- September 9, 2014
Please join Accents Bookstore and University of Manitoba Press for the Toronto launch of Young, Well-Educated, and Adaptable: Chilean Exiles in Ontario and Quebec, 1973-2010.
When: Tuesday, September 9, 6:30 pm
Where: Peter McKendrick Art Gallery, Artscape Wychwood Barns (Studio 150, 601 Christie St., Toronto)
Cost: FREE
Light refreshments will be served.
About the Book
Between 1973 and 1978, six thousand Chilean leftists came to Canada as exiles from the Pinochet coup d’état.
They left Chile for different reasons and arrived in Canada in a variety of ways, but they shared one trait: they had not wanted to leave Chile, and were only grudgingly admitted to Canada. Once resettled, with many in Ontario and Quebec, these political exiles had to find ways of coping with an abrupt and violent separation from their homeland that had deep material and emotional repercussions.
In 1990, the military regime in Chile ceded power to a civilian government, and the main reason for staying in exile disappeared. Yet most of the exiles stayed. Canada was no longer seen as a place of transit, a backdrop to be endured until they could reclaim their places in Chile. For the political exiles, it had become home.
In Young, Well-Educated, and Adaptable, Francis Peddie documents the experiences of Chilean-Canadians. He also considers how the admission of people from the wrong side of the Cold War ideological divide had a lasting effect on Canadian immigration and refugee policy, establishing a precedent for the admission of political exiles over the decades that followed.
About the Author
Francis Peddie is a historian of Latin America and Canadian Immigration. Originally from Toronto, he now teaches at Nagoya University in Japan.
