The cross-pollination of immigration history and race studies that began to assert itself in the 1990s remains an extremely fertile field of research. Recent events—the rise of Black Lives Matter, the racial dynamics of the Trump movement, and debates surrounding critical race theory—have helped propel scholarly interest. These events have demanded historicization and analysis. At the same time, research has progressed from its own dynamics. A broader racial lens has led historians of immigration to re-read old sources in a new light. In the process, these researchers have started to reveal how white immigrant groups have navigated the racial dynamics of the host society.[i]
These welcome incursions in the intersection of race and immigration have not probed the history of all white ethnic groups equally. Researchers have produced fascinating works on Irish, Jewish, and Italian encounters with American whiteness during the era of mass immigration. Some of these were pioneering works in the field of whiteness studies.[ii] Only in the last decade, however, have researchers tentatively studied the issue as it pertains to French Canadians.
Deemed the “human vestiges” of New France by one scholar,[iii] French Canadians, predominantly concentrated in the Province of Quebec, experienced a mass exodus to the United States from the 1840s to the 1920s. Some sought employment opportunities in the Upper Midwest. The majority, hundreds of thousands, settled in the northeastern states. French Canadians formed a large portion of the labor force in textile manufacturing, pulp and paper, logging, and other sectors. They also shaped their new environments culturally. They changed the urban landscape by building distinct ethnic institutions often affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church and by holding public events and parades annually for the feast of their patron saint, John the Baptist.[iv]
These immigrants and their Franco-American descendants initially occupied an ambiguous position in the United States. Many sought to maintain the culture and institutions that were central to their identity. Early on, the suspicions and hostility of the host society reinforced an insular outlook. By the early twentieth century, however, Franco-Americans were showing signs of “wanting in”: they became involved in mainstream U.S. politics, appreciated the importance of learning English, and envisioned a fully American life for their children. To use an overworn phrase, “Francos” gradually melted into a greater Americanness over the course of the twentieth century—though, some lament, without adding much to the flavor of the stew.
Authors have typically told this story from an ethnic perspective, that is, without engaging in comparative work or placing Franco-Americans within a larger context of class, gender, politics, religious debate, etc. This insularity is beginning to loosen. Historians are now exploring the significance of French-Canadian immigration and community building beyond what those processes have meant to people of French-Canadian descent.[v] This is happening profitably, if belatedly, as it relates to race and whiteness.
As early as the 1980s, Jill M. Bystydzienski put female labor and experiences in the French-Canadian community in conversation with those of African-American women.[vi] Jason L. Newton helped inaugurate the current phase of research with a 2016 study on the racial stereotyping of French-Canadian forest workers from the mid-nineteenth century to the Cold War.[vii] David Vermette has pushed further in that direction by discussing early twentieth-century racial theory and its eugenical implications.[viii] But a question has remained. If Franco-Americans’ status was disputed during that era, how did they go about asserting their whiteness and defending their full participation in (white) U.S. society?
The answer—complex and multifaceted—must ultimately come from engaging with the literature on other white ethnic groups, understanding the experiences of people of color, and placing old documents under the lens of racial discourse. Already, this process is beginning to yield hints of Franco-American engagement with the whiteness propounded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
An emblematic example involves the “Chinese of the East” controversy. In 1881, a Massachusetts public servant used that phrase to describe French Canadians who earned wages for a short time before returning to Quebec. This mobile labor force had nothing to contribute to the United States, the chair of the Bureau of Labor Statistics declared. Franco-American communities erupted in protests and petitions and demanded justice. Generations of historians have echoed the voices of the immigrant leaders in their condemnations of anti-French prejudice. Hardly ever have these historians recognized that French Canadians’ refusal to accept the status of a racialized minority represented an assertion of whiteness—an assertion of power over people of color. Community leaders did not condemn racism, but sought to show that they met the criteria of whiteness established by Anglo-Saxon Americans.[ix]
Antiracism was not absent from the Franco-American community. Signs of openness to a racial Other are discernable in important historical moments, as when the baseball team in Nashua, New Hampshire, home to a considerable “Franco” population, broke the minor league color barrier in 1946.[x] Still, researchers now have an opportunity and an obligation to study the insidious ways by which entrenched racial lines persisted, as in fact happened in other ethnic Catholic communities.[xi]
We might consider, for instance, the pervasiveness of blackface minstrel shows, often held in Franco-American clubs and church halls, through the first half of the twentieth century and beyond. Other evidence must be weighed against the decades during which, in Little Canadas across the Northeast, African Americans were held as objects of ridicule.[xii]
Unlike many white immigrant groups, French Canadians were a “New World” people. They did not come directly from Europe. Their identity was complicated by centuries of life along the St. Lawrence River. In the era of so-called scientific racism, some American observers believed French Canadians had intermarried widely with Indigenous peoples—another knock against their claim to whiteness. French-Canadian elites on both sides of the border strongly refuted the alleged “race mixing” and defended the purity of their blood. Inclusion and status meant creating distance from Indigenous groups, as occurred with African Americans and East Asian migrants.[xiii]
This type of privilege in no way diminishes the struggles that Franco-Americans and other ethnic groups experienced, from low wages and limited social mobility to persistent discrimination. It is nevertheless an important aspect of minorities’ acculturation and access to an unhyphenated white American identity. It helps us appreciate that Franco-Americans did not struggle because they were just like people of color; it also counters the convenient myth that certain groups rose simply by virtue of their work ethic. A desire to secure an enviable place in the racial landscape of the United States created blinders, the legacies of which are still very present in our century.
[i]. George Sánchez, “Race, Nation, and Culture in Recent Immigration Studies,” Journal of American Ethnic History, vol. 18, no. 4 (1999), 66-84; and John Bukowczyk, “The Racial Turn,” Journal of American Ethnic History, vol. 36, no. 2 (2017), 5-10.
[ii]. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Thomas A. Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945 (New York City: Oxford University Press, 2003).
[iii]. Mason Wade, “French and French Canadians in the U.S.,” New Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. VI (Palatine: Jack Heraty and Associates, 1967, 1981), 143.
[iv]. Yves Roby provides a scholarly overview in The Franco-Americans of New England: Dreams and Realities (Quebec City: Septentrion, 2004).
[v]. My own work places Franco-Americans in the context of mainstream U.S. politics; see “Tout nous serait possible”: Une histoire politique des Franco-Américains, 1874-1945 (Quebec City: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2021). Recent dissertations have explored the wider context of Franco-Americans’ religious advocacy, e.g. Molly Boddy, “Beyond Boston: Catholicism in the Northern New England Borderlands in the Nineteenth Century” (Ph.D. diss., University of New Hampshire, 2015) and Maxwell Pingeon, “Nationalizing American Catholicism: Irish Power, French Canadians, and the New England Language Wars, 1853-1936” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 2024).
[vi]. Bystydzienski, “Minority Women of North America: A Comparison of French-Canadian and Afro-American Women,” American Review of Canadian Studies, vol. 15, no. 4 (1985), 465-480.
[vii]. Newton, “‘These French Canadian of the Woods are Half-Wild Folk’: Wilderness, Whiteness, and Work in North America, 1840-1955,” Labour/Le Travail, vol. 77 (2016), 121-150.
[viii]. Vermette, A Distinct Alien Race: The Untold Story of Franco-Americans (Montreal: Baraka Books, 2018). See, also, on eugenics, Mercedes de Guardiola, “Vermont for the Vermonters”: The History of Eugenics in the Green Mountain State (Barre and Montpelier: Vermont Historical Society, 2023); on access to power, Patrick Lacroix, “Race, Privilege, and the Problem of the Subaltern Franco-American,” SHGAPE Blog, https://www.shgape.org/race-privilege-and-the-problem-of-the-subaltern-franco-american/, January 29, 2019.
[ix]. Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor (MBSL), Twelfth Annual Report, “Part III — Uniform Hours of Labor” (Boston: Rand, Avery, and Co., 1881), 469-470; MBSL, Thirteenth Annual Report, “Part I: The Canadian French in New England” (Boston: Rand, Avery, and Co., 1882), 5-9, 80-82. An unquestioning approach to the race rhetoric of responses to the Wright report appears notably in the work of Pierre Anctil, who notes the “brutality” of the “epithet.” See Anctil, “‘Chinese of the Eastern States,’ 1881,” Recherches sociographiques, vol. 22, no. 1 (1981), 125-131, and “L’identité de l’immigrant québécois en Nouvelle-Angleterre: Le rapport Wright de 1882,” Recherches sociographiques, vol. 22, no. 3 (1981), 331-359.
[x]. Michael Casey, “New Hampshire town recognized for historic role in racially integrating baseball in the 1940s,” News Center Maine, https://www.newscentermaine.com/article/sports/nashua-dodgers-new-hampshire-jackie-robinson-color-barrier-major-league-baseball/97-489325bb-ec3a-4cc7-8ff8-e8aa2a8ca96d, May 30, 2023.
[xi]. John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
[xii]. See, for instance, “Belle séance ‘minstrel’ par Pershing Club,” L’Impartial (Nashua, N.H.), April 26, 1921, 6; “Eagles Score Decided Hit by Their Minstrel Show,” Putnam Patriot, April 13, 1923, 8; “Un ménestrel à Ste-Cécile dimanche, à 8h.,” La Tribune (Woonsocket, R.I.), October 26, 1932, 5; “Minstrel Show by St. Joseph’s Church Highly Entertaining,” Old Town Enterprise, June 1, 1933, 1.
[xiii]. On the “purity” of French descendants in North America, see Pascal Poirier, Origine des Acadiens (Montreal: Eusèbe Sénécal, 1874).