Creating Italians in Canada

Diaspora 7:2 1998 Creating Italians in Canada Donna R. Gabaccia University of North Carolina at Charlotte Eh, Paesan! Being Italian in Toronto. Nicholas de Maria Harney. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. The English-speaking world tends to privilege the United States as the paradigmatic "nation of immigrants" produced by two subsequent waves ofinternational migration—the first between 1830 and 1930 and the second between 1965 and the present. Still, foreigners have never represented more than 14% ofthe US population. Scholars now acknowledge that the US was only one of many nations formed in the cauldron of the massive global migrations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Argentina, Switzerland, France, Canada, and Australia have all, at various times, had proportionately more foreigners among their populations than the United States. In the immediate post-World War II period, Canada and Australia were particularly important destinations for international migrants. They were especially attractive to poorer European peoples of southern and eastern Europe—Italians among them— who had been restricted on national or ethnic grounds rather than being excluded on racial grounds (as were Asians) earlier in the century. Like the United States, Canada and Australia were unaffected by the wartime devastation that temporarily eliminated northern Europe as a popular destination for the world's most mobile peoples. They were free as well of the militarism and economic stagnation that made much of Latin America less attractive than it had been to prospective migrants in 1900. Of greatest importance, however, was the fact that Canada and Australia welcomed immigrants from southern and eastern Europe at a time when US immigration policy continued to limit their opportunities to enter the country through a discriminatory "quota system." Thus, while the millions of migrants from Italy in the early twentieth century had much preferred migration to the US and to Argentina, more went to Canada than to the United States in the post-war era.1 True, these migrations of Italians to Canada rather Diaspora 7:2 1998 quickly declined again as the French, German, and Swiss economies recovered and generated a new demand for southern "guest workers " in late 1950s and 1960s. Still, Italian migration to Canada continued into the 1970s. Only then did newer migrations from Asia and the Caribbean surpass it. Until the 1980s, Italian was the language spoken by the third largest group of Canadians. (Today, it is Chinese.) Canada—itself a former colony of the British Empire—thus represents both an interesting and an important opportunity to study transitions in diaspora formation in an ever-changing world. Before the 1920s, nation building, the abolition of slavery, and the industrial revolution were arguably the most important factors shaping the formation of diasporas. After an interregnum of depression , war, and reduced migration, decolonization and a new round of economic globalization now figure prominently in newer accounts of more recent diaspora formation. By focusing on a group with a long history of migration to Canada—the Italians—anthropologist Nicholas DeMaria Harney offers his readers an opportunity to bring into dialogue scholarly literatures that rarely intersect: the study of older and newer migrations; the research agendas of history and cultural studies; and social scientific and postmodern methodologies that currently push and pull diaspora studies in a variety of directions. It is worth sorting out just how much common ground these disparate approaches share, while attending as well to what divides them. Nicholas DeMaria Harney is an urban anthropologist who, responding to the evolving field of cultural studies, and especially to theories oftransnationalism and diaspora, chose to forego the usual methodology of his field.2 He did not attempt a study of Italian migrants in a particular neighborhood or community. Rather, Eh Paesan! is a detailed examination of Italian Canadian voluntary associations and institutions. While other urban anthropologists have hunkered down to know well one tiny part of a city and its inhabitants, Harney instead spent considerable time behind the wheel of his car, driving about the suburbs of Toronto. He also regularly climbed aboard planes to accompany Italian Canadians back to their homeland. As he notes in his afterword, "whether I was driving, flying, or travelling on a bus, a trolley, or a subway...