Whoever Gives Us Bread by Lynne Bowen

Author:Lynne Bowen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS006020
Publisher: D & M Publishers
Published: 2011-05-14T04:00:00+00:00

FURTHER COMPLICATING the immigration story in the 1920s was the government’s insistence that immigrants be farmers or farm labourers. If Canada couldn’t attract enough “preferred” immigrants, then it would allow “non-preferred” immigrants who knew how to farm. All prospective Italian immigrants had to do to prove they were farmers was fill out a questionnaire written in both English and Italian that included such questions as “How many years have you farmed?” “Can you milk?” “Can you plough?” “How many horses can you handle?”

So desperate was Canada for “agriculturalists” that the government was prepared to accept the answers at face value. Whether or not an Italian could actually plow a field, if he said he could, he was deemed an agriculturalist. And the Italian government was prepared to do everything in its power to help would-be emigrants pass themselves off as such.

The British Passport Control Office in Rome warned Canada in 1924 that the new initiative was “serving as a pretext for Italian farm labourers to emigrate to Canada in search of work without reasonable assurance of employment . . . Emigration to Canada is encouraged in every possible way in [Italy] . . . even to the extent of evading the restrictions laid down.” To secure a certificate from the local mayor that said they were farmers, would-be emigrants had only to produce a witness willing to make a declaration. To obtain the twelve hundred dollars required to buy farm land in Canada, would-be emigrants had only to go to an Italian bank. The bank would issue them a cheque for the correct amount on the understanding that the cheque would be returned to the bank uncashed as soon as possible.

Such subterfuge was not required, however, by a bona fide farmer from the village of Aluli, east of Rome in Abruzzo. She was sixty years old and had been supporting her five children on the family farm ever since her husband had emigrated to the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia fourteen years before. He had never sent any money, but he did keep in touch and had arranged for his oldest son, who had been gassed during the war, to join him in Canada. He could fix shoes and patch his own clothes, but “he wasn’t much good for anything else,” according to his youngest daughter, Lucia, who was born after he left Italy.

His wife had managed quite well without him, growing food for her children and orphaned nephews on two separate pieces of land, raising fifty sheep and making blankets for sale from the wool, feeding calves to sell when they were yearlings. But two of her five children had died and now she had cancer of the uterus, and although she was resigned to the diagnosis, saying, “We all have to die sometime,” she wanted to bring her two surviving daughters to their father before she died.

Lucia didn’t want to leave Italy. She hid from her mother when she heard the news. She liked working on the farm and she didn’t care that she could go to school only when she wasn’t needed at home.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.