It is often spoken of as a veritable demographic haemorrhage. Since the mid-nineteenthe century until the Great Depression, around 1929, the shortage of agricultural land and the desire for a more comfortable existence would have caused nearly a million French Canadians to migrate to certain industrial towns in New England, the United States -United.
In Lowell, New Bedford, Woonsocket or Lewiston, for years they formed a veritable diaspora, with their newspapers, their churches, their neighborhoods. It is the American writer Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), whose parents had left their village in Bas-Saint-Laurent. Or it was Honoré Beaugrand (1848-1906) who, in 1873, after having been a pastry chef in Philadelphia and a house painter, founded a weekly in Fall River, Massachusetts, The Echo of Canada.
This migratory reality has also nurtured a good number of artists who went to entertain this large pool of population resulting from nearly a century of French-Canadian immigration to New England, in turn nourishing the identity and cohesion of these communities. Continental trajectories examined by historian Pierre Lavoie in Mile after mile. Celebrity and Migrations in the American Northeast.
Through the tangled stories of La Bolduc, the croon Rudy Vallée and burlesque theater tour director of Corsican origin Jean Grimaldi, three popular artists who are themselves migrants or descendants of migrants, somewhat subversive for Quebec at the time, the author engages in an investigation on the mobility, fame and public memory of Northeastern American Francophones.
From Lowell to LA
The life and work of these three artists are defined by their movements, and not by their points of departure and arrival, believes the researcher, who specializes in transnational history, cultural history and the history of migrations. This native of L’Isle-Verte holds a doctorate in history from the University of Montreal. His thesis — and the resulting book — deals with the entanglement of collective identifications, migrations and artistic practices between the United States and Quebec.
“From the memory maintained from the figure of Mary Travers, we realize that what has been retained is largely linked to territorial and identity anchors, notes Pierre Lavoie in an interview. Namely a French-Canadian mother who sings in her own words and in an inventive way, someone we associate with the idea of folklore and the word of the people. However, this way of describing her is not the one that best represents her at the time of her activities, ”he believes.
“Even before becoming a known artist, she was herself a migrant worker with her husband and children in the early 1920s. She was born in Gaspésie and followed urbanization and industrialization in Montreal, going in Springfield, Massachusetts, returns to Montreal. She tracks jobs and opportunities. And when she begins her career as a professional artist, burlesque comedian or singer, we notice in the same way that she is constantly migrating from one artistic form to another. She is always adapting and reacting to what is happening around her to take the next step. “And not to consolidate an anchor, contrary to the image of her which was conveyed thereafter.
Mary Travers’ episode as a migrant worker in the United States will be short-lived, but it will have inspired her to dare to cross the border again later and embark on lucrative tours through New England . Because despite the great popularity of its records in Quebec, it was in New England, recalls Pierre Lavoie, that La Bolduc achieved the most success on stage from the mid-1930s “by presenting variety shows that skilfully combine parody and nostalgia”.
Cultivate the difference
The same could be said of Rudy Vallée (1901-1986), the ancestor of croonersfamous from Broadway to Hollywood, who grew up in a Franco-American community in Maine, but who, due to the socio-cultural context of the first decades of the 20e century—notably the Americanization campaigns that were going on in the United States—slid more and more towards an American identity.
“Rudy Vallée really wants to distance himself from his difference,” emphasizes Pierre Lavoie. Or else he will use it in a superficial way by using the fact that he knows how to speak a little French and Spanish to build his persona of charmer. But he never tried to confine himself to the class identity, very working-class, which is that of the Franco-Americans. »
It is in the trajectories of these artists, as well as in the thousands of Franco-American families who consumed these entertainments, in the mixing of influence and identity, that the historian is interested here.
From church basements to parish halls, from recording studios to film sets, through very particular destinies, mile after mile takes us in the footsteps of artists who had the audacity to break down borders, and shows how migratory mobility was then able to shape artistic and media mobility. Even if this transnational artistic “mobility” could sometimes, in Quebec, encounter a certain resistance, through criticism sometimes tinged with moralism and a solid anti-Americanism.
“From a strictly political point of view, we notice that the socio-political elites of the period have no interest, for their own cause, in highlighting the departure, the migration. And a posteriori, we realize that, when we integrate into the public memory figures like Mary Travers, for example, who evolved in this transnational space, we remove the traces of this mobility so that it can be more easily integrated into the national heritage. »