Encounters, Contests, and Communities: New Histories of Race and Ethnicity in the Canadian City

Shortly after his arrival as an immigrant to Toronto’s Little Italy, Vincenzo Pietropaolo became a student of the city’s group life and its urban form. A childhood propensity for wandering about the city blossomed into a career photographing it, and Pietropaolo came to see a close relation between people and place. In November 2007, after almost a half century of studying Little Italy, he discussed this relation at some length. Pietropaolo’s reflections point to dynamics that have often eluded historians of Canadian cities and their inhabitants. “You can’t plan it,” he said of a neighbourhood like Little Italy. “It has to be organic, in a way.” Pointing out of the window of the Café Diplomatico, an iconic neighbourhood greasy spoon since it opened on College Street in the late 1960s, Pietropaolo remarked on the “gentle curve” of the street and its “lumbering streetcars,” which together slow traffic. In the 1950s and 1960s, the winding street welcomed thousands of Italian immigrants with a tradition of meandering evening strolls: the passeggiata, which characterized sociability in the towns of Southern Italy, “is the . . . walk to nowhere, just a walk for walking.” In the 1950s, this serendipitous encounter of urban form and urban dweller developed into street politics: “If you talk to immigrants you’ll find out . . . everybody will tell you in the fifties there was some kind of a rule that the police enforced that said no loitering.” For men and women out for a passeggiata, however, “the idea of loitering is a foreign concept . . . Mediterranean culture . . . is based on loitering or hanging out . . . you’re there for no specific reason, just to be there.” If hanging out for no reason at first appeared “threatening or conspiratorial,” leisurely walks eventually metamorphosed the streets: “By the time the sixties moved along . . . this part of the city had been transformed to a place where people went for walks. So that’s when the city gets transformed.” Urban social life was recast by members of ethnic groups in the midst of accommodating themselves to Toronto’s built form. This two-part special issue, “Encounters, Contests, and Communities: New Histories of Race and Ethnicity in the Canadian City,” is devoted to exploring the relation suggested in these remarks. For at least a generation, historians of race and ethnicity have been well attuned to a key aspect of Pietropaolo’s reflections; a series of studies have illustrated that group relations are best understood as highly situational rather than expressions of immutable or inherent attributes. Historians of race and ethnicity have adeptly linked group relations in Canada to a range of contingent historical dynamics, including the transformation of the state, structures of economic production, the operation of law, the performance and articulation of gender, and contestation among political ideologies. The essays in this special issue owe significant debts to this broader scholarship and touch upon similar themes. At the same time, however, this special issue reflects our view that Canadian historians have yet to fully appreciate the relations between group life and urban environments. Too often cities have been taken for granted as a background to the main action rather than treated as dynamic sites that deserve scrutiny. The articles in the pages that follow—as well as those in the next issue of this journal—seek to situate race and ethnicity more firmly in Canada’s urban past. They explore a century and a half within which group relations have been constituted in cities and have constituted urban experience. Cities emerge here not as a mere backdrop …