Staying Italian: Urban Change and Ethnic Life in Postwar Toronto and Philadelphia (review)

The sustaining role that ethnic identification played in immigrant communities that were established in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been the focus of much historical research. In contrast, studies of these communities during the post World War II era have tended to focus on a narrative of racialization which details how, why, and at what cost groups were able to embrace whiteness for privilege. The racial fault lines which divided “white ethnic” Europeans from those who were descendants of immigrants from Asia, Latin America, and Africa were accentuated by the complex interaction of the economic, ideological, legal, social and global politics of the Cold War Era and its aftermath. In Staying Italian: Urban Change and Ethnic Life in Postwar Toronto and Philadelphia, Jordan Stanger-Ross cuts against these earlier historiographical trends by stressing how ethnicity survived in two different North American cities in the last half of the twentieth century.

Stanger-Ross’ comparative approach to ethnicity provides provocative findings. The author shows that the “quality” rather than the “quantity” of Italian identity was pivotal in these two urban environments. He also convincingly illustrates how and why “Little Italy” could be both spatial and psychic. Whereas the territoriality of South Philadelphia’s Italians was necessary for the strength of ethnic cohesion, Italian Torontonians’ sense of turf was less essential to community identity. “Italian ethnicity in Toronto operated on a metropolitan scale, while in Philadelphia it marked local boundaries” (137). Stanger-Ross argues that the divergent patterns of metropolitan vs. local Italian-ness were products of cities informed by distinct municipal and national histories as well as economic, religious, and demographic changes that marked the two places. In both cities, inward migration flows shaped urban and surrounding suburban areas. After the war, Toronto continued to be a destination point for Italians but, because of maintenance of Johnson-Reed Act quotas, the inflow to Philadelphia (and other U.S. cities) was restricted. Southern African-Americans, who were part of this late moment in the Great Migration north, became the new settlers in the “City of Brotherly Love.”

Staying Italian’s most vital contribution to the understanding of Italian ethnicity comes in the chapter on religion. Here the comparative North American framework’s purpose and possibility shine. Stanger-Ross convincingly challenges what has become an accepted mainstay of Catholic immigrants and their parish boundaries. His findings suggest that Italian Philadelphians—like their ethnic kin in Chicago and Boston—were indeed rooted in the spaces and places that the parish defined. Not so for Italians in Toronto. Rather than accept what has assumed to have been a transnational experience among Catholic immigrants, the author documents how these Torontonians expanded the meaning of religious territoriality from a limited “local” spatial conceptualization to one that had “municipal” form that spread throughout the metropolis’ large geographical swath. What neighborhood ownership and control over the parochial schools meant in these two North American cities, thus, were completely different. The reason for the difference stemmed from the relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and the U.S. and Canadian governments, respectively.

These contributions in Staying Italian should prove to be an important foundation upon which future research of post-WWII European immigrants builds. This review, however, would be incomplete without pointing out some of the weaknesses of the analysis which affect the grounding of the overall argument. The book includes an enormous amount of visual images. While the author incorporates adequately the maps and graphs in the text, he does relatively little with the amazing array of photographs included. These photos seem to reveal profound changes in gender, ethnic, race, and class norms that are part of each city’s history. Picturing shifts in identity on film say much about the photographer (whether an insider or outsider in these Italians enclaves) and the communities themselves. That Stanger-Ross missed the opportunity that might have bolstered his points about the longevity of...