Canadian broadcasting underwent a period of transition following the Second World War. Government officials attempted to restructure radio to serve as an instrument for assimilation which would assist new Canadians in understanding Canadian culture and customs. In 1966, CHIN Radio AM 1540 was formed in Toronto by Johnny Lombardi. It became Ontario’s first foreign-language radio station. This study asserts that CHIN Radio provided its listeners an opportunity to negotiate their ethnicity on a daily basis, while it simultaneously worked to assist new Canadians to learn about Canadian culture and customs. These listeners must be viewed as active protagonists, who actively took advantage of the services and entertainment CHIN provided.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Amatiello, M., (2025), "CHIN Radio and its Listeners: A Negotiation in the Post-War Commerce of Ethnicity", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

  Copy Citation | Export metadata as... | JSON | CSV | RO-Crate | BibTex | EndNote

1. Quaderni d'italianistica

Original publication: Amatiello, Michele. "CHIN Radio and its Listeners: A Negotiation in the Post-War Commerce of Ethnicity." Quaderni d'italianistica 33 (1): 2012. 61-80. DOI: 10.33137/q.i..v33i1.17088. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Quaderni d'italianistica. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Quaderni d'italianistica under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.