Whoever Gives Us Bread: The Story of Italians in British Columbia by Lynne Bowen (review)

The most recent book of Nanaimo-based Lynne Bowen, Whoever Gives Us Bread: The Story of Italians in British Columbia, is an informative account of one of Canada's largest immigrant groups. This popular history brings together a range of lively personalities, sobering accounts of emotional and physical hardships, and individual success stories. By so doing, Bowen, an independent researcher, presents a much-needed overview of the Italian-Canadian experience in British Columbia with careful attention to the transnational connections shaping migrants' lives.

Whoever Gives Us Bread spans over a century, commencing in the 1860s and concluding in the 1970s. Bowen traces the evolution of British Columbia's Italians from the early days of sojourning and transient workers to the establishment of community institutions. Coming primarily from the impoverished northeast, Italian migrants were attracted to the province's free land and to jobs in the resource-extraction and railway industries. Pockets of Italian men, then families settled throughout the province. At various times, they were strikebreakers, strikers, or both. Once the Second World War broke out and Mussolini's Italy sided against the Allies, Italian-Canadians across the country were targeted as a possible fifth column. The book ends with a chapter on the postwar immigration wave and the tangible signs of integration.

The latest work of Bowen, author of five other books on Western Canada, is an important contribution to the study of one of British Columbia's European immigrant groups. Although the province is home to the third-largest Italian-Canadian population, there are few historical accounts of the community. Studies on Italian migration to Canada tend to focus on Ontario or Quebec. The most noticeable exception is Patricia Wood's Nationalism from the Margins: Italians in Alberta and British Columbia (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002). In contrast to many other scholars of Italian migration, Bowen explores northern Italians' migratory trajectories and the links between their villages of origin and the places where they found work. Pursuing these three themes contributes to a richer and broader Canadian immigration history.

In line with the latest developments in migration studies, Bowen takes seriously the importance of transnational connections, both for those who left their home towns and for those who remained behind. Italian migrants were highly mobile, often moving from Italy to British Columbia and back again. They maintained strong connections with their villages of origin through letters, frequent trips, or even return migration. For instance, British Columbia hosted sojourners who worked for half the year in Italy and the other half in Canada in order to maximize income. In many cases, Italian men worked in dangerous and low-paying jobs, hoping to send money to family members back home. When Bowen was on a research trip in northern Italy, she encountered a native Italian whose grandfather died in a Vancouver Island coal mine (3). In this respect, then, the book contains a number of fascinating, if painful, anecdotes.

Whoever Gives Us Bread also hints at the process of racialization, where Italians went from marginalized to mainstream. In chapter 3, Bowen explores the racial dynamic in the coal-mining industry, noting that Italians were often accused of, and hated for, strikebreaking. Indeed, by the 1880s, employers encouraged racial conflict to discourage unionization, intentionally hiring poor, desperate, and highly transient Italians. However, by the early twentieth century, Italians were on both sides of the picket line, and Chinese workers were the primary targets of Anglo-Saxon disdain. In the final chapter, Bowen again contextualizes and debunks the strike-breaker stereotype, referring to Ken Georgetti, the Canadian Labour Congress's long-time Italian-Canadian president. Bowen therefore touches on the relationships between race, place, and change over time.

Similarly, the book makes an implicit argument for the importance of a multi-centric Canadian history. For historians of immigration, this alternative approach entails conducting research in languages besides English and French. Bowen, for...