Race, Exclusion, and Archival Silences in the Seasonal Migration of Tobacco Workers from the Southern United States to Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the role of race in structuring the movement of seasonal tobacco workers from the Southern United States to Ontario from the 1920s to the 1960s. Over this period, tens of thousands of southern migrant workers of varying skill levels travelled to Ontario to take up jobs in all aspects of tobacco production. Participation in the movement was limited exclusively to white workers until 1966, when it was integrated at the behest of American officials fearful of contravening the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Methodologically, the article follows Michel-Rolph Trouillot and is an exercise in uncovering silences in the archive, as civil servants in both countries and employer representatives in Ontario were extremely hesitant about mentioning the movement’s racial character on record. Beyond methodology, the findings presented contribute to developing a better understanding of the uneven nature of the “deracialization” of Canada’s immigration policies in the 1960s and to charting more of Canada’s role in the construction and maintenance of transnational systems of white supremacy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".