Lucinda Carmona

Dressmaker, Toronto, ON, 2008

Dressmaker and Bus Driver, Toronto, ON, 2021

Dressmaker and School Bus Driver, Toronto, ON

Lucinda looks at the interviewer and says “See, your shoulder was a square.” She then describes in detail how she would design and tailor a dress accordingly using a “strict system” of fundamentals, gesturing along her shoulders and neck as she does so. “I was born to sew,” she says, pointing out that in her Catholic upbringing she was taught the importance of making the most of the talents God gave you. For Lucinda, this directive is inseparable from using the fruits of your labor to support others, as she has been doing her whole life, from helping her parents put food on the table to taking in a nephew who lost his parents.

“It is up to you to use the talent not just for you, but for everybody. My talent was sewing. So now, I make something with the hands, anything I learn I will make with skill. I like mathematical numbers, and I like to solve it . You need the skill, see, and you need the tools. It’s easy. And when you send them to school, I saw my nephew make the angles [in his architecture program]. If you ask me the 90 degrees, 81, 86—I remember the angles and how you put the compass, use for the angles, the rules, for sewing. I have my nephew going to be an architect. He makes plans, he made calculus. Lots of mathematics.”

Lucinda takes pride in seeing each of her nieces and nephews develop their own talent, gratified that she has been able to help them do so. But soon she will be leaving them, and Toronto, as she returns to her home country of Argentina. After more than thirty years of working in Canada, her pension of $1200 per month is not enough to live on, whereas back home it will go a long way in her retirement years. 

Lucinda started sewing at age 13, already able by then to make a buttonhole and make simple patterns. “We are so poor, my country. My father worked construction but he lived in another town to work. And we stay with my mum.” While she was learning to sew, she and her siblings’ first jobs were in the rich neighbourhood just a mile down the road from their impoverished urban neighbourhood…