Eh, Paesan!

Eh, Paesan!
Author: Nicholas De Maria Harney
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 1998-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780802080998

Today's Italian-Canadians face different images than previous generations. An exploration of the reproduction of cultural heritage in a global economy of rapid international communication.

Italians in Toronto

Italians in Toronto
Author: John E. Zucchi
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 284
Release: 1990
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780773507821

Italians in Toronto provides an insightful account of how village and regional groups transplanted their communities into the city that is now one of the largest expatriate centres for Italians in the world. The history of Italian migration to Canada is

The Italians who Built Toronto

The Italians who Built Toronto
Author: Stefano Agnoletto
Publisher: Trade Unions. Past, Present and Future
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: Construction industry
ISBN: 9783034317733

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.

Staying Italian

Staying Italian
Author: Jordan Stanger-Ross
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2010-01-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0226770761

Despite their twin positions as two of North America’s most iconic Italian neighborhoods, South Philly and Toronto’s Little Italy have functioned in dramatically different ways since World War II. Inviting readers into the churches, homes, and businesses at the heart of these communities, Staying Italian reveals that daily experience in each enclave created two distinct, yet still Italian, ethnicities. As Philadelphia struggled with deindustrialization, Jordan Stanger-Ross shows, Italian ethnicity in South Philly remained closely linked with preserving turf and marking boundaries. Toronto’s thriving Little Italy, on the other hand, drew Italians together from across the wider region. These distinctive ethnic enclaves, Stanger-Ross argues, were shaped by each city’s response to suburbanization, segregation, and economic restructuring. By situating malleable ethnic bonds in the context of political economy and racial dynamics, he offers a fresh perspective on the potential of local environments to shape individual identities and social experience.

Such Hardworking People

Such Hardworking People
Author: Franca Iacovetta
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 342
Release: 1992
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780773511453

Such Hardworking People provides a perceptive description of the working-class experiences of immigrants who came to Toronto from southern Italy between 1946 and 1965. Franca Iacovetta focuses on the relations between newly arrived workers and their families, showing that the Italians who came to Toronto during this period were predominantly young, healthy women and men eager to obtain jobs and prepared to make sacrifices in order to secure a more comfortable life for themselves and their children.

The Beautiful Country

The Beautiful Country
Author: Stephanie Malia Hom
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2015-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1442648724

Every year, Italy swells with millions of tourists who infuse the economy with billions of dollars and almost outnumber Italians themselves. In fact, Italy has been a model tourist destination for longer than it has been a modern state.The Beautiful Country explores the enduring popularity of “destination Italy,” and its role in the development of the global mass tourism industry. Stephanie Malia Hom tracks the evolution of this particular touristic imaginary through texts, practices, and spaces, beginning with the guidebooks that frame Italy as an idealized land of leisure and finishing with destination Italy's replication around the world. Today, more tourists encounter Italy through places like Las Vegas's The Venetian Hotel and Casino or Dubai's Mercato shopping mall than experience the country in Italy itself. Using an interdisciplinary methodology that includes archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, literary criticism, and spatial analysis,The Beautiful Country reveals destination Italy's paramount role in the creation of modern mass tourism.

A Tragedy Revealed

A Tragedy Revealed
Author: Arrigo Petacco
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2005-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0802039219

Based on previously unavailable archival documents and oral accounts from people who were there, Petacco reveals the events and exposes the Italian government's mishandling - and then official silence on - the situation.

Righting Canada's Wrongs: Italian Canadian Internment in the Second World War

Righting Canada's Wrongs: Italian Canadian Internment in the Second World War
Author: Pamela Hickman
Publisher: Lorimer
Total Pages: 114
Release: 2012-10-10
Genre: Young Adult Nonfiction
ISBN: 145940095X

Italians came to Canada to seek a better life. From the 1870s to the 1920s they arrived in large numbers and found work mainly in mining, railway building, forestry, construction, and farming. As time passed, many used their skills to set up successful small businesses, often in Little Italy districts in cities like Montreal, Toronto, Hamilton, and Winnipeg. Many struggled with the language and culture in Canada, but their children became part of the Canadian mix. When Canada declared war on Italy on June 10, 1940, the government used the War Measures Act to label all Italian citizens over the age of eighteen as enemy aliens. Those who had received Canadian citizenship after 1922 were also deemed enemy aliens. Immediately, the RCMP began making arrests. Men, young and old, and a few women were taken from their homes, offices, or social clubs without warning. In all, about 700 were imprisoned in internment camps, mainly in Ontario and New Brunswick. The impact of this internment was felt immediately by families who lost husbands and fathers, but the effects would live on for decades. Eventually, pressure from the Italian Canadian community led Prime Minister Brian Mulroney to issue an apology for the internment and to admit that it was wrong. Using historical photographs, paintings, documents, and first-person narratives, this book offers a full account of this little-known episode in Canadian history.

Mafia and Outlaw Stories from Italian Life and Literature

Mafia and Outlaw Stories from Italian Life and Literature
Author:
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2007-12-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1442692855

The first of its kind in English, Mafia and Outlaw Stories from Italian Life and Literature is a selection of readings from Italian fiction and non-fiction writers on the subject of the Mafia. Among the renowned writers featured are Giovanni Verga, Grazia Deledda, Anna Maria Ortese, Livia De Stefani, and Silvana La Spina, as well as famous witnesses such as Felicia Impastato, Letizia Battaglia, and Rita Atria who provide personal, often terrifying testimonies about their experiences with the Mafia. It is a historically diverse examination of criminal and outlaw institutions by some of the most significant figures in Italian literature. These newly translated writings show the ways in which Italians perceived and wrote about the Mafia and crime from the 1880s to the 1990s. Among them are stories dealing with the important legends used by the Mafia as sources for their image and ideology, legends such as the brigand and the Blessed Paulists. Some of the fascinating themes discussed are connections between the Mafia, the State, and the Catholic Church; the Mafia and children; women and the Mafia; the Black Hand; and relations between the Mafia and the Allied Forces during the Second World War. Robin Pickering-Iazzi incorporates an invaluable introduction that charts key periods in the history of Italy and the Mafia, and profiles each of the authors in the collection, noting their major works in Italian as well as those available in English. These and other features make this text especially appropriate for courses in Italian studies. Mafia and Outlaw Stories from Italian Life and Literature takes a unique and intriguing approach to the subject of the Mafia, and offers informed judgements about its historical impact on Italian society and culture.

Italy Revisited

Italy Revisited
Author: Mary Melfi
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2009
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

Drawing out her mother's childhood memories of life in southern Italy at the dawn of the twentieth century, Mary Melfi takes an unconventional approach to autobiographical writing. Italy Revisited serves as a double memoir, told in dialogue between a mother and a daughter. The conversation takes the reader to a medieval town high up in the mountains where time is told by the shadow the sun casts, where wheat and olive oil are the currency of choice (barter is in use), and where marriage is as much about property as it is about love. As they re-create that vanished world, the pair finds greater understanding of the tumultuous relationships that sometimes exist between immigrant mothers and their children.