By Angelo Bolotta for Transformations – The following vignette first appeared in a Grade 10 Canadian history textbook published in 2000. It was intended as a story recounting the experience of thousands of immigrants from southern Italy, after 1945.
This is essentially my father’s immigration story, but it was written (at the editor’s request) to reflect the similar experiences of countless other families during this period of Canadian history. His actual surname was not used because the story was intended to be a more generic representation.
Instead, I decided to use his ‘sopranome’ or family nickname. In southern Italy nicknames were used to identify different families since some surnames were very common. To help distinguish a specific family with the same surname, a particular nickname was assigned to everyone from that one family.
During workshops and conference presentations after the book’s release, I was approached by teachers of Italian descent from Niagara Falls, Kingston, Ottawa, Windsor, Hamilton, Sault Ste Marie and Thunder Bay who proudly recognized numerous parallels to their own family experiences. They were all touched to finally see these experiences in a Canadian history textbook. Because this storyline had not been presented as the author’s family story, but as a generic vignette, more families could claim it as their own.
This experience helped confirm for me the extraordinary power of the seemingly ordinary stories of simple immigrants facing their everyday challenges. This ‘extraordinary’ power takes three distinct yet interconnected forms. An innate form of power comes from the simplicity, honesty and raw humanity of the immigrant perspective on the human life journey. The immigrant’s dream is to build something better in an uncertain world—a world filled with imbalances of power and privilege that often lead to injustice and conflict. At the core of the immigrant’s fear of not fitting in are feelings of loneliness, disorientation and vulnerability. These feelings are held in check, through hope for what is possible.
