Italian Traditions in Canada

EZIO CAPPADOCIA

What happens to the immigrant’s traditions in the new coun-

try? Though inevitably transformed they continue to be a
determining factor in the life not only of the first but also of
the second and third generation. The question of “identity”
remains important to Italo-Canadian students I have known
at McMaster University. Over the past two decades of teach-
ing in the steel city, students have often wondered out loud:
“when does one become a ‘real’ Canadian?” One student
was convinced that because her parents were born in Canada
she somehow finally qualified to be one. Most students seem
to think that though “Italianness” does enrich their lives, it
is also seen as a marked disadvantage in competition for
important positions in society.
My reactions to the students’ concerns have never been
totally satisfying. My efforts to reassure them recalled my
own similar ambivalent sentiments of four decades ago. In
1947, after the MA and before turning to doctoral work and
a possible academic career, I did give serious thought to ac-
company some of my college friends to the Civil Service.
We all dreamed of External Affairs where the brains were
supposed. to be. My last-minute decision not to take the
exam was based on the immigrant’s syndrome that some-
how you would not be given an equal opportunity. I had
no evidence that such would be the case. Whether a shrewd
judgment or paranoia, I don’t know. Perhaps I should note
that those days St. Michael’s College wore its Irish Cathol-
licism quite self-consciously. We had a fortress mentality in
a Toronto world that was vigorously Protestant.

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 The world of acculturation is a potential minefield for
historians—we should leave it to sociologists and cultural
anthropologists. A number of questions, however, will im-
mediately arise as to what are Italian Traditions in Canada,
or what are and what becomes of Italian enduring values as
they adapt, adjust, become attenuated and transformed in a
new environment. We may even be intelligent about what
is going on around us, but we have little to go by as to the
future.
Mass Italian emigration is only about a hundred years
old. In 1887, 1,632 came to Canada and 37,221 to the US;
while nearly three times that number went to South America.
By the mid-twenties emigration of any significance virtually
ceased, to be resumed in Canada in 1951. Consequently in
Canada, not in the U.S., we are dealing with Italo-Canadians
the vast majority of whom have come from Italy. Hence
Italian traditions, values, are being dealt with by those of us
who emigrated, as well as by second and third generations.
Moreover, with the end of immigration into the country,
there will be no replenishing from the source. How traditions
and values fare, we do not know. A short span of a hundred
years of history affords little guidance.
Italian Heritage is obviously undergoing transformation
within the context of the wider but not always clearly de-
fined Canadian ethos. In Canada, the lack of a clearly under-
stood definition of identity has always posed a problem. The
recurring debate among Canadian intellectuals about Cana-
dian identity has always puzzled the immigrant. The only
definition he could grasp was the belief that the country
was neither American nor British. A negative definition is
no doubt preferable to noisy patriotism. But until the mid-
sixties, with the lack of a distinctive Canadian flag and a
national anthem, visible symbols of Canadianism were even
more difficult to find.
I first met the new Canadian world at the age of fourteen
in 1934. St. Joseph’s separate school in North Bay intro-

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duced me both to the language, and to the two dichotomies:
Catholic-Protestant and English-French. The school repre-
sented a Catholic fortress to the outside but a divided one
from within. Three classrooms were for the French and the
five for us “Irish.” The two groups of nuns were unilin-
gual. The had little to do with each other. At recess time
there were four groups of students—two English—and two
French-speaking. The separation was complete. The few
of us “Italians” were Irish. There was never any doubt
for us where the future lay. We wanted to be part of
the bigger English-speaking world. The only Italian sur-
name among the French belonged to four youngsters with a
French-Canadian mother.
What does Italian Heritage mean to the immigrant and
to his children and grandchildren born in Canada. What
Heritage? The term itself is not unambiguous. Do we mean
the great literary, artistic and musical tradition, the glory but
not only of Italy but of Western civilization? Higher culture,
no matter whose, is the preserve of an educated minority,
and the vast majority of Italian emigrants came from the
impoverished regions of rural Italy. Why would anyone
comfortable at home leave, unless compelled to do so?
In Italy, as elsewhere, mass media is now acquainting the
masses with their cultural Heritage. But it remains a moot
point indeed, what effect the Toronto commercial T.V. 47
or Radio CHIN will have in bringing Italian culture to their
audience. They quite understandably cater to the broadest
base.
Italian Heritage, of course, encompasses more than the
culture of the few. When asked, the majority of Italo-
Canadians reply that to them food and family with all that
implies, are the most important aspects of their Heritage:
warmth, affection, mutual support, interdependence, a sense
of unity as well as machismo and matriarchy. . . . the
legendary extended family. This is an understandable phe-
nomenon in all rural societies, but even more in all of Italy,

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a land that for centuries was ruled by foreigners. The only
loyalty that could be honestly exercised was toward the fam-
ily, and not to the foreigner’s laws.
Intertwined with family, therefore, is the Italian suspicion
of authority, and even deference becomes obsequiousness
without respect. At the time of the Florence flood, observers
noted the failure of Italians to respond to the appeal of the
Red Cross. People would be more than generous, if they
could give directly through people or groups they know.
Italo-Canadians in charge of fund-raising to help victims of
natural disasters in Italy always emphasize and re-emphasize
that Italian authorities will have no control over the funds
raised. Distrust and suspicion are endemic. In the late 50s
I suggested in jest to some acquaintances in the Revenue
Canada Office that Italian immigrants could be turned im-
mediately to admirers of everything Canadian by the process
of overtaxation to be soon followed by refunding.
Family loyalty meant also loyalty to the campanile, and
both were strengthened by the Church—the most important
institution in Italy. Its presence has been the crucial reality
to Italian life, ever since the collapse of the Empire. Thus
the nature of family, Church and campanile is quite obvious.
Italo-Canadians are not relating to present-day Italy with
its highly industrialized society, where divorce and abortion
laws won widespread support in every part of the country
and where the Bishops have declared Italy to be a mission
field. The immigrants remember the Italy of the 50s and
60s.
Within my very extended family, all groups are repre-
sented: those who came in their middle-age, (some of them
women, illiterate) those who, as in my case, came as young-
sters and could go to university as well as members of the
second and third generations. Many have married outside
both of the group and of Catholicism. |
With regard to Multiculturalism, now that it has served the
purpose to help make the 1969 Official Language Act accept-

sac
able to minorities, it will no doubt undergo new rewriting by
the politicians. In a recent major article, Keith Spicer, edi-
tor of the Ottawa Citizen, argued that multiculturalism’s new
priorities should be mainly the integration of immigrants and
short-term (not-multi-year) teaching of heritage languages
to immigrant children. He wants to foster a “shared sol-
idarity” and end efforts to please ethnic politicians. The
days of Trudeau throwing what he calls “money and re-
spect, at everybody's ancestry” should be over. Whatever
policies might emerge from both the Provincial and Federal
Governments, there will not be any united response by Italo-
Canadians. Those of the third generations whose mothers are
non-Italian differ in their views re Heritage and Multicultur-
alism from those who have had no non-Italian influences.
It is now commonplace to say that the “family” in our
Western society, especially in North America, is under stress,
that it is undergoing drastic changes. Students of social
history talk of the “extended” family as the standard pre-
industrial, rural society, which is followed by the “nuclear”
family of a wealthier middle-class urbanized world. In our
supposedly post-industrial society, the “nuclear” family is
disintegrating or evolving into something else, essentially
into a world where the primary concern is with the individual
and not with any of which he may be a part.
For most Italians, especially the post-World War II emi-
grants, the family has remained an “extended” one. Conse-
quently in an urban world such a family is under tensions
as the pressures towards its atomization become apparent.
The basic challenge to the Italian family comes both from
pressures without and even more from those within, and
these pressures are those that affect any immigrant group...
the children, and their desire to move into the mainstream
of Canadian life. The “generation gap” assumes different
aspects from the normal ones found in any family. The lack
of understanding between parents and children can escalate
into sad incomprehension, confused, angry responses that

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bewilder both sides. Parents often assume that a Catholic
school will somehow mitigate this gap of cultures. That
there should be such a clash is inevitable, when manners
and mores of a peasant world are caught in the vortex of
an industrialized society, whether that be in Hamilton or in
Turin-Milan, where so many Italians from the South have
migrated. Past efforts to live in Little Italies, in a world
of isolated paranoia, provides no solution anymore than the
flight into quick Canadianization and pathetic efforts at as-
similation, assuming, of course, that the mainstream wants
to engulf you.
The pressures on the family will remain and each gen-
eration will continue to make its adjustments. The children
are readier to understand the dilemma and concern of their
parents than these are of their children! Quite obviously
ethnic background has a powerful influence in shaping be-
haviour. One does not have to agree with a psychothera-
pist from Berkley, California, who argues that many ethnic
groups, including Jews and Italians, develop negative self
perceptions and feel inferior to the WASPS who dominate
US society. Apparently, there are in the US, the land of the
supposed melting pot, psychotherapists who are developing
what they call ethnotherapy. But, in a pluralistic society,
there will be more mixed marriages with other nationalities
and other religions.
The many generations of Italo-Canadians who must re-
late to family, Church and the many traditions that attach
to these will have similar but also different responses. For
those who arrived in their middle age language always re-
mains a problem. Integration might be possible in the work
force, but elsewhere, urban Canada remains an alien world,
whose strangeness is made bearable by the fact that in
large metropolitan areas, it is possible to function quite well
knowning only Italian. To this group, work on construction
or on the railroads represented considerable upward mobility.
And what the hard working immigrants have been able to

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achieve is legendary. Though their personal economic well
being was important, infinitely more so was the desire to give
their children wider opportunity in a more promising world.
They retain vivid memories of the harshness of existence in
mountain villages where, after years of hard work, they had
little to show except that they had survived. The children are
always reminded that they don’t appreciate the good fortune
of living in Canada. I know elderly people who have refused
to go back even for a visit to see the village or the country.
They see no contradiction when they praise the beauty of
Italy, an abstract concept of Italia Bella, but immediately
add that you cannot trust Italians. These Italians to them
are the Establishment, the white collars, the professionals,
all those who had exploited the peasants: the world as pre-
sented by Edward Bamfield in his controversial Moral Basis
of a Backward Society (1958): amoral Familism, distrust of
outsiders, family advancement over self-advancement, the
government as a gang of thieves, those in power seen as
self-serving, no connection between abstract principle and
concrete action, political decisions based on influence not
merit, success depends on raccomandazione, absence of a
sense of legality, and so on.
Will the third generation play bocce? Go to Good Friday
processions? How important will the Church remain in a
secular, pluralistic society? Will the women still be shrouded
in black, in what seems perpetual mourning? What will
endure in future generations?
But, no matter what the transformation of traditions may
be, no matter of what generations we speak, the surname will
remain. We may well ask “what is in a name?” Do you think
someone called Fabbro would have been elected Governor
of N.Y. State in 1920 and be presidential candidate in 1932?
Al Smith did—but the name, until changed in Ellis Island in
the mid-1870s by an immigration official, had been Fabbro.
Happily, in the mid 80s second-generation Americans with
Italian surnames are very prominent not only in the tradi-

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tional preserve of minorities, i.e. sports and entertainment,
where only ability matters, but also in politics, education,
industry, the Church and many other fields of endeavour.
Are we kidding ourselves when we speak of family, food,
Church as if these were distinctly Italian? Students of vari-
ous background repeat the same incantations. They all seem
to emphasize in varying degree the same traditions. What
then is uniquely Italian? Second and third generation stu-
dents when pressed seem to turn most frequently on food,
localism or regionalism. What they get most from their par-
ents is a consciousness of locality. One is tempted to con-
clude with the importance of historically determined factors,
with an awareness of what has made people what they are.
Perhaps, in the very distant future, what will remain is that
the descendants of Italians abroad will identify with Italian
Culture, with what Italy has meant to Western Civilization.
In the more immediate future, what is important is some-
thing for which I have no empirical evidence. Observers
of the Italian scene are puzzled as to what is the hidden
fabric that keeps Italy in a more-or-less coherent state: the
puzzle remains, whether we are dealing with a matter of sta-
ble instability or unstable stability. I am convinced that the
innerforce in Italy, and the crucial perpetuators of Italian tra-
ditions abroad, comes down to that powerful institution—the
Italian nonna—that significant tower of strength.

McMaster University

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