Almost as soon as I picked up a camera, I began photographing people. For a naturally shy boy, it became an easy and natural way to start a conversation – one that didn’t rely entirely on words. The camera offered a kind of permission: to look, to observe, and to engage with others in a way that felt both purposeful and safe. I photographed friends, family, and those closest to me – mostly people who were part of my everyday life. At the time, I may not have fully understood why, but there was already a sense that these moments, and these faces, mattered.
Sometimes I wonder how much that instinct has really changed. The circle of people I photograph has grown over the years, extending beyond the familiar into wider and more varied encounters. Yet at its core, the process remains the same. Portraiture, for me, is still grounded in a kind of exchange – a quiet conversation between the photographer and the person in front of the camera. It is in that exchange, however brief or subtle, that a photograph begins to take shape. When it works, the result feels shared, as though both people have contributed something to its creation.
That said, the outcome is not always immediately welcomed. Not every photograph is liked, even by those closest to me. Friends and family have sometimes reacted with hesitation or discomfort when seeing themselves in an image, particularly when the photograph reveals details they would rather ignore – wrinkles, blemishes, or features they feel self-conscious about. These reactions are familiar and deeply human. We are often our own harshest critics, especially in the present moment, where self-awareness can feel magnified.
And yet, time has a way of reshaping that relationship. Photographs that once felt unflattering or difficult often soften in meaning as the years pass. Distance allows us to see ourselves with more generosity, or at least with less immediacy. The details that once seemed like flaws become part of a larger whole – evidence of a moment, a phase, a version of ourselves that no longer exists in quite the same way. In this sense, photography benefits from time just as much as it records it.
Time, of course, does not simply pass – it accumulates loss as well as memory. Many of the people I have photographed are no longer alive, and the images that remain have taken on a weight I could not have anticipated when I first made them. What may have once felt casual or routine becomes irreplaceable. A photograph transforms into a trace of presence, something that endures beyond the physical world. This enduring quality has always been one of photography’s most powerful attributes: its ability to hold onto what cannot be held otherwise.
Because of this, portraiture carries a quiet responsibility. There is always a challenge in taking a living, breathing human presence and rendering it into a still image that retains some emotional truth. A photograph inevitably simplifies, but when it succeeds, it does not feel reductive. Instead, it feels concentrated – like something essential has been distilled and preserved.
When that happens, the image becomes more than a likeness. It becomes a memory, not only for those who knew the person, but potentially for anyone who encounters the photograph. Even without context, a strong portrait can resonate, suggesting something universally recognizable in a specific individual. In that way, what begins as a personal act – photographing someone you know – can extend outward, becoming something shared, something lasting, and something quietly meaningful.
Having been born an American, I grew up thinking of city parks as somewhat sinister places. Manhattan and Boston, the two cities I knew well, have beautiful parks but they generally aren’t places where you ignore danger, and that was especially true in the period when I was in those cities. So coming to Montreal took an adjustment. I remember while still a tourist here asking a policeman if a certain park was safe to walk across at night. He gave me a baleful look and said “you must be an American”. It wasn’t so much that he was being dismissive, just making a sad observation.
A different, more American vibe – Central Park in Manhattan on a March day.
So the idea of a city park being a public space safe to walk in alone late at night, or a place where I could sit on a bank and leave the world behind for a bit, wasn’t something that came naturally. On the other hand, I’ve had no problem learning new behaviors! We were lucky that when we moved to Montreal. Our first home bordered on one of these big parks, Parc Lafontaine, and it was very much part of our daily life for the sixteen years we were its neighbor. I came to know it well; it was like a friend who was always there.
The Park Comes Alive
Parc Lafontaine in spring feels less like a sudden transformation and more like a gradual, slow return. In early April, the park is still in transition—patches of snow linger in shaded areas, the ponds are empty and raw, and the trees remain bare. But even then, there’s a visible shift. The light softens, the paths reappear slippery with mud, and the park starts to reclaim its role as one of Montreal’s most lived-in public spaces.
Located in the Plateau, Parc Lafontaine has been part of the city’s fabric since the late 19th century, when Montreal acquired the land and began converting it from farmland into a public park. Before that, it belonged to the Logan family, and its open, cultivated character still echoes in the park’s layout today—broad lawns, structured paths, and a landscape that feels designed to be shared.
By May, the seasonal change is fully in swing. Trees leaf out in bright green, the two central ponds are refilled, and the park’s paths are coming back to life. Runners, cyclists, and pedestrians fall into familiar patterns, while others settle onto the grass, reclaiming it from snow and ice. The park’s footbridge becomes again a natural gathering and vantage point—especially for photographers and anyone watching the light shift across the surface of the ponds.
Serving Many Purposes
One of the defining features of Parc Lafontaine is how it blends recreation with culture. Near the eastern side of the park sits the newly rebuilt Théâtre de Verdure, an open-air performance space first constructed in the 1950s. It has hosted decades of concerts, plays, and community events, and while its programming has fluctuated over the years, it’s an important cultural landmark in the city.
The park serves many functions. During COVID the park rescued me and thousands of other people from enforced confinement. The city maintained wide walking paths through the snow, and a network of groomed trails for cross country skiers. It felt more like Helsinki than Montreal but it helped a lot.
Spring also brings smaller, sensory details that define the experience of the park. Lilacs, pussy willows, and catalpas bloom adding a strong, unmistakable scent to the air. The soundscape shifts as well—less wind, more conversation, music, and the ambient rhythm of daily life. What was quiet and sparse in winter becomes layered and active, without ever feeling overwhelming.
The park’s name itself points not to a fountain, which is what most people think, but to a historical character. It honors Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine, a central figure in 19th-century Canadian politics and a key advocate for responsible government.
What stands out most in spring is how naturally Parc Lafontaine accommodates different kinds of use. It’s not a park designed around a single activity or identity. Instead, it supports people having a wide range of experiences at once—exercise, socializing, quiet observation, enjoying cultural events—all unfolding within the same space. That flexibility is part of what makes it so attractive.
By late afternoon, especially on clear days, the park settles into a rhythm that feels distinctly Montreal. The light warms, the pace slows, and the space fills without feeling crowded. It’s a time when the park is neither empty nor busy, but balanced—fully in use, yet still open enough to move through comfortably.
Spring doesn’t dramatically redefine Parc La Fontaine. Instead, it reveals it—restoring its textures, its patterns, and its role in the daily life of the city.
The Palacio de Bellas Artes looks, at first glance, like the kind of building that surely must have arrived in the world fully resolved: a white-marble monument, ceremonious and self-assured, facing Avenida Juárez in the center of Mexico City. Its actual history is the opposite. The building was conceived as a florid last gasp of the Porfirian regime, stalled by bad ground and political upheaval, and completed only after the revolution had transformed the country that it was meant to represent. What stands today is not a pure work from one era but a layered object, half dream of the old Mexican order and half invention of the new Mexico.
The sculptural relief above the entry doors was created by Italian sculptor Leonardo Bistolfi depicting “La Armonía” (Harmony). The central figure is a nude woman representing Harmony, surrounded by allegorical figures depicting emotions such as “Pain,” “Rage,” “Happiness,” “Peace,” and “Love”.
The Porfirian Dream
After Porfirio Díaz’s first wife died, he married Carmen Romero Rubio who was just 17 years old while Díaz was 51. The couple met at a reception at the American embassy in Mexico City, where the her family were frequent guests. Carmen agreed to teach Díaz English, and their relationship developed from there. Source: American Library of Congress.
That tension begins with the president who wanted it: President Porfirio Díaz. Díaz governed Mexico for decades, directly and effectively, during the long period known as the Porfiriato, and his rule was marked by centralization, order, technocratic ambition, and an intense desire to present Mexico as a modern nation equal to the great capitals of Europe. Bellas Artes was part of that national self-staging. It was planned as a grand new opera house to replace the old National Theater and to help commemorate the centennial of Mexican independence happening in 1910. Díaz wanted to frame the date with monuments, boulevards, and public architecture that could display progress and shine a positive light on his legacy.
Ìt’s not difficult to see how the man – President Porfirio Díaz – would choose this sculpture to adorn a public building. It’s also not difficult to see the conflict of his views and those of the muralists inside the building.
Díaz’s political style helps explain why the project was so grand. He was an authoritarian modernizer: admired by supporters for stability and infrastructure, criticized by opponents for repression, inequality, and the concentration of power. The Palacio fits that mixture of confidence and contradiction. It was meant to signal refinement, control, and cosmopolitan prestige, and Díaz awarded the commission to the Italian architect Adamo Boari, whose European training suited the regime’s cultural aspirations. In that sense the building was never just a building, it was propaganda in the dignified form of architecture.
Soprano Anabel de la Mora taking a bow on the Bellas Artes stage after performing three Mozart arias in March, 2026. The conductor was Shira Samuels-Shragg, making her Mexican debut.
Boari began work in 1904 on the site of the former National Theater, itself part of a changing district along the Alameda. His design used white Carrara marble and combined neoclassical grandeur with the curving ornament of Art Nouveau. The exterior sculpture was international in character as well, with contributions by European artists, and the whole composition played into the Porfirian taste for imported prestige. The palace was expected to open in time for the 1910 centennial celebrations, but almost immediately the site threw up roadblocks to that timetable.
Reality Interferes
The problem was the ground beneath it. Mexico City rests on the old lakebed of Tenochtitlan, and the heavy marble structure began to sink into the soft subsoil even as construction advanced. This was not a cosmetic inconvenience but a structural and logistical problem that slowed the project and complicated its engineering. Then, to make matters more complicated, history intervened violently. The Mexican Revolution, beginning in 1910, disrupted public works, shattered the world that had sponsored the palace, and eventually drove Boari from the country. By 1916 the exterior was essentially finished and the domes were rising, but for years afterward the project lingered in suspension, stranded between regimes and between meanings.
That interruption explains the building’s architectural disjointedness. The exterior belongs to one political and aesthetic moment, while the interior belongs to another. When work resumed in 1930 under the Mexican architect Federico Mariscal, he did not simply complete Boari’s original vision. Instead, he finished the interior largely in Art Deco, incorporating more geometric forms and motifs that reflected both international modern design and a stronger post-revolutionary interest in Mexico’s own ancient past. The result is one of the palace’s great oddities: an outside skin shaped by late Porfirian European elegance and an inside world shaped by the 1930s, by modernism, and by a different national ideology.
The vertical Art Deco columns are headed by pre‑Hispanic motifs. The materials are rich, with colored marbles and bronze or dark metal. The marble-clad piers dissolve into bronze, mask-like reliefs with stepped geometric bands.
Yet the building is not disjointed only in style. It is disjointed in historical mood. Bellas Artes is a palace born from elite aspiration that later became a public temple of national culture. A project first imagined as a grand opera house for an authoritarian regime opened in 1934 as a cultural center for a post-revolutionary state more interested in social identity, civic education, and the arts as national narrative. That transformation gives the building much of its emotional force. It represents the tension between the Porfiriato and the cultural programs of revolutionary Mexico.
Bellas Artes as a Living Home to the Arts
What made Bellas Artes unique was its mixing of conflicting aspirations. Its excessiveness feels like a collaboration among architecture, decorative arts, engineering, and stagecraft on a nearly operatic scale.
The murals came later, and their presence changed the meaning of the building again. After the revolution, muralism became one of the state’s most powerful cultural languages: public, didactic, monumental, and intensely concerned with history, labor, indigeneity, class, and modern Mexico. These paintings did not merely decorate the palace. They turned it into a walk-through argument about Mexican identity, replacing the courtly atmosphere of the original theater conception with a much more contested and democratic visual program.
That is why walking through Bellas Artes can feel so startling. The building’s marble, staircases, and ceremonial spaces suggest European grandeur, yet on the walls appear revolutionary images, anti-capitalist allegories, indigenous references – the modern Mexican mythmaking. Rivera’s remade Man, Controller of the Universe is the best-known example of this collision of worlds, but the broader mural ensemble is just as important because it places the palace within the central story of twentieth-century Mexican art. Bellas Artes became not simply a venue where art was shown but a monumental frame for the state-sponsored visual imagination of modern Mexico.
An average of ten thousand people a day visit Bellas Artes, or about a half million people a year.
The building has also remained a place for temporary exhibitions, which is one reason visits there can feel personal as well as historical. In 2015 we were lucky to see a remarkable show when the museum presented a Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition called La mirada del siglo XX (“The View of the 20th Century”), bringing the French photographer back into a building that already had an earlier connection to him. Cartier-Bresson had in fact exhibited work at the Palacio de Bellas Artes as early as March 1935, alongside Manuel Álvarez Bravo, during his first important Mexican period. Bellas Artes is often thought of chiefly as a mural and performance space, but exhibitions like the 2015 Cartier-Bresson show demonstrate how the building also functions as a site where international modernism, photography, and Mexico’s own visual culture meet inside the same institution (LINK in French and Spanish to video about Cartier-Bresson show).
Henri Cartier-Bresson is a photographer close to my heart, so the 2015 show of his work at Bellas Artes was especially meaningful to me. It honored him both as an artist and as someone previously personally connected to the city. He spent nine months in Mexico City in 1934-35, during which time he exhibited in Bellas Artes with Manuel Álvarez Bravo.
The performance spaces remain central to its identity. Bellas Artes is home to major national companies and institutions, including the National Theater Company, the National Dance Company, the National Symphony Orchestra, the National Opera Company, the Ballet Folklórico de México, and the Fine Arts Chamber Orchestra. Its main hall seats about 1,700 people, and the building also contains recital spaces named for Adamo Boari and Manuel M. Ponce. In practical terms, that means the palace is not a frozen monument but a working cultural machine, used for opera, orchestral concerts, dance, theater, touring performances, state ceremonies, and the Ballet Folklórico presentations that many visitors first associate with it.
Bellas Artes survives not because it is merely old or photogenic, but because it still performs the civic role that architecture of its scale always hopes to achieve. Audiences enter for a symphony or dance program; museum visitors come for murals, architecture, or exhibitions; students and tourists cross paths in the same stair halls and galleries. The building’s mixed life mirrors its mixed design.
To me the palace’s architectural inconsistency is less a flaw than a record. Its Art Nouveau shell, Art Deco interior, revolutionary murals, and Tiffany curtain do not resolve into one tidy style because Mexico itself did not pass tidily from the Porfiriato into the twentieth century. Bellas Artes preserves that break in political identity in material form. It tells various stories: a ruler who wanted grandeur, a capital built on unstable ground, a revolution that interrupted Días’s dream, and a later nation that reused the same palace to tell a strikingly different narrative about itself. That is why the building still feels alive: not despite its contradictions, but because of them. It’s also what keeps us coming back to it.
I was riding along in perfect touristic bliss on my rental bike until I wasn’t, and I hit the pavement hard with the bike on top of me. In that moment I learned several important lessons. One was don’t ride a bike during a rain storm on polished marble.
A couple exhibits better judgement, wheeling their CDMX bikes across slippery rock near Bellas Artes (and it’s not even raining).
Other lessons I learned were about how people around me reacted to my injury, and how the physical location of the accident became an important place in my own life story. Luckily my knee recovered and though it had been a long time since I’d fallen off a bike, my ego did too. What stayed with me was the location. It was in front of the Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City’s grand cultural landmark, and the subject of this blog post. It’s the first of two. This week is about the amazing murals that inhabit this building. Next week will be about the building itself, and its galleries and performance space.
This is a fairly homogeneous group but Mexicans of all backgrounds come to see the murals. Admission is free on Sundays and 75 pesos on other days, about 6$ CAD.
Bellas Artes is a white Carrara-and-Mexican-marble palace that rises above Avenida Juárez on the western edge of the historic center, facing the Alameda Central. It is home to many aspects of Mexican art, but especially to Mexican muralism. Lining two floors of its deep four-storey attrium are some of the most famous murals ever painted.
Part of Rivera’s four-panel Carnaval de la vida mexicana
The Mural Floors
The second floor carries work by “Los Tres Grandes”: José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Diego Rivera. Also joining these three are Jorge González Camarena, Roberto Montenegro, and Manuel Rodríguez Lozano.
Libaración, Jorge González Camarena, 1963.Victima del fascismo by David Alfaro Siqueiros.
The third floor holds the building’s most famous single work — Diego Rivera’s El hombre controlador del universo, his defiant recreation of the destroyed Rockefeller Center mural — along with Siqueiros’s three-part La Nueva Democracia, Rivera’s four-panel Carnaval de la vida mexicana, and Orozco’s La Katharsis. These are works that you will never forget seeing.
Diego Rivera’s mural El hombre controlador del universo.
The Siqueiros – Rivera Feud
These murals were a part of the post-revolutionary project taken on by Mexican artists to educate a largely illiterate public. The project’s objectives were honoring Indigenous and working-class Mexicans, while at the same time propagating the ideology of the revolution into every school, hospital, and union hall.
However, underlying these murals are stories that are often overlooked. Rivera and Siqueiros met in 1919 in Paris and they travelled together that summer studying Italian frescos. In the early 20s they worked inside the same state-funded program creating content in support the Mexican Revolution.
Diego Rivera (R) with León Trotsky and his wife Natalia Sedova. Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France
The relationship went south, however, with Rivera becoming a celebrity artist with strong leftist beliefs, and Siqueiros being a more doctrinaire strict Stalinist. These were serious differences. The feud came to its most famous moment at a 1935 conference held at Bellas Artes. Siqueiros was onstage expounding his theories of revolutionary art when Rivera — seated in the audience — became enraged, stood up, and, by contemporary accounts, drew a pistol and attempted to shoot him. He was restrained by audience members at the last moment. A formal debate was arranged for the following day; the nominal charge each leveled against the other was that “neither was sufficiently Communist.” Needless to say, the two ended up on different ends of many episodes throughout their careers, including the assassination of Leon Trotsky, for which Siqueiros was imprisoned and Rivera fled the country (though innocent).
León Trotsky’s tomb in the garden of his Coyoácan home.
“It’s My Wall” Diego Rivera, the Rockefeller Center Commission, and the Mural That Crossed the Border
A second story about the murals starts in 1932. In that year the Rockefeller family commissioned Rivera to paint the centerpiece fresco in the lobby of their new RCA Building in Manhattan. Eighteen months later, before the work was finished, the mural was covered with canvas, then chiseled off the wall in the middle of the night, then destroyed entirely. The fight that produced this outcome — over a single added portrait of Vladimir Lenin — ended Rivera’s American career, embarrassed the Rockefellers for decades, and sent the composition south, where Rivera repainted it, enlarged its politics, and installed it where we now see it in Bellas Artes.
Rivera painting on a scaffold in Rockefeller Center. Source: NY World-Telegram & Sun
The New York contract for the mural was drawn up by Todd, Robertson & Todd, the development agents for Rockefeller Center. Rivera would be paid $21,000 for the mural. A detail in the fine print that would matter enormously later was evidently overlooked by Rivera: in exchange for the $21,000, Rockefeller Center Inc. would hold full ownership of the finished mural.
The public trouble began on April 24, 1933, when the New York World-Telegram ran a front-page attack under the headline “Rivera Paints Scenes of Communist Activity for RCA Walls — and Rockefeller, Jr., Foots Bill.” The article accused the mural of being anti-capitalist propaganda paid for by the Rockefellers themselves. It placed the family in a politically untenable position at the height of the Depression.
Diego Rivera at Frida Kahlo’s house Casa Azul in Coyoácan, photographer unknown.
Rivera had signed an agreement that committed him to an approved sketch, but in executing the mural he added a recognizable portrait of Vladimir Lenin. Nelson Rockefeller, then 25 and director of Rockefeller Center, asked Rivera to remove Lenin but the dispute rapidly escalated. The result was that Rivera received his full $21,000 fee, and was then escorted off his working scaffold and locked out of the building. Rivera must have known this was a danger, because he originally specified that the fresco would be painted onto a specially built metal substructure so it could be removed intact if needed. The only problem was that the Rockefeller Center’s management had never allowed that substructure to be installed. So on the night of February 10, 1934, workmen carrying axes chiseled Man at the Crossroads off the wall. Rockefeller Center Inc. issued a two-sentence press release stating that the walls had been re-plastered, resulting in the mural’s demolition. Rivera responded from Mexico: “In destroying my paintings the Rockefellers have committed an act of cultural vandalism,” and added, with characteristic defiance, that the destruction “will advance the cause of the labor revolution.”
Rivera persuaded the Mexican federal government to give him the wall in Bellas Artes where he could repaint the mural. The one we see now is smaller, and painted as a single unified piece rather than as a triptych. Its Spanish title is El hombre controlador del universo (“Man, Controller of the Universe”). The Rockefeller Center contract had insisted that the completed mural “not differ from the approved sketch.” At Bellas Artes, Rivera made sure it did.
El hombre controlador del universo
Wikimedia link to many of the murals, unfortunately most not very well photographed. The Mexican government seems to block access to the official museum site, something I’ve found typical.
I’ve been thinking lately about two seemingly unconnected conversations. The first was with a friend, an immigration lawyer, who said that since Canada passed Law C-3 her business has been overrun with Americans applying for Canadian citizenship (C-3 eliminates the “first-generation limit”). The second conversation was with another friend who is married to a rural-born Quebecer who grew up in a lively farm family. She was observing how his family events were centred around the kitchen, not the living-room or parlor. Meals were served on the kitchen table and after a big feast, like Easter, everyone would push back their chairs to the walls and then the afternoon would be filled with conversation. For me there was a resonance in what she was saying.
In the 1950s, in the hills of central Vermont, I was told I was growing up in “Yankee” country. The word rolled easily off adult tongues, summoning a picture of stone walls, maple sugaring, town meetings, and old leathery New England families who had been there forever. I hadn’t been, but that’s incidental to this story. When I think back, when I really replay what went on in those school corridors, walk into those kitchen-shed entrances, and sit at the kitchen tables in my mind, what I see and hear feels far less purely “Yankee” and much more like a quiet, unacknowledged extension of rural Quebec.
An amusing (and unlikely) pair – a Peugot 504 (vintage 1950s) and a much earlier Ford truck – placeholders for French/Yankee duality – in the apple orchard of an old Vermont hill-farm (photo taken 1972).
Many of my classmates were not Yankees at all. They were the children of Quebecers, families who had moved south over the border in search of work, trading rocky Quebec farm fields and the poor economy for Vermont’s mills and small factories. Their parents still spoke French at home, still had filet crocheted bible scenes on their walls, still crossed themselves instinctively, still held onto Catholic feast days and family rituals, even as their children sat beside me behind desks reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in English.
The geography encouraged a kind of illusion. Compared with Quebec, with its broad St. Lawrence valley and wide fields, most of Vermont is hill country. The farms that still existed in those days were small and coughed up a lot of rocks, more a patchwork of cleared land between forests than the sweeping agricultural vistas one imagines when one says “farm.” Yet many of the people working those small farms, or supplying labor for the mills, had roots that ran straight back to Quebec. On paper, in town histories and news-stories, it might have been called “Yankee Vermont.” On the ground, it was something more complicated: a hybrid of old New England and transplanted rural Quebec, stitched together by rivers, roads, and the hum of machinery.
The mills were the real magnets. They were scattered along Vermont’s rivers, some still visibly tied to the old water power era with raceways and old brick, others already retooled and electrified. In those years, they wove cotton and wool cloth, most of it rough, and a little further south (along the larger rivers) manufactured industrial parts. They were not glamorous places, but the work was steady, and they needed hands. Hands came from the hills and from across the border.
So, in my grade school classroom, many of the desks were filled with kids whose grandparents had been farmers in Quebec, whose parents now worked for businesses in the town or the mills that bordered it. Many of them bore names that had been smoothed into English, as if the crossing of the border had required passing through a kind of linguistic customs warp. A “Leblanc” became “White.” Sometimes the change was deliberate. Other times, it seemed to have been imposed by immigration bureaucrats who simply wrote what they could pronounce. It was as if the name itself had to be pushed into shape to fit the idea of America. I knew the drill.
Late spring and scrounging up the dregs of the woodpile.
Some of my friends embraced that shaping. They practised their English carefully, and worked hard, as I did, to appear fully “American.” When you’re a child, you are acutely aware of the small signals that mark you as different, and you quickly learn to sand down those edges. When we were older we learned to call it racism. Others, though, held on to more of their ancestral life. They disappeared from play on certain feast days, learned their catechism, and later, in adolescence, you might see them slipping off to the large Catholic church that we never entered. Their houses felt different when you stepped inside: religious images on the walls, perhaps a rosary hanging from a nail, and often a sense that English was something you spoke for the outside world, not in the kitchen.
Coming back to the kitchen and my friend’s description of her husband’s family gatherings. To me it always felt like the kitchen was the next room after the shed. First you went through the shed, a kind of transition area that had the sweet smell of split drying wood, moist earth, and wet wool. Then the was the warm kitchen, with a stove crackling and the smell of food being cooked.
But what really registered with me was pushing the chairs back, making a ring of people rather than a scattered group. I always liked being there. At the time, I understood those families as simply “farm families,” (though that wasn’t the way my parents described them). Only later did I understand how many of them were not just “country people,” but Quebecois by origin, bringing with them patterns of family life shaped north of the border.
Of course, we did not have the language of “Franco-Americans” or “diaspora” for this; the word that floated around instead was “Frenchies,” often used with a derisive and mean edge. It was the sort of racist nickname that passed as normal in those days. The implication was that the “real” Vermonters, the real Americans (which I felt excluded from too), were the Yankees, and the “Frenchies” were a kind of tolerated, but alien, presence. Yet, in reality, Quebec immigrants made up a large portion of the local population – fifteen to twenty-five percent, by some estimates – and their influence seeped into the “Yankee” culture.
As a child, I absorbed both the prejudice and the intimacy without fully understanding either. I heard the jokes and the slurs, but I also knew that the kid sitting next to me with a “funny name” (like mine!) was the one I skied with after school, or the one whose mother handed me a plate of food when I was a visitor. The contradiction was simply part of the air we breathed. We were caught between the received story – Vermont as a bastion of old Yankee stock – and the lived reality of a mixed, evolving community where Quebec was a silent but important part of the mix.
Lately, hearing about law C‑3 and how it has opened the door for Americans with a Canadian parent or grandparent (or even further back) to claim Canadian citizenship, I find myself thinking about those classmates and their families. Many of them, I suspect, would now qualify to move back up here with little trouble. What strikes me is how, in the 1950s, the direction of movement was almost entirely one way: people came from Quebec to Vermont to work, to be American, to give their children a future “down south.” The border itself felt more like a one-way bridge than a shared threshold. Now, that’s changed.
With C‑3, the current is running the other way. Americans are trying to reclaim or confirm a Canadian identity they only vaguely knew they had before, or even tried to conceal. Underneath the legal arguments – who qualifies, what documents are needed, how far back descent can run – I sense an echo from my childhood days. The law is new, but the story is old: families shifting across the invisible line that cuts through the hills and fields, children caught between languages and loyalties, names bending to fit whichever side of the border they find themselves on.
For me I’m much more aware now that the most striking realization is not just that Vermont in the 1950s was more French Canadian than anyone wanted to admit, but that the ways people tried to appear “American” were often layered on top of habits and values that remained stubbornly, quietly Quebecois. The kitchen as the centre of family life. The chairs pushed back to make room for talk. The insistence on gathering everyone around a table, not just for the meal, but for the hours afterwards, when stories and teasing and small arguments stitched a family and friends together.
In retrospect, that gesture of pushing back the chairs feels almost like a metaphor for the whole period. Publicly, the chairs of identity were lined up neatly: Yankee, American, English-speaking. Privately, inside the kitchens, they were rearranged, pushed back to the walls, making space for another way of being together – more communal, more rooted in the rhythms of Quebec than the official story would allow. I grew up in that in-between space, in some ways wanting to believe I was part of “Yankee Vermont” while actually feeling more comfortable sitting in kitchens surrounded by people whose lives had been shaped by the culture of where is my home now.
Now, as Americans look north for citizenship rights and legal recognition, I find myself looking back instead – back to those kitchens and classrooms full of children with anglicized names and hidden bilingual homes. The border that seemed so definitive on maps was far more porous than we were taught. We didn’t then have the words or the awareness to describe it.
Return to Damascusis my new book of photographs, available for order, that preserves fleeting impressions and the spirit of a place through the lens. Accompanied by brief reflections and memories, the photographs offer a tribute to the place and its people, focusing on enduring character and the subtle interplay of light, architecture, and tradition. Return to Damascus is a quiet celebration of observation and memory, inviting viewers to participate.
How Many Roads? is a book of photographs by Jonathan Sa'adah, available for order, offering an unglossy but deeply human view of the period from 1968 to 1975 in richly detailed, observant images that have poignant resonance with the present. Ninety-one sepia photographs reproduced with an introduction by Teju Cole, essays by Beth Adams, Hoyt Alverson, and Steven Tozer, and a preface by the photographer.
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