Young, Well-Educated, and Adaptable

Between 1973 and 1978, six thousand Chileans leftists took refuge in central Canada after the Pinochet coup d’état. Once resettled at the northern extreme of the Americas, these political exiles had to find ways of coping with an abrupt and violent separation from their homeland that had deep material and emotional repercussions. In Young, Well-Educated, and Adaptable, Francis Peddie documents the experiences of twenty-one Chileans as they navigate their newfound identity as exiles. Peddie also considers how the admission of people from the wrong side of the Cold War ideological divide had an effect on Canadian immigration and refugee policy, establishing a precedent for the admission of political exiles over the decades that followed.