History_of_the_Franco-Americans_in_Holyoke,_Massachusetts

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries Holyoke saw an influx of Franco-Americans (French: les Holyokais franco-américains, lit. "the French-American Holyokians"), predominantly French-Canadians, who immigrated to Massachusetts to work in the city's growing textile and paper mills. By 1900, 1 in 3 people in Holyoke were of French-Canadian descent, and a 1913 survey of French Americans in the United States found Holyoke, along with other Massachusetts cities, to have a larger community of French or French-Canadian born residents than those of New Orleans or Chicago at that time. Initially faced with discrimination for the use of their labor by mill owners to undermine unionization, as well as for their creation of separate French institutions as part of the La Survivance movement, this demographic quickly gained representation in the city's development and civic institutions. Holyoke was at one time a cultural hub for French-Canadian Americans; the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society of America was first organized in the city in 1899, along with a number of other institutions, including theater and drama societies from which famed vaudevillian Eva Tanguay was first discovered, and regular publications, with its largest French weekly newspaper, La Justice, published from 1904 to 1964. The city was also home to author Jacques Ducharme, whose 1943 book The Shadows of the Trees, published by Harper, was one of the first non-fiction English accounts of New England's French and French-Canadian diaspora.A changing industrial economy, Americanization, and emigration to the suburbs led to demographic decline, and by 1990 this population had dropped to about 16% of the population, and as of the 2010 US Census this demographic represented less than 10% of residents. In contrast, the demographic's suburbanization is reflected in 2010 Census figures as well, as Hampden County respondents who identified as French (12.7%) or French Canadian (5.5%) represented 18.2% of the population, the county's largest group by ancestry were the two taken as a whole. In 2015, the American Community Survey estimated less than 1 percent of all residents of Holyoke spoke some form of French or French Creole.