BOOKS
Pick and Shovel: Building the Labourers’ International Union of North America Local 183 (working title). Toronto: Lorimer (forthcoming, Fall 2022) – non-refereed
This book tells the transnational history of Portuguese communities in Canada and the United States against the backdrop of the Cold War, the American Civil Rights movement, the Portuguese Colonial Wars, and Canadian multiculturalism. It considers the ethnic, racial, class, gender, linguistic, regional, and generational permutations of “Portuguese” diaspora from both a transnational and comparative perspective. Besides showing that diasporas and nations can be co-dependent, This Pilgrim Nation counters the common notion that hybrid diasporic identities are largely benign and empowering by revealing how they can perpetuate asymmetrical power relations.
BOOK CHAPTERS AND JOURNAL ARTICLES
“Moving Earth and Minds: Modern Construction Machines and the Building of Canada’s Ways, 1860s-1910s” (forthcoming)
Mobility has been a dominant theme in Canadian historiography. Yet, there is practically no scholarly work on the history of the modern construction machines that built the waterways, railways, and roadways that allowed for Canada’s expansion during the Second Industrial Revolution. This article helps fill that gap by examining the development, manufacturing, and adoption of the first generation of steam-powered, portable, heavy construction equipment – i.e., dredges, steam shovels, draglines, road graders, scrapers, and rollers – in parts of Eastern Canada in the 1860s–1910s. It discusses the role played by excavation and road building engineers, and public works officials, like A. W. Robinson and A. W. Campbell, in creating, promoting, and adopting the use of these machines by way of publications and public education campaigns associated with American organizations. While Canadian politicians concerned themselves with national markets and borders, the purveyors of technological knowledge travelled across a large transnational northeastern region, in which Ontario was an important area of activity. This article supports the argument that technological development in Canada during the Second Industrial Revolution was continentally integrated in ways that involved technological dialogue with American companies, associations, and publications. In the conclusion, I will relate the history of this industry with that of farm machinery manufacturing in Ontario during the same period, and reflect on the rise of corporate capitalism in this industry.
w/ Roberto Perin, “Living Through Exciting Times: Portuguese Political Dissidents in Montréal During the Long Sixties” (forthcoming)
Like Dragons of the Fairy Stories: Social and Cultural Responses to Modern Construction Machines in Canada, 1870s–1940s (forthcoming)
Modern construction machines were essential for building the infrastructures that allowed Canada’s growth as an industrialized nation since the late nineteenth century. By making possible the nation-building projects envisioned by politicians, engineers, and capitalists, they were at the heart of official versions of progress. Because of their novelty and proximity in both rural and urban settings, these machines entered the collective consciousness of Canadians, who ascribed them meanings that reflected their hopes and fears in a rapidly changing world. This article discusses how this steam-powered technology was received by Canadians (especially Ontarians) within the context of North American anglophone society and culture, by examining its references in news media, adult and children literature, poetry, toys, advertisement, and city by-laws. By analyzing the metaphors, pronouns, and adjectives used in its cultural representations, it reveals some of the modern aspirations and anxieties of white working-class masculinity in the face of this simultaneously empowering and superseding technology. This article focuses primarily on steam shovels, the most popular and culturally significant construction machines in this period. Seen as both creative and destructive, empowering and oppressive, enhancing and emasculating, masculine and feminine, they were well-suited for reflecting the fluidity, insecurity, and tension of modern capitalist society with its constantly changing demands and expectations. Studying cultural responses to these “dragons” reveals instructive lessons for anyone interested in the ongoing changes in the world of work prompted by technological development.
“Part of the Solution? Indigenous Apprentices and the Unionized Building Trades – The Way of the International Union of Operating Engineers, Local 793″ (under peer review)
There have never been more favourable conditions for drawing Indigenous workers into the unionized building trades. The construction industry needs to replenish and diversify its overwhelmingly white male and aging workforce to meet its skilled labour demands for the next few decades, when major civil infrastructure, mining, and green energy developments are expected to happen in northern Indigenous territories. These projects will be mandated by Impact Benefits Agreements to employ a significant number of Indigenous workers who will first need to be trained. At the same time, Indigenous peoples are the fastest-growing population in Canada and have shown a propensity for pursuing trades education. In recent years, Ontario’s largest building trade unions have taken significant steps to recruit, train, and employ northern Indigenous workers, including in Nunavut. In collaboration with various stakeholders, their efforts are starting to show positive results. But are their methods and goals informed by decolonization, reconciliation, and indigenization? This article reflects on this question while examining the case of the International Union of Operating Engineers, Local 793, which has been a leader among building trades unions when it comes to establishing relationships with Indigenous partners, training Indigenous workers, and contributing to their economic self-determination.
“Breaking the News: Portuguese Lusotropicalist Public Relations and Lobbying in the United States, 1961–4” Portuguese Studies Review 29: 2 (Winter 2021): 197-232.
This article examines the pro-colonialist propaganda and lobbying campaign by the American public relations firm Selvage & Lee on behalf of the Overseas Companies of Portugal and its ties with the Estado Novo during the Presidency of John F. Kennedy, the height of decolonization in Africa, and the start of the Portuguese Colonial Wars in Angola, Portuguese Guinea, and Mozambique. It takes a close look at the non-diplomatic activities of these “foreign agents” and their clandestine collusion with Portuguese government officials revealed by a Senate Committee on Foreign Relations investigation, which led to the 1966 amendments to the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Besides contributing to the growing historiography on international public relations, this article also introduces an Anglophone dimension to the study of lusotropicalism outside of the “Lusophone world” by exploring some of the channels through which its pro-miscegenation ideas were disseminated among American conservatives, including right-wing African-American intellectuals. The article can be downloaded here.
R. Costa, E. da Silva, G. Fernandes, S. Miranda and A. St. Onge, “Archiving from Below: Preserving, Problematizing and Democratizing the Collective Memory of Portuguese Canadians – The Portuguese Canadian History Project,” in Identity Palimpsests: Ethnic Archiving in the United States and Canada, ed. Amalia S. Levi and Dominique Daniel. Sacramento: Litwin Press, 2014
Until recently, the few archival records “representing” Portuguese immigrants in Canadian archives were those produced by governments and reflected a “top-down”, uniform perception of the Portuguese-Canadian experience. This chapter explores the “bottom up” motivations, principles, and work of the Portuguese Canadian History Project (PCHP) in its efforts to facilitate the donation of community records to a public archive and bridging the gap between immigrant and academic communities.
This article examines the transnational and international politics and motivations behind the Eurocentric campaigns of Portuguese American heritage advocates to memorialize the sixteenth-century navigators Miguel Corte-Real and Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo as the ‘‘discoverers’’ of the United States’ Atlantic and Pacific coasts, and how those campaigns were framed by the advocates’ ‘‘ancestral’’ homeland’s imperialist propaganda. It argues that the study of public memory and heritage politics can offer valuable insights into the processes of diaspora building and helps reveal the asymmetrical power relations often missing in discussions about cultural hybridity. The article can be downloaded here.
The sovereignty of migration policy makers is never absolute. This has been true for both receiving and sending states. One important check on the receiving nation’s immigration policy implementation was the sending nation’s own sovereignty over its expatriated citizens. These colliding sovereignties sometimes created liminal spaces where migrants and their facilitators were able to subvert regulations by playing them against each other, while other times they were grinded between gatekeepers bent on enforcing their policies. This bilateral dimension is often missing from Canadian immigration history, as is the role of homeland government officials, who brokered and supervised these migrant movements while conciliating the roles of gatekeepers and facilitators. This is especially significant when it involved authoritarian governments, like Portugal’s Estado Novo dictatorship (1933-74). How did Ottawa’s relatively liberal immigration policies correspond with the Estado Novo‘s authoritarian stance on emigration? How did Portuguese officials influence the movement of its emigrants in Canada? How did the migrants react to the concerted top-down arrangements of two imposing governments? This article examines these and other questions in reference to the Portuguese “bulk order” and family sponsorship movements to Canada, between 1953 and 1974. The article can be downloaded here.
The following article examines the changing political attitudes of Portuguese immigrants in Canada from the arrival of the first cohort in the 1950s to the emergence of the second and third generations in Canadian mainstream society in the 1990s. It explores historical factors that have influenced the political profile of Portuguese Canadians, including its predominantly working-class makeup; its lack of formal education and democratic culture resulting from Portugal’s authoritarian legacy; and its internal factionalism along regional, ideological, generational, and class lines. Fernandes offers a historical critique of sociological models— “socio-economic status” and “socialization”—commonly used for measuring and explaining immigrant political participation, and stresses the importance of diachronic studies in dispelling essentialist assumptions regarding immigrant communities. The author argues that generalist notions of “political participation” and “political constituency” miss important distinctions between representative and direct forms of political action, collective mobilization and individual activism, as well as state level and grassroots politics. He claims that each of these political processes operates according to its own distinct internal dynamics, at times responsive, at other times alienated from one another, which must be analyzed using appropriate scales of observation (macro and micro). The article can be downloaded here.
SELECT BLOG POSTS
“On Guard for Canadian Parochialism,” Parts one, two, and three, ActiveHistory.ca, September 8, 15, 22, 2015
Since coming into power in 2006, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has taken various steps to redefine Canadian citizenship and reassert its “value” under a territorial, militaristic, loyalist, conformist and Anglocentric interpretation. As numerous commentators have noted, these reforms have unfolded within Harper’s broader campaign to (re)define the meaning of being Canadian along conservative ideals and British traditions. Conservative officials deny the existence of such underlying “agenda,” arguing their reforms simply addressed specific problems in the system, such as massive fraud and application backlogs. Recent citizenship debates in English Canada have dwelt mostly on the question of whether it is a right or a privilege; on issues of legality and process; and on measures of loyalty, attachment or worthiness. But there is more to it. In this three-part series, I will explore the historical narratives and political myths supporting the Conservative government’s parochial views on Canadian citizenship, and how they affect Canada’s and its expats’ place in the world. Part one will focus on the policies; part two on the historians; and part three on Canada’s diasporas.
“It is often said that Toronto is a city of neighbourhoods, each with its own socioeconomic characteristics, ethnic communities, life cycles and histories. While that may be true, Toronto is also a cluster of “invisible cities”, to use the words of Italo Calvino. Their diverse citizens have developed their own mental maps of the city, which are often juxtaposed yet distant from each other or unable to communicate. In these alternative geographies, Toronto is not just the largest city in Canada, or simply the capital of Ontario, but also a transnational ‘suburb’ of the places where its vast immigrant population comes from.
(…) Toronto is host, and home, to a great many immigrant communities, whose family, cultural, economic, and political realities traverse local and global contexts. Toronto’s streets and squares merge with those of their home towns and cities – alternative geographies ‘invisible’ to those who ignore them. We all live in someone else’s land. To know the citizens of these juxtaposed cities and their transnational realities is to grow our common ground, which is where democracy ultimately happens and Toronto increasingly lives.”
Gilberto Fernandes 