The Heritage Month Project: "A Distinct Alien Race" and Little Canadas

My Reading for National Immigrant Heritage Month Continues

One of the many things author David Vermette writes about in  A Distinct Alien Race: The Untold Story of Franco-Americans  that I knew nothing about growing up is Little Canadas. I mean I didn't hear about them until the last ten years or so. I had some knowledge of Little Italies, Chinatowns,  Little Polands, and Little Swedens. But I'd never heard of Little Canadas, even though there was supposed to have been one in the early twentieth century in Winooski, Vermont where I was a student teacher in the middle school years later. I now also wonder if the extremely small  town in which my father was born and grew up would qualify as a Little Canada, but one that grew up around farming, not mills. My Gauthier grandfather was 

The Gauthier family on their Vermont farm. 

from eastern Ontario and came here with his wife and older children after WWI, making him and other French Canadians like him different from the French Canadians who came to the U.S. from Quebec in the nineteenth century to find work in mills. My American-born father, who as an adult lived in a neighboring, very nonFrench town, spoke his native language with nearby people he'd grown up with right up until his death. (He didn't speak it in his own adult home, of course, since his wife and daughters didn't understand a word of it.)

Otherwise, Petite Canadas were neighborhoods that developed around mills and Catholic churches, primarily in the nineteenth century. People shopped in French-run stores, attended French-speaking schools, and may have been able to read locally published French newspapers and go to French doctors. I'd say they could attend French churches, but the Mass was in Latin in the old days, so that wouldn't have mattered as much, though French-speaking priests did appear to be common in them.

According to Vermette, it may have been possible for many French-Canadian immigrants to not have to speak English if they lived in a Little Canada.

What Happened to Little Canadas?

Why do other areas associated with the ethnic identities of immigrant groups still exist, but we find so little left of Little Canadas? Even Chinatowns, which experienced serious racism in the late nineteenth century, are still around and attract visitors. Many of the other ethnic "towns" may have grown up around mills or some other work situation, as Little Canadas did. But when the mills closed down, the big factor in the end of Little Canadas, some aspect of Italian, Polish, Swedish, etc. culture remained. 

Why were Little Canadas different?

My own speculation:

1. Vermette says in A Distinct Alien Race that there was incredible poverty in Little Canadas, at least in those in New England. He talks of housing built for Franco-American workers by the Cabot Company, which owned a number of mills in the area that employed them. Typhoid and diphtheria were an issue in the 1880s. He has quotes from a newspaper editor and doctors from the same time period complaining of the sanitary conditions.  Vermette also has statistics suggesting that education levels stayed low among Franco-Americans into the twentieth century. Among my father's siblings, only one of the eight finished high school. For all I know, she was the only one of the eight to even attempt going to high school. My point being, if the living conditions were not as bad in other ethnic communities and if the groups living in them were able to improve their personal situations with education faster, that would explain why they stayed in them while Franco-Americans got out of Little Canadas, many of which were then just absorbed into the English-speaking world. Lowell, Massachusetts' Little Canada, for instance, was demolished as part of an urban renewal project.
2. Because the French-Canadian immigrants came from a country that bordered the U.S., their need for an ethnic community where they could speak their own language and practice their own faith may not have been as great as it was for people who came from Europe and Asia. People arriving from Italy, Poland, and China in the nineteenth century, for instance, probably had no expectation of ever being able to go home again. But the French Canadians, the only immigrants arriving in this country by train, could "go home again." In fact, there was a great belief at that time that they were here just to make money, and when they'd made enough, they'd go back to Canada with it. (I don't know how many of the French Canadians knew that, since so many of them stayed here.) My husband's family has heartbreaking nineteenth-century letters from Irish parents writing to their children in America, asking them when they're coming home. My father's family, who arrived here in the twentieth century, went back to Canada for funerals and events and had family members coming down here to visit them, which explains why I know some of my father's cousins. That kind of familial interaction may have been enough to satisfy the cultural needs ethnic communities filled for other groups.

Some Fiction Related to this Subject

Last week I happened to stumble upon and start reading The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne by Ron Currie. It's primarily set in 2016 in what's left of a Little Canada in Maine, where the number of remaining French-speaking residents can fit around a kitchen table. So far, it's terrific

Next Time: Franco-Americans and the Ku Klux Klan.