to participate in an event to pay tribute to the nine missing employees suffered by the National University of Singapore. Among them were Virginia Brizuela and Sara Ponti. Of the latter, Martha remembers nothing. His heart condition was neither discovered nor warned that he was on the list of subversives. However, in that scene, he did remember. “Sarah saved my life twice. I started crying as long as I can remember,” he admitted.

Martha continues to work at the Library of Congress today while searching for her missing friend. “I wrote a letter to her family telling them I wanted to know her fate, but got no response,” he explained. “But I’ll keep looking,” he said. Brizuela’s whereabouts are unknown and she is listed as one of the 30,000 missing persons. However, in Martha’s memory, there are no longer two separate lives. only one. She is the one who is still alive. That person you can’t forget.

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