Make Yourself a Home: Hungarian Immigration and Life in Canada during the Great Depression

Abstract

Focusing on Hungarian immigration to Canada between 1924 and 1931, this paper aims to describe the immigrant experience and life during the Great Depression by juxtaposing family history research with critical scholarly works. Interdisciplinary in nature, the material of the article is organized around the motif of homemaking, and this theme is examined from the perspective of history, folklore studies and ethnography, anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies. In addition to critical scholarship on Hungarian and Central European emigration to North America, this essay relies on data gathered by the author in the spring of 2000 and on twofield trips in late 2001 - early 2002 with social science methods including printed questionnaires and archival documents, on-the-spot participant observation, and elicited flashbacks documented in fieldwork notes. Unless otherwise indicated, quotations in the subtitles of this study are taken from answers in the questionnaires and have been retained in their original language and grammatical form to reflect the linguistic and cultural idiosyncrasies and the rich connotations displayed by the sources: József Tóth, born in 1915, and Laci Tóth, born in 1920.