This is a splendid study of the uses of ethnicity in divergent urban contexts in post-war North America. Philadelphia, like many other cities in the north-eastern United States, went through economic decline marked by deindustrialization and the flight to the suburbs. By contrast, Toronto became Canada's economic and financial metropolis: it rode the wave of a boom that stretched almost uninterruptedly over a 30-year period and reaped the benefits of progressive policies put in place by Ontario governments to consolidate the city's primacy, policies, one might add, blithely tossed aside by a mean-spirited provincial administration in the 1990s.
After deftly constructing the economic and social backdrop for his study, Stanger-Ross sets the spotlight on the persistence of ethnicity in these two different urban environments. Comparing the ethnic enclaves comprising Toronto's Little Italy and two adjacent parishes in South Philadelphia, he examines three questions to illustrate his point: real-estate transactions, rates of endogamy and religious celebrations. Through a wide variety of sources, including oral interviews, government studies, census data, marriage and mortgage records, parish publications, as well as a breathtaking array of secondary literature, the author illustrates contrasting attitudes to space on the part of Italians. In Philadelphia, they remained deeply attached to their turf, whereas in Toronto, Little Italy became a jumping-off point: houses were later purchased in the north-western part of the city and beyond, notably in the famous or infamous ‘ethnoburb’ of Vaughan. What is remarkable in both cases is that ethnicity was used to attain these divergent ends. Against US social scientists who trumpeted its decline in the post-war era, Stanger-Ross instead upholds the vitality of ethnicity, even in Philadelphia where the first Italian parish dates back to 1852.
His book vividly captures how ethnicity was used strategically by immigrants to get ahead, by business people to build up loyal clienteles, by established residents to preserve their neighbourhood against a perceived black invasion (which is reminiscent of how ethnicity is invoked today in Quebec to reject Québécois nationalism). Stanger-Ross is making an important point here. But there remains an undeveloped aspect to his discussion having to do with the generational variable. The Philadelphians he is examining were second- and third-generation immigrants, whereas their Toronto counterparts were newcomers who overwhelmed by their sheer number the pre-existing community. As semi-literate peasants from the Mezzogiorno, the latter had few options outside of hometown and kinship networks for inserting themselves in the new society: ethnicity was for the vast majority of them a necessity, the only tool they had. By contrast, in Philadelphia and in other major US centres of Italian immigration, it is a minority which continued to live in the ethnic enclave. The majority opted for ethnically mixed neighbourhoods and intermarriage. In other words, ethnicity was one option among many, dictated perhaps by one's socio-economic status, although this question is left unexplored. Consequently, what it meant to be Italian was necessarily different for recently arrived immigrants than for the children and grandchildren of immigrants. The question then arises: is it the same phenomenon that is being examined across time? Although Staying Italian argues that it is, the answer does not appear to be so straightforward.
Be that as it may, this book fills an important void in the field of North American immigration and ethnicity where publications on the post-war period are few and far between. The author has established his thorough mastery of the existing literature in this area and in urban studies. He has contributed as well to the ongoing discussion of ethnicity in North America.
