1. Immigrant Memories of Brantford as civic memory work

Immigrant Memories of Brantford is a collaborative public history initiative I, together with local historians and artists, launched in 2019 with partners including the Brant Historical Society, Wilfrid Laurier University, Brant Theatre Workshops, the Canadian Industrial Heritage Centre, and the Brantford Public Library. Sparked by the contrast between Brantford’s white-dominated public identity and its rich immigrant history, the project treats immigrant memory as a way to reread the city.Footnote ⁵ Each year, the project focuses on one immigrant or racialized community, exploring its history through a museum exhibition, oral history interviews, a walking tour, an original play, public lectures, food, and music. To date, we have engaged Jewish, Italian, Chinese, Ukrainian, Armenian, Black, and Dutch communities (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Immigrant Memories of Brantford website (www.memoriesofbrantford.ca).

Figure 1. Long description

The website header contains a logo at the top left with the text Immigrant Memories of Brantford over a red and white graphic. To the right is a navigation menu with links for ABOUT, COMMUNITIES, RESOURCES, CONTACT, and a search icon.

The main background features a large, sepia-toned photograph of a vintage railway passenger car with barred windows. Overlaid on the left side of this image is the white text Brantford’s Immigrant Communities Project, followed by the subtext Come and learn about the Immigrant communities of the City of Brantford! Below this is a Read more button with a right-pointing arrow icon. Green maple leaves from a tree frame the top and right side of the background image.

On the right side of the screen, a vertical white rectangular panel displays a black and white historical portrait of a man identified by the cursive signature below as Yours truly John Anderson. He is shown from the waist up, wearing a dark suit and waistcoat with a high collar.

As lead researcher and curator, I work with twenty to thirty families per community each year to co-create annual museum exhibitions using personal, irreplaceable artifacts from kitchen tables and attic boxes rather than institutional holdings. People bring things to me that have not left their homes in decades: ferry tickets, passports from countries that no longer exist, a hand-embroidered textile carried across an ocean. None of this is easy. Families must decide whether to entrust a curator with objects that are irreplaceable and stories that are sometimes painful, and that decision takes time that academic calendars do not naturally accommodate. Some families decline. Some agree but ask that certain stories remain private. The collaborative framework distributes historical authority and practices ethical accompaniment: families review content beforehand, and all artifacts are returned home afterward.Footnote ⁶

Each multi-month cycle culminates in a full-day opening event featuring the exhibition, a historical walking tour, live music, cultural dinners, panel discussions, and a play premiere. All oral histories, photographs, and community-written accounts are permanently preserved on our digital platform at memoriesofbrantford.ca.

Beyond its immediate impact in the city, Immigrant Memories of Brantford helps us theorize civic memory. Civic memory is not neutral. It is produced through selective recognition, through the histories that get plaques, museum cases, and commemorative events, and through those that do not. When a city’s civic memory leaves immigrant life outside the frame, it does not simply omit those communities. It shapes the conditions under which their descendants and today’s newcomers either find themselves reflected in the city’s story or discover they are not quite in it. Participatory civic memory work intervenes in that process. It decentralizes historical authority and turns objects, places, and performances into public arguments about who has already built this city (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Photograph of Brantford’s Nyman’s Store (1917), a well-known Jewish business in downtown Brantford (Courtesy of Brant Historical Society).

Figure 2. Long description

The interior of the store features a narrow central aisle with a patterned tile floor leading to the back.

* On the left foreground, a dark wooden table holds folded white garments. Behind it, a tall wooden wardrobe with glass doors displays hanging coats. Further back on the left, a circular rack is densely packed with long skirts or coats, and a man in a dark suit and tie stands beside it.

* On the right foreground, a long dark wooden counter dominates the space, featuring a roll of paper or fabric on top. Behind the counter stands another man in a dark suit and tie. The wall behind him is lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with uniform white boxes.

* Hanging from the ceiling on the right are several large animal pelts and furs.

* The back wall features a large dark patterned rug or tapestry hanging vertically.

* The upper walls are decorated with a decorative floral or geometric border near the ceiling, and a single globe light fixture hangs from the center of the room.

2. Chinese Brantford and the everyday infrastructure of labour

The Chinese community project and my exhibit Laundries, Chopsticks, Medicine explored the history of Chinese laundries, restaurants, foodways, and medicine through oral history interviews with community members and elders, a museum exhibition, a walking tour of former Chinese-owned businesses in downtown Brantford, a concert by the Grand River Chinese Orchestra, a community dinner, and the original play Tomb Sweeping. Footnote ⁷

This project, presented in 2022 and 2023, interviewed more than twenty members of Brantford’s Chinese community, which started in the 1850s. Among artifacts gathered were early twentieth-century laundry advertisements, restaurant menus, family photographs, and community records from the Brantford branch of the Chinese Nationalist League, founded in 1920. At the League’s inaugural banquet that year, authentic Chinese cuisine was served with chopsticks to guests including a senator and a judge. Brantford, it turns out, had always been more cosmopolitan than it remembered. The walking tour traced former laundry and restaurant locations in downtown Brantford.

Lee Chong ran Brantford’s first successful Chinese laundry at 153 Dalhousie Street, right across from what is now my office window at Laurier University. In 1897, facing persistent prejudice, he placed a notice in the Brantford Expositor asking citizens to “throw prejudices to the dogs” and judge his work on its merits.Footnote ⁸ He was not asking for much. He was asking to be seen. A hundred and twenty-five years later, his notice became part of an exhibition in a city museum (Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Photograph of the Exhibit Laundries, Chopsticks, Medicine (2023).

Figure 3. Long description

In the foreground, two large, weathered galvanized metal wash tubs sit on a wooden floor. A wooden hand-cranked wringer mechanism is mounted between the tubs, with a white cloth being fed through its rollers. To the right, a child wearing a red patterned face mask and a peach-colored shirt stands behind a wooden table, looking toward the equipment. Several adults are gathered around the display, including one person in a black and white checkered shirt and another in a colorful red and blue top. In the background on the right, a fireplace with a lit fire is visible inside a dark hearth. The room has polished wood flooring and light-colored walls, suggesting a museum or historical exhibit setting.

The project recovered Dr. Thomas Chiang, born in China in 1907, who earned his medical degree at an American medical school in Shanghai, served as Deputy Health Minister during the Second Sino-Japanese War, and represented China at the World Health Organization conference in New York in 1948. Following the communist victory, he came to Canada.

But a man who had represented China at the founding of the WHO was told by the University of Toronto that his credentials were insufficient. He completed two additional years at the University of Toronto before he could practise. Later he worked for the federal government, serving Indigenous communities across Canada, including Inuit communities in Whitehorse, before joining Lady Willingdon Hospital in Ohsweken, where he served Six Nations until the hospital closed in 1968, reunited with his wife and children only in 1957, after nine years of separation. The Six Nations awarded him the title of honorary chief.

Dr. Chiang’s extraordinary trajectory places Chinese-Canadian history within a far wider set of historical forces than the language of immigration alone can hold. It also demonstrates that the histories of different marginalized communities are interconnected: that immigrant history and Indigenous history in Brantford are not separate chapters. Brantford did not know his name until we found it. That is not a gap in the record. That is what the record decided (Figure 4).

Figure 4.

Photograph of Dr. Thomas Chiang in front of the Inuit Hospital in Whitehorse, Northwest Territories (Early 1950s) (Courtesy of Dr. Chiang’s Family).

3. Armenian Brantford and the geography of displacement

The Armenian project, Forget Me Not, presented in 2024, explored how Cockshutt Plow Company’s active recruitment of Armenian workers from Constantinople beginning in the 1880s intersected with the history of genocide, displacement, and rebuilding.Footnote ⁹ More than two hundred people attended the opening event. The exhibit connected industrial geography with survivor memory: the Armenian community had settled downtown Brantford partly because the factories that recruited them were there, making the geography of production and the geography of displacement the same geography.

Oral history interviews were conducted with community members across three generations. One family brought a hand-embroidered textile that had been carried from Anatolia during the genocide and had never left the family home. To hold it is to understand that survival is not only a matter of getting out. It is a matter of what you carry. The Armenian community also maintained a rich cultural infrastructure in Brantford from the early twentieth century onward, including Armenian-language classes that helped transmit their literary heritage across generations, and Armenian-language publications that appeared in the city as early as the 1910s. Armenian workers were also a vital part of Brantford’s labour movement, striking the Malleable Iron Works in 1906 for a pay increase from $1.50 to $1.75 a day.Footnote ¹⁰ In 1905, an Armenian baker named Harry Gorgian opened a shop on Market Street. That April, his horse went wild and scattered Armenian bread across the road outside the public library. Brantfordians stopped to examine it. It was, the newspaper reported, great bread offered at a bargain.Footnote ¹¹

The Forget Me Not exhibit asked visitors to read Brantford’s industrial landscape as a landscape of survival as much as production.Footnote ¹² At a time when global displacement and refugee movement are central to immigration debates, Armenian Brantford historicizes migration as something more than economic movement: it is survival, memory, and the long work of making home after rupture (Figure 5).

Figure 5.

Workers at Cockshutt Plow Company, including the Armenian workers in the front row (1930s) (Courtesy of Brant Historical Society).

Figure 5. Long description

A group of approximately twenty-five men are gathered in an industrial setting.

* Front Row: Two men are seated in the center foreground. To their left, a man stands holding a small bag. To their right, a row of vertical cylindrical metal components, possibly plow parts, stands in the foreground.

* Central Figures: Standing behind the seated men, two workers are prominently positioned. The man on the left wears a light-colored apron and holds a small round object, possibly a gauge or clock. The man to his right wears a dark apron and holds up a decorative table lamp with a white shade.

* Background Workers: Numerous other men in work clothes, many wearing flat caps, are crowded behind the central figures, filling the middle ground from left to right.

* Setting: The background reveals the interior of the Cockshutt Plow Company factory, featuring heavy timber ceiling beams, metal tracks, and hanging industrial machinery. Natural light filters through windows or skylights in the upper portion of the frame.

4. Black Brantford and the limits of the immigrant frame

Roots and Routes: Black Brantford, presented in 2025, required us to widen our conceptual frame in ways none of the earlier projects had. Black history in Brantford includes freedom-seekers who arrived via the Underground Railroad, slavery’s afterlives in Canada, Black pioneer settlements, church life, Emancipation Day, sport, migrant farm labour, and long struggles for public recognition.Footnote ¹³ The Black communities represented include both freedom-seekers from the United States and members of the broader Black diaspora, including seasonal workers from the Caribbean. The exhibit, the original play A Matter of Colour, and the Brantford Public Library’s Black Communities Speaker Series together brought this history into view as part of Brantford’s civic and industrial past.Footnote ¹⁴

Among the figures celebrated was Blanche Williams, a Brantford resident who in 1885 became the first Black woman to attend the University of Toronto on the same terms as white students, achieving second-class honours in French and German. Then she and her family vanished from the historical record entirely. It was only when local historians recovered her story and brought it to the city’s attention that Brantford named a new school after her. That is precisely what this kind of work does: it finds the people the record lost and gives them back to the city (Figure 6).

Figure 6.

Victoria Lakatos and Jasmine Romany act out Blanche Williams’ acceptance to the University of Toronto during the premiere of Matter of Colour on Saturday, October 18, 2025. (Photo by Kimberly de Jong).

Cavel Wright, a Jamaican migrant farm worker who has worked in the Brantford region seasonally for over four decades, connects this history to the present. He had worked forty harvests in this region and had never entered its cultural institutions. When he saw his story featured at the exhibition, he was deeply moved. His presence in the project connects the history of the Underground Railroad and Black pioneer settlement to the ongoing reality of migrant labour today.

Black Brantford challenged us to see that migration is also a story of freedom-seeking, forced displacement, and the long refusal of belonging to communities that made the city home. Canada’s anti-racism strategy recognizes systemic recognition as a matter of public policy, and Statistics Canada reports that police-recorded hate crimes targeting race and ethnicity rose 8 percent in 2024.Footnote ¹⁵ The Black Brantford project situates these present concerns within a specific local history, showing that racial exclusion and the struggle for civic recognition are not new to Brantford but have shaped it for generations (Figure 7).

Figure 7.

Cavel Wright on the opening day of the exhibit at the Brant Museum and Archives. Behind him is a panel describing his story, an apple-picking ladder, and the signage from the orchard where he works.

5. What civic memory work adds to the immigration debate

The immigration policy debate asks how many people a city can absorb.Footnote ¹⁶ Civic memory work asks a different question: who has already built this city? Whose memories have been preserved, and whose have been erased? In Brantford, it turns out, a lot of people. More than any of the plaques suggest.

In Brantford, immigrant memory work reveals that the industrial city was always more diverse, more complex, and more globally connected than its dominant civic narrative allowed. Recognizing that is not only a matter of historical accuracy. It is a form of civic responsibility. Immigrant Memories of Brantford is distinctive in its depth and continuity. While many Canadian cities host multicultural festivals celebrating immigrant cultures through food and performance, this project differs in its commitment to sustained archival research, oral history, and original theatre grounded in community collaboration.

The conversations these projects have generated are among their most significant outcomes. Residents who attended the Chinese exhibit discovered a century-long Chinese-Canadian presence in streets they had always known. One of my research assistants, a recent Chinese immigrant who initially found Brantford cold and unwelcoming, told me at the end of the project that she finally felt she belonged, that she had found her community’s roots in this city. She had been here all along. She just had not been told. The project has also begun to enter the city’s broader civic life. It has received coverage in local media, while the City of Brantford has supported the initiative through financial assistance and the participation of municipal dignitaries at exhibition openings and public events.

Recent scholarship in public humanities demonstrates that participatory projects decentralize historical authority and change how marginalized communities are recognized within shared civic culture.Footnote ¹⁷ Memories of Brantford is doing precisely this work, year by year, community by community, in an industrial city still negotiating its past and still welcoming newcomers who will one day be part of its memory. Lee Chong asked Brantford to throw its prejudices to the dogs in 1897. We are still working on it.