Bøker av Marcello Di Cintio

A series of profiles of foreign workers illuminates the precarity of global systems of migrant labor and the vulnerability of their most disenfranchised agents.In 2023, United Nations Special Rapporteur Tomoyo Obokata spent two weeks in Canada, meeting with representatives from federal and provincial governments and human rights commissions, trade unions, civil society organizations, and academics—as well as migrants working in agriculture, caregiving, food processing, and sex work. His conclusion: the country’s Temporary Foreign Worker program is “a breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery.” “I am deeply disturbed by the accounts of exploitation and abuse shared with me by migrant workers,” Obotaka said in a statement. Workers complained of excessive hours and unpaid overtime; of being forced to perform dangerous tasks or ones not specified in their contracts; of being denied access to health care, language courses, and other social services; of being physically abused, intimidated, sexually harassed; of the overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions that deprived them of their privacy and dignity. In response, some farm owners and their advocates, angry at Obokata’s comparison to slavery, defended the program, citing long standing relationships with workers who returned to their operations year after year. “If the program is so damned bad,” one farmer advocate asked, “why do these guys keep coming back?”In Precarious: the Secret Lives of Migrant Workers, Marcello Di Cintio seeks the answers to both the question and illuminates the charges that compelled it, researching the history of Canada’s migrant labour program and speaking with migrant workers across industries and across the country to understand who, in this global elaborate enterprise, stands to gain, who to lose, and how a system that depends on the vulnerability of its most disenfranchised actors can—or can’t—become more just.

Selected by editor Marcello Di Cintio, the 2024 edition of Best Canadian Essays showcases the best Canadian nonfiction writing published in 2022. Featuring:Lyndsie Bourgon ¿ Nicole Boyce ¿ Robert Colman ¿ Daniel Allen Cox ¿ Acadia Currah ¿ Sadiqa de Meijer ¿ Gabrielle Drolet ¿ Hamed Esmaeilion ¿ Kate Gies ¿ David Huebert ¿ Jenny Hwang ¿ Fiona Tinwei Lam ¿ Kyo Maclear ¿ Sandy Pool

Shortlisted for the Bressani Literary Prize AGlobe and MailBook of the Year ACBC BooksBest Canadian Nonfiction of 2021In conversations with drivers ranging from veterans of foreign wars to Indigenous women protecting one another, Di Cintio explores the borderland of the North American taxi.The taxi, writes Marcello Di Cintio, is a border. Occupying the space between public and private, a cab brings together people who might otherwise never have metyet most of us sit in the back and stare at our phones. Nowhere else do people occupy such intimate quarters and share so little. In a series of interviews with drivers, their backgrounds ranging from the Iraqi National Guard, to the Westboro Baptist Church, to an arranged marriage that left one woman stranded in a foreign country with nothing but a suitcase,Drivenseeks out those missed conversations, revealing the unknown stories that surround us.Travelling across borders of all kinds, from battlefields and occupied lands to midnight fares and Tim Hortons parking lots, Di Cintio chronicles the many journeys each driver made merely for the privilege to turn on their rooflight. Yet these lives arent defined by tragedy or frustration but by ingenuity and generosity, hope and indomitable hard work. From night school and sixteen-hour shifts to schemes for athletic careers and the secret Shakespeare of Dylans lyrics, Di Cintios subjects share the passions and triumphs that drive them.Like the people encountered in its pages,Drivenis an unexpected delight, and that most wondrous of all things: a book that will change the way you see the world around you. A paean to the power of personality and perseverance, its a compassionate and joyful tribute to the men and women who take us where we want to go.

An evocative blend of travel writing, politics and literature, offers a window into the contemporary Palestinian literary scene.