Marcello Di Cintio’s books include Walls: Travels Along the Barricades, which won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing and the City of Calgary W. O. Mitchell Book Prize, Pay No Heed to the Rockets: Palestine in the Present Tense—also a W. O. Mitchell Prize winner—and Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers. He was also the editor of 2024’s Best Canadian Essays. Di Cintio’s magazine writing has appeared in publications such as The International New York Times, The Walrus, Canadian Geographic and Afar. Di Cintio has served as a writer-in-residence at the Calgary Public Library, the University of Calgary, and the Palestine Writing Workshop.
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.” Workers complained of working and living conditions that deprived them of their integrity, 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, 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.
“With humility, respect, and great sensitivity, he seeks out writers, people skilled at telling stories, and asks them to narrate their own situations. The result is a document that captures not only the manifold sorrows and injustices of Palestinian life but something of its beauty, its joys, and its yearning.” —Ben Ehrenreich (The Way to the Spring)
Taking the long route through the West Bank, into Jerusalem, across Israel, and finally into Gaza, Marcello Di Cintio meets with Palestinian poets, authors, librarians, and booksellers to learn about Palestine through their eyes. Pay No Heed to the Rockets offers a look at life in contemporary Palestine through the lens of its literary culture, one that begins with art rather than with war.
In 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 met—yet 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, Driven seeks 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 aren’t 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 Dylan’s lyrics, Di Cintio’s subjects share the passions and triumphs that drive them.
Like the people encountered in its pages, Driven is 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, it’s a compassionate and joyful tribute to the men and women who take us where we want to go.
Starring Marcello Di Cintio, Linden MacIntyre & Saeed Teebi. Hosted by Christina Frangou
In the spirit of reconciliation, we acknowledge that we live, work and play on the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika, Kainai, Piikani), the Tsuut’ina, the Iyarhe Nakoda Nations, the Otipemisiwak Métis Government of the Métis Nation within Alberta District 6, and all people who make their homes in the Treaty 7 region of Southern Alberta.
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