While They Fought Fascists in the East, We Were Surviving in the West

 While They Fought Fascists in the East, We Were Surviving in the West

By Tina Winterlik aka Zipolita

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Have you heard of the Christie Pits Riot?

In 1933, in Toronto, Jewish and Italian youth stood up to local fascists waving swastikas during a baseball game. Charlie Angus recently wrote about it, calling it “Canada’s first battle with fascists.” And it was — a fierce, public stand against hate.

But I live in British Columbia. And my family wasn’t in the headlines — we were surviving in the shadows.

That same year, 1933, my mother was just 3 years old, living in Vancouver. Her family struggled so badly, she sometimes had to go next door to ask for bread. There was no money, no support — just a garden, hard work, and the hope that someone might share.

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🌿 A Family Story Rooted in the Land and Sea

My roots go back far — deep into the land and across oceans:

• In the late 1800s, my Portuguese (Azores) great-great-grandfather married my Songhees great-great-grandmother.
• Their son married a Kalapuya-Iroquois-French Canadian Indigenous woman.
• That union brought forth my grandfather — who later married a Swedish woman, and together, they built a home on Ross Street & 51st in Vancouver.
• My grandfather, dark-skinned with beautiful full lips and a glass eye, worked aboard ships like the Empress of Russia, sailing to Japan and beyond.

I always wondered why he left. Was it racism? No work? Or something else no one dared speak of?

We were a family of survivors, of mixed heritage and many nations, trying to belong in a country that often told us we didn’t.

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🔥 Racism Was Here Too

While Toronto battled fascists in a ballpark, Vancouver was already steeped in racism:

• Chinese, Japanese, and South Asian Canadians were excluded, segregated, and harassed.
• Indigenous children, like my ancestors, were being forced into residential schools, stripped of language, ceremony, and family.
• White-only signs, land restrictions, and wage discrimination were normal.
• The 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act was still in effect. The Komagata Maru tragedy was only 19 years earlier.
• People like my grandfather, who didn’t look white, often couldn’t get jobs — no matter how hard they tried.

Even gardening — something my Swedish grandmother loved deeply — was an act of defiance. Growing food, growing beauty, when everything around said: you don’t belong.

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💔 The Silence That Followed

No one ever told me how my grandfather lost his eye.
Or how my grandmother managed with so little.
Or what it meant to be a dark-skinned man married to a white woman, raising mixed children in a racist city.

But I can feel it in the silences.

And in the strength that runs through me.

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✊ We Were All Fighting — Just in Different Ways

Christie Pits was loud. Public. Remembered.

But not all resistance looks like a riot.

Some of it looks like:

• Asking for bread and still keeping your dignity.
• Marrying across racial lines, even when society condemned it.
• Sailing into dangerous waters just to feed your family.
• Planting a garden, even when your hands are tired and your heart is heavy.

We were surviving.
And that is its own form of defiance.

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🕊️ Let’s Remember All the Stories

As Charlie Angus reminds us, we must remember the battles we fought — and those we’re still fighting.

But let’s also remember the ones that never made the papers.

Because history isn’t just made by the loudest riots — it’s made by the quiet survivors, the mothers with gardens, the children asking for bread.

We were here too.

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© 2025 Tina Winterlik aka Zipolita
Blog: tinawinterlik.blogspot.com
Instagram: @zipolita
Twitter/X: @zipolita
Online CV: zipolitazcv.blogspot.com