Preliminary Programme

Inspired by the work of Jeffrey Lesser and Roberto Da Matta, I explore how Eastern European Gypsies define their place within the Brazilian national identity in relation to other European and non-European immigrants. I examine how they have lobbied for political support, visibility and citizenship rights. Brazilian Romanies perceive themselves as a distinct people, and continue to hold an ethnic identity based on language (Romanes), kinship and clan ties inside and outside Brazil, myths, values, beliefs and symbols.
Acculturation has been an ambiguous process for the Gypsies. They continue to be treated with a high degree of undesirability and exclusion by Brazilian society, despite their presence in the country since the sixteenth century and their continuous migration to Brazil. Yet, at the same time, Gypsies retain an aura of freedom and mysticism in the Brazilian cultural imaginary that is present in Brazilian literature, soap operas, and even in Umbanda (Afro-Brazilian) religious practices. In this sense, Gypsy immigrants and their descendants not only adapted to Brazilian culture, they greatly influenced it, especially during the past seven decades.
By focusing on Brazil’s most important Gypsy leader’s life trajectory, I show how Mirian Stanescon has been able to promote Gypsy culture, identity and citizenship rights. Stanescon’s personal testimony, presented through oral interviews conducted in 2007, reveals important details on Romani migration to Brazil, and on discrimination against Romanies. Most importantly, it shows how, despite her status as a woman in a highly patriarchal ethnic community and host society, she managed to strengthen her power and authority inside her own ethnic group, represent and promote Gypsy identity in Brazil and play a vital role in the incorporation of the National Gypsy Day into the Brazilian calendar of official events on 2006. (Show less)

This paper analyses how and why Polish- Canadian community leaders in Montreal and Toronto constructed and maintained a particularly narrow, gendered ethnic identity in their publications. Six major moments since 1945 challenged their notions of hyphenated identity: the integration of displaced persons from WWII; the rise of Quebec nationalism and the 1960s generation; the evolution of multiculturalism as state policy; Solidarnosc in Poland; and the collapse of communism. These historical contexts were crucial. They helped to modify the public definition of “Polish Canadian”, as the ebb and flow of Polishness and Canadianness affected the way in which first, second and third generations saw themselves. Early in the Cold War, Polishness in displaced persons, other immigrants, and their children diminished rather quickly. During the evolution and culmination of multiculturalism during the 1960s and 1970s, Canadianness rose simultaneously with a reinvigorated Polishness, despite the sharp generational divide of these years. In the 1980s, Polishness was reawakened as support for Solidarnosc waxed. The degree of ethnicity leaders advocated depended more upon social, cultural, and political events in Canada and Poland than simply time spent in Canada.
Thus, post-WWII Polish Canadian identity promoted by leaders did not develop in the ways social scientists have generalized or in the manner historians have described for other groups. Even the best linear assimilation models do not apply, despite allowing for forward and backward movement. Spikes in Polishness or Canadianness, the conflict between the second and first generations, whiteness, and of course back migration reveal that events in the home or host country could cause quantum leaps in either or both directions, within or even off the scale. Moreover, as Ewa Morawska has noted, discussions of ethnicity have taken place largely without regard to the effects of gender. This paper shows that neither sociologists nor historians have fully captured the complexity of ethnic identity as it is invented and maintained in specific historical contexts over time.
In her 1994 article “In Defence of the Assimilation Model”, Morawska reconsiders the assimilation model that has largely been replaced in the US by the ethnicization model. Using her definitions and those of the scholars she cites, neither approach captures the complexity of Polish Canadian identity when it is examined over the entire post-WWII period. The assimilation model applies to Polish immigrants from the 1940s to the 1960s; the ethnicization model applies during and after the generational changes and the rise of multiculturalism; neither model applies to the 1980s Solidarność era, nor the post-1990 period. The Canadian environment was crucial for the first and second periods, but was not important for the third and only somewhat important for the fourth. Concern for a free Poland played out with only slight degrees of difference and Polish gender roles had a tremendous staying power for Polish Canadian men and women. (Show less)

This paper examines how descendants of Italian immigrants of the second, third and fourth generations construct their ethnic identities in oral history interviews. In particular I discuss how Italienness is developed by the interviewees when they talk about the migration of their forefathers and foremothers. In order to capture these identity constructions I trace and interview the descendants of a Southern Italian couple who left their hometown to start a new life in the United States: In 1913 Anna and Alessio Scalera migrated with their children from Sava, a small town near Taranto in southern Italy to Worcester, Massachusetts, where the family first settled on arrival in the U.S. Worcester, which at the time had a strong Italian community, flourished industrially from 1850 until the end of World War II.
The focus of this paper now is Anna and Alessio’s children (1.5/2nd generation), grandchildren (3rd generation), and great-grandchildren (4th generation). Roughly half of the second, third and fourth generations descendants that I interviewed still live and work in Worcester. They form an extended family and share a common collective private memory. Furthermore, they are members of and identify strongly with the working or lower middle class. On the other hand there are descendants who left the city of Worcester in the 1930s in the second generation and moved to towns with large white Anglo-Saxon populations. These descendants climbed the socio-economic ladder and are now part of middle-class America. They form a separate collective family memory.
This methodological outline enables me to analyze how narratives are shaped by the categories gender, class and generation. Especially the consideration of gender, needs to be stressed, considering that this social category has often been neglected among mainstream migration historians, as Ewa Morowska has pointed out. Additionally, in this paper I want to make the argument that class needs to be reconsidered after it has lost some of its popularity in the decades following the 1970s. However, contrarily to research in the 70s where the focus is on class conflict and resistance towards assimilation, this paper shows how class shapes the assimilation process. Assimilation is used here in the way Elliot Barkan (1999) suggested it. Lastly, by choosing a sociological methodology for the interpretation of the interviews, called reconstruction of narrative identity (Lucius-Hoene 2002) – I bridge the often criticized gap between sociological and historical immigration studies.
The paper will finish with the thesis that the interviewees who live in Worcester identify stronger with Italienness and construct a migration and assimilation of their family as a success story, whereas the middle-class interviewees who moved up the socio-economic ladder and out of Worcester distance themselves from Italianness and are more critical towards the migration and assimilation process of their family. (Show less)