Soraya Martinez Ferrada's first months as mayor have fallen under the microscope and scalpel, and why wouldn’t they? At the time of her coming into office, the veneer of Valerie Plante’s previous administration had long since fallen away and the incumbent is facing a clear and challenging demand: Can you fix what’s broken in this city?
Enter the ensuing media scrums, critiques, and editorials, covering everything from public‑transit labour disputes, property‑tax hikes, and budget choices while making promises made on homelessness, housing, and mobility that are actively being put to the test. Then there are the debates on bike lanes, cars, and all of the potholes between polarized Montrealers since she took office. (And this, I know, is glossing over all manner of other priorities.)
Of course a citizen should expect responsibility, results, and decorum from the new mayor of their city. At the same time, a mayor’s far from an automaton. Would it be possible to know the person behind the title, beyond the platform and first-100-days scorecard? What does Montreal look like through her eyes?
When her team responded to my request for an interview along these lines, the coming talk was ripe with possibilities. By the time we were sitting down together, she'd been in office about 140 days, and the spectre of every outlet in town having covered her platform, priorities, and pressures cast a long shadow.
Still, I wanted to try and understand her outside of all these things. What I got was forty minutes at a Latin American grocery store with a mayor who briefly stepped outside the job to hang out.
Have a seat
Ahead of the lunch rush in the restaurant attaché of Marché Andes, it doesn’t take long for empanadas with Colombian aji, pan de maiz, yucca fries, and a couple of bottles of horchata to arrive at our table.
Soraya—who was ferried to the restaurant following a morning at a strategic forum on defence and security in early April—is dressed formally in black for what’s supposed to be an informal meeting in an informal place.
“Just so you know, I wouldn’t normally dress like this,” she’s quick to point out.
What I’d learn later, once this interview was concluded, is the honest caveat that mayors don't really fully clock out. It was clear that the politician and the person are in constant negotiation.
But there are moments, smaller ones, where the job briefly falls away.
She’s sticking out a bit in a room of steam tables heaped with fried food under heat lamps and upbeat bachata playing overhead, but her stance is at ease in the dining room’s plastic stackable teal chairs.
At ease, and at home: Montreal's first Latin American mayor, who arrived to the city as an eight-year-old from Pinochet's Chile and unable to speak a lick of French, has been coming to this anchor of the city’s Latin American community since childhood.
“This is one of the first spots that I remember as a kid,” she says, “and, you know, finding a piece of my own culture and traditions."
It’s my first glimpse, but a real one, at a version of Soraya that isn’t wrestling with policy or infrastructure. I'm tempted to ask about these things; just before we’d begun to speak, I’d noticed the road outside Marché Andes deeply pockmarked with potholes, that classic bombarded look so many streets have after the snow’s melted away. The mayor had only recently blown two tires on Notre-Dame Street months prior in February. I think about the viral video where she’s standing outside of a gas station with a tow truck operator at 9 p.m.
“We're coming with solutions,” she said then in French on camera, laughing. "But in the meantime, we're getting towed. And I know the state of the roads doesn't make any sense."
I want to ask about these things, but I also want to know who she is, and the clock is ticking.
Tell me about yourself
Soraya's family put down roots in the northern borough of Saint-Michel in 1980, and it remains a part of the city that she calls home. Her grandfather bought a house there shortly after the family arrived. "The most important thing for them was having a home," Soraya says.
She's lived elsewhere in the city over the years, including Longueuil and Pointe-aux-Trembles, but Saint-Michel is somewhat of a gravitational centre to the mayor’s identity.
The neighbourhood's heart, she tells me, is François-Perrault Park, an octagonal civic core and third space that speaks to the borough’s prior status as its own city. The city hall is nearby, and her high school growing up, Joseph-Francois-Perrault, occupies a part of the park. Lunchtime meant slipping out to a tiny restaurant operating out of the basement of a house on Michel-Ange Street, where you could get a box of poutine for under $1.50 and one-cent candies in brown paper bags.
In her late teens and early twenties, Soraya bounced between classes, work and periods of travel, never entirely cutting the cord with Saint‑Michel. During a difficult first pregnancy that kept her close to home, she started volunteering at the Éco‑quartier Saint‑Michel, knocking on doors and helping residents to sort their recycling and greening back alleys.
A way to pass the time turned into four years of community organizing and environmental work, a hyper‑local politicking that would quietly define her career. Around the same time, as a young mother of two, she began management studies at HEC Montréal while juggling odd jobs, community meetings and daycare pickups, slowly piecing together a vocation that blended administration and neighbourhood activism.
In time she’d find her first big administrative break by working at TOHU, the circus arts centre that opened in 2004 in the Cité des arts du cirque, not far from where she grew up. Someone from the board called her because her name kept coming up in community circles; they needed someone who could help build the project in a way that would respect the neighbourhood.
The project was ambitious: a $65-million investment in one of the poorest parts of Montreal to create a world-class performance space. One of its greater challenges out of the gate was making it make sense to the people living near it. The social cohesion work that went alongside the construction—hiring locally, training people on the job so they could compete fairly for positions—has shaped how she thinks about governing today.
Finish “Out of Office with Mayor Soraya Martinez Ferrada”
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