“Pathways Strewn with Ocean Waves and Thorns”: Grassroots Multiculturalism and the Trojan Horse Coffeehouse in 1970s Toronto

In 1972, as Toronto’s cultural landscape was being reshaped by postwar immigration and countercultural movements, poet Gwendolyn MacEwen and musician Nikos Tsingos opened the Trojan Horse at 179 Danforth Avenue. This boîte became an unexpected hub where political exiles, artists, and activists forged connections across cultural boundaries. Drawing on oral histories, archival materials, and newspaper accounts, this article traces the Trojan Horse’s remarkable history through three phases: its founding as a space of cultural dialogue, its evolution into both a sanctuary for political refugees and a classroom for intercultural exchange, and its emergence as a creative studio where the Greek neo kyma harmonized with the Chilean nueva canción . The study reveals how the Trojan Horse fostered a form of multiculturalism that emerged not through government-led initiatives or curated cultural spectacles but through shared grassroots creativity and political commitment. This grassroots multiculturalism also reproduced gendered hierarchies and asymmetries of symbolic capital familiar from the broader left, revealing that solidarity built from below carried its own structures of exclusion.