Reddit mentions of Legacy: How French Canadians Shaped North America

>The most bilingual place in Canada and maybe one or the most in NA is the Montréal region.

I love Quebec, but there are millions more bilingual Spanish-English speakers in California than there are bilingual French-English people in Montreal.

There are more bilingual people in California than the entire population of Quebec, bilingual or otherwise.

>The United States has a strange relationship to language rights. Although the federal government has no official language, in recent decades individual states—California included—have adopted English as an official language, largely in response to a puzzling English-only movement. But, of course, English is not the only significant American language. One-third of California’s residents speak Spanish at home.

https://www.thenation.com/article/california-needs-take-bilingualism-seriously/

There are some interesting shared history between California and Quebec:

>Prudent Beaudry served as the 13th mayor of Los Angeles, California, from 1874 to 1876. A native of Quebec, he was the second French Canadian and third French American mayor of Los Angeles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prudent_Beaudry

>Today, Los Angeles is the undisputed megacity of California, but in 1852 L.A. had a population of only about five thousand people, way fewer than San Francisco’s 36,151. And at least some of L.A.’s growth into what it is today is credited to a former French Canadian mayor.
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>Prudent Beaudry was mayor of Los Angeles from 1876-1878. I learned about him and his brothers from Gaétan Frigon’s chapter in Legacy: How French Canadians Shaped North America. The Beaudry bros were born outside Montreal. When Prudent Beaudry was 32, he decided to follow his brother Victor to San Francisco, where, Frigon writes, the two Canadian business men set up a business selling — and this is not a joke — syrup and ice.
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>Two years later in 1852, Beaudry moved to the small town of Los Angeles which counted six hundred French speakers among its population of around five thousand. He began to build his fortune in real estate, buying up and developing “barren” land just north of downtown L.A., including what today are the neighbourhoods of Bunker Hill and Angelino Heights.
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>“The subdivisions would be worthless, though,” explains Frigon, “unless water could be conveyed to them.” So next he needed to create the Los Angeles City Water Company, which pumped water to his new “upscale residential neighbourhoods.” To design the villas, he turned to “an engineer from the first graduating class of Montreal’s École Polytechnique.”
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>Twenty four years after he first moved to L.A., in 1876, Beaudry was elected mayor. By at least one account, he was a pivotal one:

https://acresofsnow.ca/the-french-canadian-mayor-of-los-angeles/

I haven't read it yet, but I have heard good things:

Legacy: How French Canadians Shaped North America