Early-century immigrants largely were shut out from power, privilege, and wealth in the prairie city. But at the centre of the immigrant’s story was a vital community. In a sense it was an ethnic ghetto, a gathering of people, but it was much more. It was a cultural creation, in the words of anthropologist Clifford Geertz, a ‘web of meaning,’ providing the vocabulary, symbols, and understandings by which life made sense and social action was ordered.¹ This cultural matrix intersected with social networks that linked the German, Ukrainian, Jewish, Italian, Chinese, and other immigrants to their own kind. Such relationships...

Newcomers used their ethnicity as a staging ground from which they could enter the wider community and to which they could retreat. The factors that distinguished their ethnic practices might include distinct ways of speaking or distinct types of clothing, and certainly distinct networks of friends. Ethnicity as staging ground was a strategy based on difference. It placed great store on the markers separating the various newcomer communities as well as on the differences between one’s group and the host society. But there were many occasions in daily life when immigrants encountered members of other ethnic communities or, indeed, established...

Immigrant culture in the mid-century prairie city differed significantly from that of the early-century decades. To a large extent it reflected a cultural mix from two distinctive groups of newcomers. On the one hand were the urbanized and highly educated European refugees of the Second World War and Eastern bloc communism. On the other hand were the children and grandchildren of the early-century immigrants; they were the second-and third-generation farm folk seeking economic survival in the post-war economy. They already knew Canada, its language and customs, and they were welcomed in the cities as participants in the new post-war economy....

Winnipeg, the oldest and, at mid-century, still the largest prairie city, reflected the dramatic changes in prairie regional identity that occurred between the 1940s and 1960s. Like other prairie centres, it was affected by the exodus from rural districts and the influx of new arrivals from Europe. The newcomers’ impact was not quite the same in Winnipeg as in the other cities, however, because Winnipeg citizens had been dealing with large-scale challenges of just this sort for a half-century. The new arrivals from Europe were joining larger communities of countrymen who knew Canada well. What is more, a new generation...

The last third of the twentieth century marked a rather sudden transformation in Canada’s prairie city. Some changes seemed to link those regional cities more indelibly to the wider nation. As elsewhere in Canada, and now aided oftentimes by provincial legislation, a new message of multicultural inclusion and a government-funded social safety net bolstered a sense of welcome to all, a common cultural citizenship across the land. This culture was propelled by the technological innovation of inexpensive air transportation and electronic ties of affordable long-distance telephone links, television, and, later, the Internet. In this milieu old ideas of periphery and...

In some ways, despite significant economic and demographic changes in the five prairie cities, life within the urban immigrant community changed little over the course of the century. Immigrants still found their bearing in the new land within their own social organizations. As noted in Chapter 5, for example, social networks that included social clubs and religious sites of worship remained significant into the last decades of the century. In fact some studies demonstrate that newcomers invigorated both inner-city and suburban social organizations. Others show how the role of religion remained crucial within a rapidly secularizing society, most apparent in...

By the late-century decades, prairie citizens had grown accustomed to the activities of ethnic cultural networks and to the steady arrival of strangers from other backgrounds. In a number of striking episodes, however, racist incidents broke the surface of urban life. These were isolated events, typically, though they seemed to feed on deeper sentiments. People’s long experience with ethnicity, their mid-century burst of volunteer activism related to immigrant services, and their invention of citywide multicultural festivals combined to combat such expressions of hate. Because citizens responded so calmly to the arrival of newcomers of different heritages and because some challenged...

The networks that defined the immigrant worlds in the prairie city grew more complex throughout the late-century decades.¹ During this time the various prairie centres became interwoven into a series of transnational lines connecting the immigrants to familiar and unfamiliar sites around the globe. A globalizing economy and neo-liberal policies overtook what Eric Hobsbawm has referred to as ‘older units such as the “national economies” defined by the politics of territorial states.’² Added to technological innovation, these economic changes meant that newcomers increasingly charted their lives within social and cultural webs that had not just one centre, but two or...