HAPPENING
PEOPLE
B Y PA U L N E E V E L
CLAUDIA RIUMALLÓ AND
RICARDO CÁRDENAS
When she was five years old, Claudia Riumalló
traveled with her family from Chile to Boston for her
father’s Ph.D. maternal malnutrition research at MIT. “I
went to elementary and middle school in the U.S.,” says
Riumalló, who also spent four years in Houston, where
her father did research on longevity. “He was offered
U.S. citizenship, but his goal was to work with the poor
in Chile.” After high school in Chile, then ruled by military
dictator Augusto Pinochet, Riumalló earned a degree in
dance from the University of Chile in Santiago. After-
wards, she taught English and Spanish language classes
for multi-national company employees at the university,
and she met Ricardo Cárdenas, who taught classical
guitar. They were married in 1993 and visited Eugene
on a tourist visa at the invitation of a friend in 1997. “We
met amazing people here,” says Riumalló, who entered
and won a U.S. Green Card Immigrant Visa Lottery after
seeing a newspaper ad in 2001. She flew to Eugene in
July of 2002, followed in September by Cárdenas and
their children Daniela, Gabriel and Sebastien. Riumalló
now serves as a bilingual academic advisor at Lane Com-
munity College, while Cárdenas teaches and performs
classical, Latin and jazz guitar. Their story and those of
other Lane County immigrants from around the world are
dramatized in the original play Now I am Your Neighbor,
assembled by playwright Nancy Hopps and directed by
Carol Dennis, with original music by Cárdenas. Staged
readings of the play will be produced at the Very Little
Theatre’s Stage Left, 2350 Hilyard Street, at 7:30 pm
Friday, Sept. 14, and Saturday, Sept. 15; at 2 pm Sunday,
Sept. 16; and at 7:30 pm Thursday, Sept. 20, at the
Wildish Theater, 630 Main Street, Springfield. Proceeds
will be donated to the Community Alliance of Lane
County (CALC) to fund their immigrant justice work. For
ticket information, visit calclane.org and click on We Are
Neighbors.
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eugeneweekly.com • September 13, 2018
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