Loewen, Royden and Friesen, Gerald. Immigrants in Prairie Cities. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Pp. 260

Royden Loewen and Gerald Friesen’s synthetic treatment of immigrants in twentieth century prairie cities promises a “story about people meeting people” that takes seriously the strategies and understandings of immigrants as well as the shifting interactions between newcomers and the society to which they arrived (5). Dividing the century into three periods and their book into three corresponding parts, the authors argue that the prairie mainstream was remade by immigrants to the region. In the early century, from 1900–1930, boundaries separating continental European immigrants from the British majority were held high, yet diverse newcomers succeeded in using their internal networks as “staging grounds” (32) for entry into the wider society. In the mid-century, from the 1940s to the 1960s, migrants displaced from rural Canada and the continuing stream of continental Europeans integrated more readily into burgeoning prairie cities, often able to take advantage of integrated suburban residence and the aid of “well meaning British Canadians imbued with a newly developed pluralist idealism” (97). Finally, in the late century, from 1970s-1990s, skilled and “socially confident” (103) immigrants from the “Global South” largely forsook ethnic enclaves, relying upon one another for cultural rather than material needs and integrating rapidly into a prairie urban society that, while not without racism, ultimately embraced diversity and “offered a ray of hope for all plural societies at the turn of the twenty-first century” (155). Urban historians will be encouraged to learn that this is a book that takes the urban setting seriously. Throughout, Friesen and Loewen seek to establish that immigration to prairie cities, while sharing much with a wider national history, had a distinctive regional flavour. “Immigrant-host interaction,” the authors maintain, “is as much a local as a national phenomenon” (9). The second and third parts of this narrative, which carry prairie cities from the Second World War to the end of the twentieth century, are the most provocative and compelling. Here the authors provide persuasive grounds for a regional focus. With the exception of Winnipeg, to which the authors devote three exclusive chapters, prairie cities grew rapidly in the postwar era even as they diversified. Immigrant incorporation was not prefigured by industrial era patterns or pre-existing ethnic enclaves; instead, the postwar immigrants arrived to cities that were just taking form. Particularly in Alberta, where Calgary and Edmonton doubled in size in the 1950s and continued to grow at astounding rates in the decade that followed (58–59), postwar immigrants were integral to the very formation of prairie cities. Indeed, the confident western regionalism of the postwar era was, according to the authors, “created by immigrants for immigrants” (74). These developments, the authors suggest, paved the way for the increasingly diverse newcomers who arrived after the introduction of the “points system.” Skilled and confident late century immigrants were well suited to the kind of cities that had emerged on the prairies in the previous decades. These immigrants created institutions and organizations that acted as “virtual ethnic webs,” bringing together “immigrants spread over the large areas” of sprawling prairie cities, while using new technologies to retain close ties to their places of origin (108, 157–173). Although they generated somewhat ambivalent response from their prairie neighbours (111–118, 139–155), the new immigrants found a home within a “common cultural citizenship” (101). The book seems likely to generate interesting discussions among historians of immigration and urban life in Canada. Notably, the authors argue, most forcefully in the chapters devoted to Winnipeg, that immigrant reception in the prairie cities differed from that described in Franca Iacovetta’s recent analysis of “gatekeepers,” which was mostly rooted in postwar Toronto. According to Loewen and …