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In conjunction with the Franco American Center at the University of Maine, I will in conversation with David Vermette, author of A Distinct Alien Race.

Franco American communities constitute a large percentage of the population of Maine and the Northeast region. It is the mission of  the University’s Franco American Programs to serve these communities while recognizing that cultural patterns do not stop at national borders.  Franco American Programs includes the Franco American Centre as well as Franco American Studies.

The primary goal of the Franco American Centre is to support and enhance the Franco American communities of Maine. The Centre looks to disseminate the richness of Franco history, language, and culture, as well as to bridge Franco Americans both to the University campus and to other peoples of the region.

The primary goal of Franco American Studies is to broaden the canon of knowledge on Franco American peoples, culture, and literature. It encourages and facilitates interdisciplinary research, faculty engagement, and student exploration.

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David Vermette is a researcher and writer who studies the history and identity of the descendants of French North America. Vermette is a third generation Franco-American from Massachusetts and the author of A Distinct Alien Race: The Untold Story of Franco-Americans: Industrialization, Immigration, Religious Strife (2018)

About A Distinct Alien Race: In the later 19th century, French-Canadian Roman Catholic immigrants from Quebec were deemed a threat to the United States, potential terrorists in service of the Pope. Books and newspapers floated the conspiracy theory that the immigrants seeking work in New England's burgeoning textile industry were actually plotting to annex parts of the United States to a newly independent Quebec. Vermette’s groundbreaking study sets this neglected and poignant tale in the broader context of North American history. He traces individuals and families, from the textile barons who created a new industry to the poor farmers and laborers of Quebec who crowded into the mills in the post-Civil War period. Vermette discusses the murky reception these cross-border immigrants met in the USA, including dehumanizing conditions in mill towns and early-20th-century campaigns led by the Ku Klux Klan and the Eugenics movement. Vermette also discusses what occurred when the textile industry moved to the Deep South and brings the story of emigrants up to the present day. Vermette shows how this little-known episode in U.S. history prefigures events as recent as yesterday’s news. His well documented narrative touches on the issues of cross-border immigration; the Nativists fear of the Other; the rise and fall of manufacturing in the U.S.; and the construction of race and ethnicity.