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Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Wenona Giles, Portuguese Women in Toronto: Gender, Immigration, and Nationalism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2002)

IN HER ETHNOGRAPHY, Portuguese Women in Toronto, Wenona Giles offers a provocative perspective on the relationship between hegemonic ideologies of national membership, state-promulgated immigration policies, and the experiences and life trajectories of immigrant women and their daughters. Her analysis effectively integrates detailed life histories and individual voices with histories of both Canadian and Portuguese forms of national belonging and insights into the multiple effects of economic restructuring. Through qualitative interviews primarily with first- and second-generation Portuguese immigrant women living in and around the large Portuguese community of Toronto, she investigates how biases in Canada's immigration law and official ideology of multiculturalism promote inequities along gender and class lines. Giles offers a much needed and persuasive critique of liberal versions of multiculturalism, helps rectify the frequent analytic inattention to gender and class in studies of immigrant incorporation, and develops a clear argument for alternative modes of political engagement.

Giles' central argument is that Canadian immigration and multicultural policies have greatly contributed to the difficulties and disadvantages faced by Portuguese immigrant women. Canadian immigration law assesses the desirability of prospective immigrants in terms of work skills in ways, she argues, that have "delimited and defined immigrant women as dependents in subordinate positions," (21) and contributed to the fact that most Portuguese women entered Canada, regardless of their actual status as wage workers, officially classified as "dependents" rather than as "workers." Recruitment preferences in the 1950s and early 1960s for unskilled male labour have continued, but with the introduction of a points system in 1967, have come to include preferences for male workers with advanced education and specialized professional skills. Portuguese women's lack of access to education and skills training in their home countries has, Giles argues, made it harder for them to immigrate on their own. Once in Canada, their low-level jobs and "dependent" status have made it more difficult for women to acquire further education and language training or to garner the necessary family resources to sponsor the subsequent immigration of family members.

A related consequence of Canada's multicultural policies is that identity and social differences have come to be conceptualized, almost exclusively, in terms of culture. Giles persuasively argues that the growing emphasis on "cultural authenticity" and distinctive ethnic traditions as markers of ethnic group identity has increasingly obscured differences in class and the reality of women's lives as workers, and made it difficult to organize around shared experiences of exploitation that often cross-cut ethnic boundaries. Access to state resources is primarily negotiated through ethnic group membership that, as Giles points out, ends up obscuring significant distinctions in regional and class background among immigrants and discourages alliances along other lines. Women in the Portuguese community are, she notes, particularly disadvantaged within the multicultural system of representation as it is usually men who head the ethnic organizations that serve as conduits to the state. She repeatedly asserts that "the promotion of a particular ethnic identity, such as a Portuguese identity, has not and will not lead to more equitable access to basic resources ... unless it is linked to more broadly based struggles against racism, and gender and class inequities." (110)

The contrast between the outlooks and life options of first-and second-generation Portuguese women forms the ethnographic core of Giles' account. Avoiding facile generalizations, she tells the stories of individual women who have dealt with tensions around gender roles and familial expectations as well as work-related experiences and dilemmas in very different ways. They range from women who feel "a woman should be what her husband tells her to be" (44) to those who push hard against conservative Portuguese expectations and seek more independence and equitable gender relations. Giles pays special attention to the dilemmas of second-generation women who attempt to navigate beyond constraining gender roles while maintaining their commitment to family and community. She also traces the transformation from first- to second-generation mothers. The first generation tend to work in manufacturing or domestic service, left school at the elementary level, have limited skills in English, and few realistic options for further education. Their second-generation daughters, by contrast, tend to work in low-level, white-collar jobs and, despite streaming and discrimination in the schools and often ambivalent family attitudes towards education, have by and large successfully finished high school and in some cases attended college. Interestingly enough, Giles notes that first-generation women tend to work in unionized sectors and participate in labour struggles more actively than do their daughters who generally work in non-union settings and prefer more mainstream forms of political participation.

Another important theme that Giles explores is the relationship between an increasingly deterritorialized Portuguese nationalism and the identities and relationships forged by Portuguese immigrants. The Portuguese state has sought to keep its diaspora "Portuguese" — offering dual citizenship, voting rights in Portugal, and forms of representation to emigrants while not quite encouraging a permanent return. The flexible form of national membership is aimed in part at encouraging the continuation of economically very significant remittance levels from the Portuguese abroad. Giles points out that remittances, as well as plans for an eventual permanent return, are, especially for first-generation Portuguese immigrants, important components of their relationship with Portugal. She presents very interesting insights into how these commitments differed markedly between immigrants from the continent and those who had come from the Azores as the prospect of return to the continent, with its higher standard of living, wider job opportunities, and culturally less restrictive gender roles, was, for most immigrants, more appealing than return to the economically marginal and culturally more traditional islands of the Azores. She also notes that it is primarily women who nurture transnational connectedness through visits, communication, and remittances.

There are several question raised by Giles' insightful analysis that could be developed further in future work. Citizenship, although addressed at several points, is not systematically explored in this account. Questions remain as to what strategies Portuguese immigrants pursued with regard to citizenship and why. What did formal membership in the Canadian, and Portuguese, polity mean to them? What obstacles do they encounter in seeking to acquire citizenship? What was the role of the state in the process? Recent scholarship by Irene Bloomraad makes important contributions to our understanding of these questions.

It would also be interesting to explore further the multiple ways in which immigrants and their children construct and assert their Portuguese identities. Giles forcefully critiques the political emphasis on cultural authenticity and ethnic distinctiveness, but does not delve very deeply into what cultural identities and practices might mean to people across the generations. It would also be helpful to place the growing emphasis on identity politics within a wider context as the de-emphasis of class and shared experiences of exploitation, even within leftist political rhetoric, is hardly unique to Canada.

Hearing the voices of women is, obviously, extremely important and the often tense conversations between mothers and daughters add a crucial dimension to our understanding of the immigrant experience. But gender and arguments about gender roles involve both men and women. It would be relevant to hear more from Portuguese immigrant men about how the immigration experience has challenged, and perhaps transformed, their notions of how to be "proper men," or about the interconnected conversations between wives and husbands, daughters and fathers, and brothers and sisters. Adding perspectives from multiple subject positions would add nuance and complexity to our understanding of how people negotiate between shifting and often conflicting expectations.

Giles offers strong critiques of the biased impact of immigration law and multicultural policies on the lives of immigrant women and future work would do well to follow that lead. More detailed attention, however, needs to be paid to how state-level practices and hegemonies actually impact the lives of individuals. What, in other words, are the specific processes through which that impact is realized? For example, while Giles is clear that immigration policies defined women largely as familial dependents, her argument that a "dependent" status undermined the access of immigrant women to subsequent options and opportunities in Canada is less clear. She points out that almost as many Portuguese women entered Canada as did men and the majority found paid work after arrival, regardless of their official entry status. It would be important to more clearly differentiate factors that affect the access of all working-class immigrants, regardless of gender, to education, better jobs, and political representation from those that primarily affect the possibilities for women. Hopefully future work will build on Giles' argument that Canada's laws and policies are "deeply gendered," and contribute further analyses of how gender inequities among immigrants are fostered, perpetuated, and resisted.


Andrea Klimt University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth

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