Growing up, I went to Dante Elementary School in Saint-Leonard, a suburb in the east-end of Montreal. Dante is part of the English Montreal School Board. Dante's neighbour was and still is École Lambert-Closse, under the Commission scolaire de la Pointe-de-l'Île, its francophone counterpart in this area. We were separated by a thick yellow line running the length of the playground. Lunch monitors would patrol this area at morning and lunch recess making sure we didn't cross to the other side. Often, kids would get into fights. I still remember the feeling of sneaking across, usually on a dare, or with friends to play with the equipment our side of the playground didn't have, hoping to not get caught.

We weren't aware of the implications of this seemingly Anglo-Franco meeting point, where confrontations so often happened. We didn't know the history. We didn't know that the fact that we spoke primarily English and they spoke primarily French, spoke to a long colonial history that began long before our grandparents or parents landed at the ports of Halifax or Trudeau airport. We weren't yet aware of our role in that colonial history. We weren't yet aware of the implications of the accepted textbook narratives of the place we inhabited. We didn't know why we were on separate sides of the yellow line.

The six Italo-Canadian narrators whose stories are the backbone of this project were rejected from French schools between 1950 and 1977, directly or indirectly, for a variety of reasons. but what do their stories have to do with mine? Historians emphasize that post-WWII immigrants in Montreal, including Italians, chose English schools for their kids because it was regarded as the “language of opportunity.” The story of their rejections, then, became a myth, and was even forgotten as they became part of the “English speaking community.” Thirty years after the narrators’ stories, my classmates and I were placed firmly on the “English” side of the yellow line. Even though many of us didn’t learn to speak English until we started school. What are the stories beyond and between the bilingual and bicultural divide? How can oral historians write histories alongside our narrators that acknowledge, but also complicate their yellow lines? This is not an anglophone vs. francophone story. Yet, like many in Québec, it’s become ‘easy’ to tell it that way. This continues to make possible the erasure and dismissal of individual and collective stories of exclusion, rejection, and discrimination that do not easily fit into this "comfortable" categorization. My main aim is to tell this history - one of language legislation, politics, education, immigration - without resorting to the idea that our communities and neighbours must be easily categorized into "EN" and "FR". That there are in-betweens, and these are valid, not threatening, and important to our city and province.

This project aims to look forward to a future we must face critically and differently. It looks to the yellow lines - the places of confrontation, but also of meeting - that linger in the pavement today.