History, Memory, and Struggle in Saint-Henri, Montreal

The working-class neighbourhood of Saint-Henri in the Southwest of Montreal was long at the heart of capitalist production in Canada. Like other industrial cities across North America, the area experienced a precipitous deindustrialization and decline in the postwar period, a process whose brutality was matched only by that of the subsequent refashioning of the sector into a post-industrial paradise of restaurants and condominiums. Taking as its point of departure the competing historical discourses at play in present-day Saint-Henri – a post-industrial structure of feeling advanced by developers, business owners, and sanitized heritage projects; an oppositional working-class culture rooted in memories of industrial labour and the hard years of unemployment; and a common, structuring framework of settler whiteness – this thesis uses oral history and archival work to excavate the roots of gendered working-class consciousness, settler identity, and local forms of political resistance in a part of the city long seen as a quintessentially Québécois space. Beginning with the 1967 shutdown of Dominion Textile, the thesis examines the changing patterns of capital accumulation that led to factory shutdowns and the brief 1970s overlap within community organizing around productive and reproductive labour issues, a nexus that conditioned local resistance into the 1990s. It then turns to the State and capital’s conscious redevelopment of the neighbourhood in the image of bankers and hedge funds, a process particularly difficult for the women largely responsible for the affective and reproductive labour of collective survival. Gradually, local activism became integrated into the nationalist State apparatus, as deindustrialization fed into gentrification and the “worker's neighbourhood” slowly became re-imagined as a white-coded “quartier populaire.” Finally, the dissertation turns to a more in-depth investigation of the structuring forces of settler colonialism and anti-blackness on working-class lifeways in Saint-Henri, before concluding with some thoughts on active, public history and the role it can play in imagining transformative ways of organizing local resistance. The dissertation is an intervention into deindustrialization studies, inserting perspectives of race and gender into the discussion; gentrification studies, challenging the field to centre working-class experiences of displacement; Quebec and Canadian labour history, contesting dominant national/ist frameworks; and public history.