Le Carrefour: Connecting French-Speaking Populations in Vacationland
Jessamine Irwin, French professor and director of Le Carrefour
by Brian Alcamo
“Nobody knows about French in Maine, and nobody knows about all of the newcomers that have been arriving in the past few years,” Jessamine Irwin tells me over a Friday morning Zoom call. “It’s a lot of new information in thirty-two minutes.”
I recently sat down with French professor-turned-documentarian Jessamine Irwin to learn more about her first film, Le Carrefour (The Intersection). Why is it called the Intersection? The film explores “the intersection of francophone immigrant experiences in Maine.” The immigrant experiences which Ms. Irwin is referring to are those of white, older French speaking Mainers and those younger black French speaking population that has been steadily arriving since the mid 2010s. The film’s goal, she says, is to “serve as a catalyst to create a space for conversation surrounding immigration.” Some of these conversations, she hopes, will happen in French classrooms.
Jessamine, first and foremost, is a French educator. She cares about the plus-que-parfait, proper pronunciation of the French “R,” and pain au chocolat. While university French departments and other institutions that offer French classes consistently advertise French as a global language with over 250 million speakers, (making it the fifth most spoken language in the world!) courses typically only offer linguistic and cultural insights into one country: France.
Maine may not be the first place on the list of “French-speaking places that aren’t France” (you may be more inclined to think of Louisiana for that), but the East-Coast’s northernmost state has historically been a stronghold of the French language in the USA. Le Carrefour not only gives us insight into the present day immigrant experience in Maine, but also takes us through the history of immigration in French, answering many people’s (including protagonist Trésor’s) big question: why is there French in Maine to begin with?
Tresor, one of the film’s main subjects.
Cécile, another main focus of the film.
The journey of French into Maine began with the migration of Acadians into the state during Le Grand Derangement. This period of time, known as “The Great Upheaval,” in the mid 1700s, was an ethnic cleansing attempt imposed by the British after they took control of New France (present day Canada). Acadians lived off the land and worked with the woods, producing commodities like maple syrup and snowshoes. To this day, many of them are very tied to the forest. Acadian settlements in Maine are positioned extremely close to the Canadian/American border. Some of their relatives moved down south to Louisiana, particularly New Orleans. Their southern eponym slowly underwent a linguistic metamorphosis to become a word (and cuisine) we all know and love today, Cajun.
Back up north, though, a wide-reaching underground French speaking population has been living there since the dawn of the United States, and Jessamine Irwin wants you to know about it. Le Carrefour stars Tresor and Cecile. Tresor came to the USA from the Democratic Republic of Congo, with a pitstop in Brazil. He speaks French, Portuguese, Lingala, Tshiluba, and some English. He is well educated, having studied pedagogy in his home country and Performing Arts in Brazil. Beyond his official education, though, Tresor is also filled with more worldly knowledge than most people. Before coming to the US, he lived in Brazil. He says that moving to another country is “like being born again.” Logistically speaking, this unfortunately meant that Tresor’s degrees and work experience abroad aren’t recognized in the USA. Despite being highly educated, he works night shifts in a warehouse in Maine. Hardship like this, including having to learn new languages, adapt to a new environment and bureaucracy, and deal with the trauma that comes with displacement, is a common thread among immigrants and history, Jessamine says, repeats itself.
This repetition, she says, is playing out right now in Maine, tucked away in the far northeast corner of the country. Cécile, the film’s other protagonist, is aware of this past immigrant experience. She is part of Maine’s large Franco-American community, and there was a lot of shame in Cecile's generation for identifying as such. “Many people might understand Franco-American as an American who speaks French,” Jessamine specifies, “but in New England the term takes on a more specific definition.” Not to be confused with Acadians who moved to Maine before the mills, Franco-Americans are of French Canadian descent, either an immigrant themselves or a descendant of an immigrant who moved to Maine from Canada to work in the mills during the Industrial Revolution between the 1850s and the 1930s. Cécile and others faced intense shaming from the English-speaking public, and were discouraged from speaking their language and from worshipping Catholically. Franco-Americans were even targeted by one of the largest KKK chapters in the US. “If we avoid trying to make people feel like they’re ‘Not American Enough’ we can all benefit from the diversity, more easily learn from each other, give people a voice, give power to people, and break the generational cycle of assimilation trauma.”
A bridge in the middle of Lewiston, ME
Mainers are very aware of people who did not grow up in Maine. They even have a phrase for it: “coming from away.” “To me,” Jessamine explains, “‘Coming from away’ is a very nonmalicious way that Mainers describe outsiders. People care about the lived experiences of others. “Maine,” she continues, “is not ethnically diverse. It’s very white, with those white people typically having Irish and/or French Canadian heritage.” There’s certainly lots of racism to deal with in the state. This racism follows economic lines and gets more rampant up north, away from Portland, Maine’s largest city (of 67,000 people). “People want to find someone to blame for their own hardship.”
Some people in Maine are welcoming the newcomers with open arms. In 2019 with the first big wave of asylum seekers, the former mayor of Portland, turned the Expo Center into makeshift housing, welcoming the asylum seekers and making them feel like they belonged, helping them to not feel othered. “It’s dangerous to not make people feel welcome,” Jessamine says. “There’s been displacement forever, and most Americans are lucky to have not experienced it.” Maine has an aging population. Like the countries where the immigrants are coming from, the state is undergoing its own Brain Drain. However, Jessamine says, “it’s practically being gifted these super capable young people, and even has some of the linguistic infrastructure required to welcome these newcomers.” Jessamine and Tresor want people to understand that educated people are coming. Trésor believes that all these immigrants want to do is pursue their passions and move forward with the people of Maine. In the 1970s, there were 147,000 French speakers living in the state, and that number has dwindled since. Newcomers are not only breathing new life into Maine’s economy, but its French-speaking population as well. But not even all Mainers know about their own state’s Francophone backbone.
The Gendron Franco Center, a historic stronghold of Francophone culture in Maine
Jessamine, luckily, grew up aware of all of the French being spoken betwixt and between Maine’s maple trees. Jessamine’s mother grew up in Madawaska, a town right on the border of Canada’s French-speaking province of New Brunswick. Her mom grew up hearing French on the playground everyday at school, and this exposure led to her pursuit of French, which she studied at the University of Maine in Orono and turned into a career while working at the school’s Franco-American Center. Perhaps interest in the French language is passed down matrilineally, because Jessamine followed in her mother’s footsteps, beginning her formal French studies in high school.
Unfortunately, the filmmaker didn’t get to formally learn about the French speakers in her home state that she knew existed during those early years of apprentissage. “In my French classes before the university level, I never came into contact with Franco-American representations.” With the exception of one Canadian teacher who provided some insight into Canadian French and cultural traditions, most of her school books were Euro-centric.
Jessamine finally began to learn about the French language in her neck of the (literal) woods when she began studying at the University of Maine, her mom’s alma mater. Learning French, or any foreign language for that matter, tends to unlock opportunities, and Jessamine was able to study abroad in France during her time in college. “When I went to Paris for the first time, it was like my eyes opened,” she says. “People had no clue what Maine was, and made fun of North American French. At first, I kind of embraced it.” Due to societal pressures, Mrs. Irwin was embracing was the homogenous view that many French students and educators have of the French language and culture. Through her film, she wants to challenge those ideas and provide a resource to help bring the diversity of the French speaking world into the classroom.
Vocabulary For Your Next Discussion About Immigration En Français
Les frontières - Borders
L’identité culturelle - Cultural identity
Locuteur natif - Native speaker
La barrière de la langue - Language barrier
Une dictature - A dictatorship
Lewiston, the center of Maine’s Franco American population, is what many Mainers would describe as a “die hard mill-town,” a working class town filled with Franco Americans. It was founded at the beginning of the industrial revolution, and many immigrants from Quebec fondly remember taking the train down to the Grand Trunk Railroad station. The town features remnants of “Little Canada,” which used to be tenement housing built in rapid succession for the mill workers who were moving in droves. “The main street is easily identifiable, with the Continental Mill coming, then Little Canada, and then the Franco Center,” Jessamine says. In a course that she created at NYU, Jessamine creates that experience for her students on a week-long trip to the french-speaking parts of Maine. But in a less curated setting during her summer of shooting footage in Maine, Jessamine could still speak French every day.
Shooting with a bilingual team provided a few language-barrier challenges. Cecile is fully bilingual, Tresor is still working on his English. Jessamine’s co-director, Daniel Quintanilla could understand French, which helped for some on-set shooting snafus, since most of the film is in French and only two team members could decide whether enough footage was shot. Where her teammate’s knowledge of French was even more crucial, Jessamine said, was during the editing process. It turns out that screens and keyboards provide none of the social cues or body language to supplement spoken word.
If you’re wondering whether you can strike up a conversation in French with someone, the short answer is “yes.” Walking around Lewiston on a busy day (when it’s not freezing cold out), you can hear French in parks, spoken between friends and families old and young. You’re not considered a nuisance for trying to speak French, either. It’s a very “Maine” thing to acknowledge a passerby on the street. To wrap up our discussion, Jessamine recounted the story of when Cecile was asked “How can we be more welcoming to immigrants?” at a recent screening Q and A. Smiling, Jessamine recalled that Cecile advised people to simply “look people in the eyes and say ‘bonjour.’”
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