Evaluates the effect of the official Canadian policy of multiculturalism, in effect since 1971, on Italians in Canada.

This book examines the concept of translation as a return to origins and as restitution of lost narratives, and is based on the idea of diaspora as a term that depicts the longing to return home and the imaginary reconstructions and reconstitutions of home by migrants and translators. The author analyses a corpus made up of novels and a memoir by Italian-Canadian writers Mary Melfi, Nino Ricci and Frank Paci, examining the theme of return both within the writing itself and also in the discourse surrounding the translations of these works into Italian. These ‘reconstructions’ are analysed through the lens of translation, and more specifically through the notion of written code-switching, understood here as a fictional tool which symbolizes the translational movements between different points of view. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of translation and interpreting, migration studies, and Italian and diasporic writing.

After World War II, hundreds of thousands of Italians emigrated to Toronto. This book describes their labour, business, social and cultural history as they settled in their new home. It addresses fundamental issues that impacted both them and the city, including ethnic economic niching, unionization, urban proletarianization and migrants' entrepreneurship. In addressing these issues the book focuses on the role played by a specific economic sector in enabling immigrants to find their place in their new host society. More specifically, this study looks at the residential sector of the construction industry that, between the 1950s and the 1970s, represented a typical economic ethnic niche for newly arrived Italians. In fact, tens of thousands of Italian men found work in this sector as labourers, bricklayers, carpenters, plasterers and cement finishers, while hundreds of others became contractors, subcontractors or small employers in the same industry. This book is about these real people. It gives voice to a community formed both by entrepreneurial subcontractors who created companies out of nothing and a large group of exploited workers who fought successfully for their rights. In this book you will find stories of inventiveness and hope as well as of oppression and despair. The purpose is to offer an original approach to issues arising from the economic and social history of twentieth-century mass migrations.

Through a historical and economic analysis of Italian Canadian migration in the second half of the 20th century and through the study of Italian and Canadian archival sources, this book provides an analytic and in-depth tool for the study of the economic and cultural relations between Italy and Canada, from the Golden Age until the present. It focuses, in particular, on the analysis of migratory flows between the two countries, on the evolution of integration, work and assistance problems, and on the promotion of Italian-Canadian culture. The book also retraces the evolution of some relevant non-profit organizations and their role in the enhancement of Italian-Canadian cultural heritage.

From Sojourners to Citizens: Alberta's Italian History brings to life the untold story of Italian immigrants in Alberta from the 1880s to the present. It places them in the narrative of province building from work on railways, mines and other industries to breaking the land for agriculture. Oral history excerpts allow the men, women and children to speak for themselves. What emerges is an unquenchable desire to make good, and overcome intolerable working conditions and discrimination, which culminated with enemy alien designation and internment during the Second World War. The book also provides an exploration of the impact of Government of Canada's multicultural policy on the process of assimilation for the post-war influx of immigrants. It offers a prototype of an immigrant community's movement from marginalization to the mainstream.

In the 1950s and 1960s, immigration bureaucrats in the Department of Citizenship and Immigration played an important yet unacknowledged role in transforming Canada’s immigration policy. In response to external economic and political pressures for change, high-level bureaucrats developed new admissions criteria gradually and experimentally while personally processing thousands of individual immigration cases per year. Making Middle-Class Multiculturalism shows how bureaucrats’ perceptions and judgements about the admissibility of individuals – in socioeconomic, racial, and moral terms – influenced the creation of formal admissions criteria for skilled workers and family immigrants that continue to shape immigration to Canada. A qualitative content analysis of archival documents, conducted through the theoretical lens of a cultural sociology of immigration policy, reveals that bureaucrats’ interpretations of immigration files generated selection criteria emphasizing not just economic utility, but also middle-class traits and values such as wealth accumulation, educational attainment, entrepreneurial spirit, resourcefulness, and a strong work ethic. By making "middle-class multiculturalism" a demographic reality and basis of nation-building in Canada, these state actors created a much-admired approach to managing racial diversity that has nevertheless generated significant social inequalities.

The Leamington Italian Community intertwines personal and family stories with both empirical and intuitive writing to offer new historical insights into the complex social, economic, and psychological causes and effects of the migration phenomenon. Walter Temelini meticulously reconstructs the history of immigration and settlement in Leamington, Ontario, of Italians from the southern regions of Lazio, Molise, and Sicily. He explains how, despite their regional differences, three generations between 1925 and the 1990s forged a cohesive, socially conscious, and unique agricultural community by balancing their inherited values and their newly adopted Canadian economic opportunities. Temelini's groundbreaking research draws on testimonial and documentary evidence gathered from in-depth interviews with hundreds of residents, as well as on original archival information and Italian-language histories translated by the author and previously unavailable to English-speaking readers. He concludes his study with an investigation into the award-winning novel Lives of the Saints by Nino Ricci, one of the community's most celebrated descendants. Drawing parallels between Ricci's narrative and the development of the community, Temelini demonstrates that ethnicity can be transformed successfully into a powerful universal archetype, and a creative force of identity. A pioneering and authoritative work, The Leamington Italian Community creates an intimate portrait within a global framework, delving into issues both timely and timeless, that will interest and inform the general and specialized reader alike.