Good Friday on College Street: Urban Space and Changing Italian Identity

This dissertation examines the relationship between urban space and minority ethnic identity. It makes extensive use of oral history and a variety of archival documents including personal correspondence, photographs, parish records and newspapers to reveal the way Italian immigrants utilized traditional religious practices, in particular a procession on Good Friday, to nurture and express a feeling of belonging in the Toronto neighbourhood known as Little Italy. Although use of neighbourhood space for leisure appears to be a gendered practice among Italian immigrants, during the Processione di Cristo Morto (Procession of the Dead Christ) women occupied and directed the use of public space on a scale equal to men. I argue this procession was unique in terms of its appeal to Italian immigrants from all regions of Italy and became an important symbolic vehicle for publicly expressing the evolution of personal and communal Italian identity from Italian "immigrant" to Italian-Canadian "ethnic" over two generations. Urban space is an appropriate category of analysis for understanding the ways immigrant/ethnic minorities develop feelings of belonging in a new city. Sidewalks, roads, neighbourhood businesses and churches are the most visible site of encounter and negotiation between immigrant newcomers and the settled population. In these places, which were simultaneously the most easily accessible and most difficult to avoid, relationships of power and marginality were revealed at the individual and community level. This dissertation identifies strategies of negotiation for access to urban space employed by Italians in Toronto included, but were not limited to, nurturing relationships with religious, civic and political authorities. The grassroots evolution of the Processione di Cristo Morto (PCM) is an example of the way sensual experience, memory and emotion were located and expressed in urban space. This study argues these elements deserve scholarly attention. They were central to how Italians understood the degree to which they were welcome in different urban places and important for understanding why this highly visible processional practice was established in the College Street neighbourhood after migration and endured well beyond the immigrant generation.