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CHAPTER ONE

The Politics and Poetics of Popular Ethnography

Folk Immigrant, Ethnic, and Racial Pasts in History and Discourse

We must therefore read the great canonical texts, and perhaps also the entire archive of modern and pre-modern European and American culture, with an effort to draw out, extend, give emphasis and voice to what is silent or marginally present or ideologically represented … in such works.

—Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism

IN THIS SCHOLARLY intervention, I rely neither on statistical data to tabulate objective patterns of cultural retention or loss nor on interviews and surveys to identify degrees of subjective attachment to ethnicity. The aim is not the collection of statistically significant evidence that disrupts conventional interpretations of white ethnicity. Instead, I build on the close reading of texts. I undertake the critical reading of a selected corpus of popular ethnographies to examine how ethnic meanings are produced and what this production tells us about white ethnicity. In other words, I explore how and why these ethnographies construct ethnicity by asking the following broad questions: Who defines usable pasts, where, for what purpose, and under what conditions? What are the uses of the past in each case, and how do they reproduce or contest ethnic whiteness?

I analyze this textual corpus by foregrounding ethnicity as a heterogeneous social field defined by similarities but also by internal differences, conflict and consensus, consistency and contradiction, resistance and accommodation, negotiation and consent. That is, I offer a venue to investigate ethnicity not as a shared culture, but as a field of contested meanings. Here I draw on a particular Gramscian thread of cultural studies that examines culture as a field “marked by a struggle to articulate, disarticulate, and rearticulate particular meanings, particular ideologies, particular politics” (Storey 2003, xi). If “[m]eaning is always a social production, a human practice,” white ethnicity must be seen in terms of texts and practices that contribute to its making. And white ethnicity cannot generate a single, authoritative interpretation of the past: “because different meanings can be ascribed to the same thing, meaning is always the site and the result of struggle” (ibid.).

I have already identified my object of analysis: popular ethnography. As interpretive descriptions of social life, these ethnographic accounts conveniently offer an opportunity to explore the multilayered contours of white ethnicity. In reading ethnographies, I do not assume that these texts offer transparent reflections of reality, faithful mirrors of the worlds they depict. As foundational work on the politics and poetics of ethnography has shown (Clifford and Marcus 1986), ethnographies are narratives that rest on rhetorical strategies of persuasion to establish authority and to produce convincing representations of social life. What this means, of course, is not that ethnographies are lies—and therefore illegitimate sources of knowledge about white ethnicity—but that they tell only partial truths (Clifford 1986a). I draw from this anthropological tradition the insight that attention to how ethnographies make meaning is of particular analytical value in the textual production of usable ethnic pasts. This method of reading becomes useful for interrogating narratives that claim absolute truths about Greek America or white ethnicity. I also use it to recover textual ambiguities, contradictions, silences, and the muting of alternative meanings within a text. Thus, I am interested in the manner in which the politics of ethnicity intertwines with textual poetics. My compass includes the interests that texts serve and the ways in which textual meanings are made rhetorically in the first place. I undertake all this with the goal of writing against culture (Abu-Lughod 1991), that is, disrupting tendencies to represent white ethnicity as a unified whole, a single demarcated culture.

I do not merely analyze texts. Ethnographic truths are embedded in broader impersonal structures and must be situated in relation to wider social discourses. I consider, therefore, textual politics and poetics as well as discourse and history. Attention to history and discourse allows me to conceptualize the terrain of ethnicity not in terms of a neatly delineated and already known past. Pasts are not natural facts; instead, they entail knowledge produced at specific moments in history. It becomes of primary analytical importance, then, to identify the specific political and cultural geographies where pasts were created, where they took root or were rerouted, were rejected or revived, were activated or silenced, at any given point in time. In other words, we must carefully scrutinize how tradition or heritage traveled across specific social fields and through identifiable historical moments. For the “recovery of discarded areas, or the redress of selective and reductive interpretations [of tradition]” has little value “unless the lines to the present, in the actual process of selective tradition, are clearly and actively traced” (Williams 1977, 115).

This mapping is necessary if we wish to understand the current modification, preservation, elimination, valorization, or deprecation of the past as a historical process. It is an enormous task, this comprehensive excavation of a multitude of relations, and it lies beyond the scope of this book. I merely make a gesture toward initiating this project; I start mapping only some dimensions of this process. In this chapter, for example, I enter this terrain through the analysis of selective representations in which claims about the past intersect with discourses and power relations to produce the meaning of ethnicity. I discuss four key, yet arbitrarily selected, historical moments of ethnic representation.¹ First, I reflect on an ethnographic encounter between a folklorist and a Greek American family in 1955. I move on to analyze a public performance of Greek immigrant identity from a few decades earlier, as captured in a photograph taken during a national commemorative event in Washington, D.C, in 1917. I then discuss a 1907 editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle that situated Greek immigrants in relation to racial categories in the United States, in order to reflect on the racial politics of that era vis-à-vis southeastern Europeans. And I continue with an autobiographical narrative by an ethnic intellectual in the 1970s that gave voice to the descendants of southeastern European immigrants in the context of white ethnic revival in America during the civil rights era.

My discussion of these representations demonstrates the utility of combining textual, historical, and discourse analysis to illuminate the complex interrelationships among various discrepant historical constructions of Greeks in the United States as ethnic, folk, white, and white ethnic. I begin this discussion by exploring how, in a specific historical moment and in the writings of a specific scholar, the discourse of folklore constituted Greek ethnicity as folkness. The text here is an extract from an ethnographic depiction of a Greek American family by folklorist Richard Dorson. It comprises excerpts from interviews that members of the family granted to the visiting folklorist. These textual fragments stand as a nascent popular ethnography, neither fully fledged nor textually autonomous. But once they are situated in relation to history and discourse—a task that I undertake in detail below—they foreground the idea that folklorists may miss or misrepresent the perspectives of the people they study.

Ethnicity as Folkness? Academic Constructions

Intellectuals and academics function as crucial agents in assigning significance to the culture of common people—their dances and riddles, songs and lullabies, jokes and celebrations. In fact, as John Storey (2003) shows, they have been instrumental in constituting the categories of the “folk” or “popular.” In the context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century romantic nationalism, for example, it was the learned middle class—book editors, collectors, publishers, artists, and academics—who introduced and subsequently valorized the category of folk culture. Such a classification, Storey notes, extracted from the cultural complexity of peasant experiences an idealized version, which it subsequently posited as the authentic core, the essence of the nation. In this enterprise, intellectuals “discovered” the folk, not because ordinary people did not previously exist but because the learned classes attached to them a historically specific meaning as the embodiment of national virtues and used the state apparatus to disseminate it. By stripping peasants of the authority to function as guardians of their own traditions, the educated bourgeoisie assumed “control of folk culture on behalf of the nation” (5). In the context of a nationalist ideology that posited folk culture as an eternal spirit that connected the present with the authentic origins of the nation, such an appropriation enabled the middle class to assume sole guardianship of the national past. The British Folk Song Society, for example, included among its members distinguished artists, academics, and professionals, but it was not a place where one “could expect to meet members of the folk” (122). Peasants could be interviewed and observed, invited to perform and documented, but they were excluded from membership in prestigious institutions established to preserve folk heritage.

The process of peasant folklorization outlined by Storey underscores an issue central to this book, namely how the past is used to promote social and political interests. “The idea of folk culture was a romantic fantasy,” Storey writes, “constructed through denial and distortion. It was a fantasy intended to heal the wounds of the present and safeguard the future by promoting a memory of the past which had little existence outside the intellectual debates of the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries” (13). The implications of such cultural engineering were far-reaching. Intellectuals conjured an idealized pastoral folk culture as an “alternative to the rather troublesome specter of the urban-industrial working class” (14). In the context of rapid industrialization and urbanization, the culture of the uneducated masses was seen in terms of a sharp duality. On the one hand, the positively valued folk represented a site of authentic unity and peasant conformity, now threatened by widening class distinctions and labor unrest. On the other hand, the expressive culture of the urban proletariat was stigmatized as vulgar and debased, a potent force that threatened the social order. Such a bifurcation in the meaning of popular culture served as a strategy to discipline the unruly working class. Folk culture, elevated to the status of national heritage, was seen as a pedagogical and political instrument to restore morality and to civilize the masses. It was embraced as a means of creating national unity out of class and cultural disunity. This portrayal of common people, however, bore no resemblance to the rural folk, as it said nothing about the social realities of the peasants. As Charles Keil insisted in his acerbic exchange with Richard Dorson (1978b) regarding the utility of the term “folk,” the process of “‘folking over’ people’s lives” (Keil 1978, 264) works as an ideological tool to “mystify the class forces and power differences that structure inequality (Keil 1979, 209). No one but the bourgeoisie and the folklorists need the folk, Keil continues: “[T]here were never any ‘folk,’ except in the minds of the bourgeoisie…. A world of misery and stolen pleasures can become a staged world of song and dance and ever so colorful costumes, … a fantasy, a lie, that the bourgeois world needs to believe” (1978, 263).

In this reflexive moment in the history of social sciences, academic folklore can no longer be defined descriptively, as a set of scholarly activities that record and analyze everyday activities—conversations, jokes, dance performances, superstitions, forgotten songs, tales about past heroic deeds. Rather, the discipline is understood as a practice that constitutes the quotidian occurrences that it documents as “folk.” In the words of Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998), folklore becomes a “mode of cultural production” that is actualized at the moment when “particular objects and behaviors come to be identified, and understood, as folklore” (305). This process of naming and classifying “create[s] our disciplinary subject, even if those caught in our disciplinary drift net protest” (ibid.). Here, the old metaphor of the ethnographic discipline as an ocean still holds: “Ethnology is like the ocean. All you need is a net, any kind of net; and then if you step into the sea and swing your net about, you’re sure to catch some kind of fish” (quoted in Clifford 1988, 134).

The folk are not, then, to be naturally discovered during a folklorist’s forays into communities, places of ordinary sociability, and sites of expressive culture. The category “folk” may be alien or irrelevant to the individuals who share a story, worship, or recall a proverb for the benefit of the visiting folklorist. They may manipulate or resist it. Aspects of the everyday behavior of people acquire significance as folklore through social processes often removed from their immediate social experience. It is the discipline of folklore that folklorizes the quotidian.

Producing Greek America as “Folk” (Mid-1950s)

The metaphor of a “disciplinary drift net” points to folklore as an ever-expanding academic field in search of disciplinary subjects. It was such a search that led Richard Dorson, a neoromantic folklorist vested in the function of immigrant folklore in American modernity (Del Negro 2004, 44), to direct his attention to Greek America. When Dorson made arrangements to interview the Coromboses, an extended Greek family that resided in Iron Mountain, Michigan, he was pursuing a lead he had discovered while teaching a folklore class at Michigan State University. As a site of folklorization, this course was crucial in encouraging Peter (Ted) G. Corombos, a student in the class, to recognize his ethnic family as folk and to contribute material on Greek tradition. The Corombos family was caught in the folklorist’s net. His interest sparked, Dorson took it upon himself to continue the process of folklorization through fieldwork. On a fall day in 1955, he set out on the five-hundred-mile drive to Iron Mountain for a pilot study of the family, which spanned three generations.

This field trip was part of a larger academic project. Dorson was invested in demonstrating the resilience and relevance of the premodern past in modernity. He polemically defended the position that urbanization and industrialization did not signal the extinction of this past, which he, like his fellow neoromantics, treated “as a discrete category of culture”—folklore (Del Negro 2004, 47). Maintaining that folkness endured because it functioned as a crucial source of meaning in an alienating modernity, Dorson organized his research around the question “Is there a folk in the city?” (1978a, 29). His fieldwork in rural Michigan was a precursor of future ethnographic work in urban settings, such as Gary and East Chicago, Indiana, where he pursued “the multigroup targets … [he] had aimed at in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in a remote, rural, and small town situation” (ibid.). The emphasis was on ethnicity, and the thrust of the research was to explore how memories among ethnic people help elucidate “the relation of memory culture to New World hyphenated folk culture” (31). Discovering evidence of durable folk cultures was imperative, therefore, to lend credence to his project. To locate “folklore’s canonical subject” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998, 306) in Iron Mountain, that is, to show that the Corombos family had retained its folkness, would prove that premodern ethnicity represented a vital counterforce to modernity. Rather than being obliterated by modernity, immigrant folkways took root in the New World as vital living traditions.

Dorson surveyed major Greek American institutions—the church, the press, community language schools, and voluntary associations—from the position of an omnipotent observer. The circulation of printed material, the practice of institutionalized worship, and teaching in the classroom made Greek America a modern society only in appearance, he argued. Below the modern surface, the folklorist identified a vital folk community. For Dorson, ethnic communities acted as “forces for conservatism” (1977, 156) that enabled the preservation of folkness that he equated with tradition. As he wrote elsewhere, “layer upon layer of folk-cultural traditions lie heaped up in the metropolis” (1978a, 29). He then summarily dismissed as error a rival interpretation advanced by Dorothy Demetracopoulou Lee’s “Folklore of the Greeks in America” (1936), a study of Greek immigrant acculturation in the Boston area. Responding to her argument that Old World culture was a functionless vestige of the past, already on the verge of being swallowed by modernity, he wrote:

[Demetracopoulou Lee’s essay] errs in its gloomy forecast for the ancient legacies. Lee fails to consider the forces for conservatism operating in new-fangled America. A solid and cohesive Greek-American community takes root within the metropolis, buttressed by its Greek Orthodox church, parochial schools teaching modern Greek, Greek social and religious clubs, Greek language newspapers distributed from New York. Ties with the homeland remain strong and constant, a fact easily overlooked by the outsider…. In such an atmosphere, certain folk traditions endure and prosper. This was my discovery when I visited the Corombos family in northern Michigan one fall day in 1955. (1977, 155–56)

In this account, ethnicity fragments American modernity into coherent patches of enduring folk entities. Cohesive and deeply felt, interethnic ties operate invisibly in proximity to unsuspecting outsiders, as an alternative to modern anomie. The trained folklorist then identifies the folk in the city and reports a case of effective cultural transplantation. Dorson viewed ethnic communities as face-to-face organic entities that, along with transnational ties, assure ethnic traditionalism. Curiously, Dorson asserted the resilience of folk custom in the cohesiveness of the urban enclave but sought evidence of it among immigrants in the relative isolation of rural Michigan. This paradoxical shift impelled him to elaborate on the poetics of his quest for the folk.

“Insofar as one family can represent a national folk heritage, the Coromboses indeed qualify,” Dorson wrote. “In spite of their isolation in Iron Mountain, where no other Greek families live,” he assured his readers, their natal village of “Bambakou and the saints and the icons in Greece remain a powerful reality in their lives, to which they return on occasion” (164–65). Isolated in a remote small town, the family is seen as a carrier of national, regional, and religious folk heritage. For a folklorist who at the time of his fieldwork was keen on searching for functioning cultural remnants of a bygone past in the present, the Corombos family represented a “folkloristic gem.” In fact, the discovery of the Greek folk in rural America stands as an instance of “folkloristic surrealism,” the effect produced by “the gap between the folkloristic gem and the unlikely circumstances in which it is harbored” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998, 301). Though living in Iron Mountain, the family was foreign to it. Though a part of Greek America, it was far removed from Greek ethnicity’s customary site of social organization, the urban community. Dramatically alien to its surroundings, Greek immigrant folkness powerfully wrought its surrealistic effect.

Dorson refrained from representing the Greek immigrants as frozen relics of the past. His research was guided by the assumptions (1) that selective traits of the folk past can be found in the lore and activities of contemporary peasants and (2) that they furnish evidence not merely of the survival of folkness but of the vitality of its function in modernity. Dorson’s search for coherence, for a “typical form or theme” that defines a group or period, led him to the conclusion that “the epitome of immigrant folklore is the duality of Old Country mores in a New World context” (Ben-Amos 1989, 55). This analytical framework accommodated both the preservation of folklore in the tradition of romantic nationalism (Wilson 1989) and integration, which precluded the total folklorization of the family. Dorson represented the Coromboses as being partially folk and in a state of intergenerational flux. Its male members were described as mobile and acculturated, holding various degrees of attachment to folklore. The son, Ted, who was college-educated and “had taken a course in comparative folklore … handled Greek and English with equal facility, and [while] he listened with respect to the family tales … he could look at the traditions with some degree of detachment” (Dorson 1977, 157). His father and uncle, who had immigrated to America in 1903 and 1907, respectively, “spanned the two cultures, speaking fair and rapid-fire English, adapting themselves to American business ways, but withal respecting the old heritage” (ibid.). In contrast, “their wives, residing in the home and not meeting the public like their husbands, spoke only broken English, and appeared timid and withdrawn” (ibid.). Ted’s late grandmother “represented the fountainhead of ancient lore. When Ted was stricken by the evil eye, she knew the proper formula detecting the culprit” (156–57).

The folkloric value of the family lay precisely in its porous boundaries. There was evidence in the immigrant narratives that despite acculturation and extended contact with American modernity, the male Coromboses still preserved a memory culture of meaningful folklore. For a scholar like Dorson, who was invested in showing the functional contemporaneity of folklore, this was a delightful discovery. It demonstrated the tenacity of folk culture among ethnics who had effectively adapted to American modernity. It furnished evidence for defending the terms “folk” and “folklore” as all-inclusive categories, a position that his trenchant critic Charles Keil effectively captured in the statement “We all need the folk because we are all folk” (1979, 209).²

But discovering folklore’s canonical subject in ethnicity is hardly an innocent enterprise. By underscoring the persistence of elements commonly associated with lower stages of cultural evolution—magic and superstitions—Dorson inevitably, though unwittingly, attached a dimension of primitivism to Greek immigrants. Dorson’s own discussion (1968) of Edward Tylor’s evolutionist work Primitive Culture (1871) underscores the hierarchical implications of his findings:

According to the doctrine of survivals, the irrational beliefs and practices of the European peasantry, so at variance with the enlightened view of the educated classes, preserve the fragments of an ancient, lower culture, the culture of primitive man. Consequently these survivals not only illuminate the past history of the race but also confirm the broad theory of development, as opposed to the theory of degeneration, which Tylor vigorously counters. While the main march of mankind is upward, from savagery through barbarism to ascending levels of civilization, relics of savagery, such as witchcraft, still survive among civilized peoples, and occasionally burst into revivals, as in the fad of spiritualism, a revival of primitive society. (Dorson 1968, 193)

“We have but to scratch the rustic,” said evolutionist and president of the British Folk-Lore Society Edward Clodd in 1895, in order “to find the barbarian underneath” (quoted in Dorson 1968, 250). In evolutionist thought, there lies behind the modern veneer of the Greek immigrant a functioning and inescapable layer of primitivism. The folklorization of the family makes Dorson an unintentional participant traversing a historical minefield, the representation of immigrants as primitives in our midst. Did the Coromboses represent primitive folkness, as the professional folklorist maintained? Or did they stand for something else, entirely missed by Dorson? To fully explore this question it is necessary to shift the frame of analysis from the folklorist’s conclusions to the statements made by members of the family—the textual fragments to which I alluded earlier—during the course of the ethnographic interview. The question “Who are the folk?” will yield unexpected insights once we foreground ethnic self-representations and situate them in relation to the practice of collecting ethnographic data and to historical discourses on national identity.

Who Are the Folk?

Viewed through the lens of the anthropology of Greece, the encounter between Richard Dorson and the Corombos family raises a number of key questions. What kind of cultural assumptions informed the family’s self-representation to the folklorist? Did the immigrants have prior knowledge about the place of the folk in Greek national history? If so, how was this expressed? Were they the functioning folk, as Dorson portrayed them, or were they self-consciously performing a specific kind of folkness, obliging the expectations of an educated outsider? If one member of the family exhibited “the broad insight of a folk historian” (Dorson 1977, 157), wasn’t this member also familiar—through exposure to mainstream as well as ethnic print media—with the history and politics of immigration? In my attempt to nuance Dorson’s conclusions, I turn to studies in anthropology and folklore, which have cast light on the complexities of doing ethnography with Greek people. In the context of Greek ethnography, Michael Herzfeld (1986b) has emphatically identified the ethnographic interview as a rhetorical construct. When he writes, “the villager’s ability to situate any ethnographer in a particular ideological framework must affect the recording of data” (222), he frames the problem in terms of a politics of ethnographic location. Similarly, Margaret Alexiou’s pioneering (1984–85) insight had earlier debunked the myth of pure ethnographic facts. “The ‘folk,’ however defined,” she wrote, “will often provide information they think is expected, or even deliberately mislead. Neither they nor we are ‘innocent’” (11).³

Following the internal development of folklore in Greece as a discipline “committed to the presentation of an idealized view of national culture,” the peasants expected folklorists to be urban, educated Greeks whose high position and perceived prestige “caus[ed] reluctance among rural informants to disclose their local traditions” (Herzfeld 1986b, 222). Through self-censorship, they sought to conceal those aspects of vernacular culture—obscene songs and ribald jokes for example—that would have compromised the idealized view of the folk promoted by official folklore. On the other hand, what were construed as ancient Greek (Hellenic) elements of folk culture were performed for the benefit of foreign anthropologists. The latter were seen as ideal interlocutors for whose benefit the peasants deployed the outward-oriented model that showcased the Hellenic dimensions of Greekness. “The Romeic model might have slipped through the crack,” Herzfeld notes, “had the ethnographers not been receptive to the often all-too-vague suggestions of its importance in the villagers’ own scheme of things” (221). Extending credit to the astuteness of anthropologists of Greek culture here safeguards the legitimacy of ethnographic knowledge.⁴

Herzfeld presents the peasants as being both fully aware of the debates on the place of the folk in national history and in a position to manipulate this knowledge. For my purposes, the question is whether the placement of Dorson in the rural taxonomy of ethnographers affected the ethnographic data and, if so, in what way. Undoubtedly, the family did not disappoint Dorson’s quest for ethnic folkness. It not only generously displayed its folk knowledge in narratives about the past, but it also performed tradition while hosting the folklorist. Because the male informants assumed center stage in the encounter—their wives appearing “timid and withdrawn”—we can safely deduce that the professional folklorist was accorded the gendered rituals of formal Greek hospitality. The “architectonic distinctions between formal/male and familiar/female” that organized social experience in Greece also informed the customary reception of the distinguished guest (Herzfeld 1987, 118). Paradoxically, the women, who function as guardians of ethnicity according to patriarchal ideology, are marginalized in this ethnographic encounter. They are twice removed from the center stage of knowledge production about the folk: once on account of the customary decorum of ritualized hospitality and again because of insufficient acculturation, their limited English language skills.

A crucial passage documented and reported by Dorson, however, complicates the performance of the Coromboses as folk subjects:

Besides their myriad accounts of saints’ legends and miracles and black magic, the Corombos brothers spouted forth lighter tales of entertainment from the old wonder stories to modern jests. A prize specimen from George showed an American veneer coating the venerable European tale of the valiant hero overcoming the stupid ogres. George introduced the story as an account of how baseball was invented in Greece two thousand years ago. Giants eight and ten feet tall then lived in Greece and from them the New York Giants took their name. A weak, lazy fellow joined the giants and outwitted them in trials of strength. When night fell he placed his overcoat over a pile of stones, to simulate a man sleeping, and hid in the hills. The giants attempted to kill the little fellow by pounding his bed with an ax. But in the morning the youth, whom they had presumably chopped in a thousand pieces, reappeared, complaining that the bedbugs had been scratching him all night long. Impressed and overawed, the giants named him captain. And thenceforth carried out his orders. The Americans picked up baseball from this adventure, and the New York Giants began swinging bats two thousand years after the Greek giants had swung axes. (1977, 164–65)

To recognize the irony in Dorson’s interpretation of the Greek claim to the origins of baseball, we must place this narrative in the historical context of Greek identity. The folklorist bypasses the national significance of the narrative, treating it as a “lighter tale.” From his longstanding interest in motif analysis, he draws on “comparative folklore theory” (Georges 1989, 7) to place the narrative on the origins of baseball in relation to the European tale tradition. But had Richard Dorson read the work of Nikos Politis (1852–1921), the founder of the discipline of folklore in Greece, that knowledge would have constrained him to interpret the interview material differently.⁵ Folk references to Hellenes, a giant race of mythical ancestors of superhuman size and strength, served for Politis as irrefutable evidence of the continuing use of the word as a term of national self-ascription, a name that he favored over that of Romii. Whether these references in popular tradition “represent the survival of a true self-designation” or whether they “may be metaphorical in origin” is a moot point (Herzfeld 1986a, 127–28). Of relevance here is the realization that popular circulation of Hellenic markers of identity cannot be treated as evidence of an authentic folk knowledge but only as a site of cross-fertilization between popular and literary sources (Herzfeld 1986a, 125; Alexiou 1984–85, 20). This realization shifts the analysis of folk tradition from “pure orality” to “literary orality,” toward the contextual analysis, that is, of the interaction between the textual and the oral (ibid.).⁶

Dorson’s folk historians appropriated an item of popular and literary tradition to create a usable past in the context of the ethnographic encounter. I suggest that the narrative on the Greek derivation of baseball functions to inscribe the ethnic folk within American modernity, not outside it. Establishing the modernity of the folk in turn averts the hierarchical impulse to classify ethnics as less modern and, by implication, less American. The narrative does not merely claim ethnic origins for a quintessentially national (American) pastime. The Greek invention of an American sport additionally works as a claim to beginnings, in the sense that it views the Greek past as an active cultural force that shapes the present (see Said 1975). The national past of the folk is afforded supreme value in that it functions as a model worth emulating. This narrative of beginnings establishes continuity between the Greek past and the American present as it underwrites Greek cultural authority over a quintessential American pastime, baseball. It collapses the distinction between the premodern and the modern, the ethnic and the national. It therefore authorizes the family to identify itself as authentically Greek (by virtue of ancestry) and American (by virtue of shared culture). If the interview points to the family’s folkness, the narrative decidedly illuminates the family’s Western (and by implication white) pedigree. It deflects, therefore, the Orientalist and primitivist gaze that any reference to irrational beliefs ostensibly invites. To put it differently, if the ethnic family is indeed premodern by the virtue of its beliefs in superstitions, so is the entire baseball community, a network of players, coaches, and audiences who thrive on the practice of superstition (Gmelch 1984). As popular theoreticians, the Coromboses shatter the hierarchical dichotomy between ethnic folk and modern national subjects.

The Coromboses responded to Dorson’s romantic nationalism with a folk version of its Greek counterpart, one that reverses the historical devaluation of the immigrant folk. The fact that immigrants indeed possess folklore makes them neither alien primitives nor devalued Orientals, but equal participants in America. The ethnic folk and the inquiring folklorist inhabit a common temporal civilizational plane; a claim to origins establishes a fundamental coevality between the family and their prestigious visitor as it simultaneously subverts the structural hierarchy between the educated academic and the ethnic folk.⁷

To fully grasp the implications of the story’s claim to beginnings, we must place it in relation to Greek immigrant negotiations with American modernity. Neither an idiosyncratic nor a merely creative cultural appropriation, the narrative about the Greek invention of baseball belongs to a foundational identity narrative. In fact, the text produced by the Coromboses constitutes a component of early immigrant historiography, which located Greek America within “the ‘illustrious’ history of Classical Hellenism attributing a semi-divine origin to Greek Americans” (Kalogeras 1992, 17). These historical narratives are in turn part of a wider social discourse that encompasses them. Whether claiming Greek ancestry for Christopher Columbus, as historian Seraphim Canoutas did in Christopher Columbus: A Greek Nobleman (1943), or whether designating Greek immigrants in America as the racial inheritors of the classical legacy while simultaneously positing ancient Greece as a cultural and political archetype of white America, as an early immigrant elite did, a dominant Greek American discourse has consistently presented (and continues to present, as I will show in chapter 2) Greek Americans as active participants in the making of American political and cultural life. Not unlike the Corombos narrative, this discourse of beginnings attempts to reverse deeply ingrained hierarchies between the immigrants and the American hosts. It seeks to subvert the historical devaluation of the Greeks as primitive folk who were rendered unworthy (and incapable) of equal participation in early twentieth-century American modernity.⁸

Who are the Coromboses? Or, more precisely, who are they made to be in this ethnographic encounter? Once we analyze the exchange between folklorist and family through its textual politics and poetics and situate it in history and in relation to extratextual discourses, we see that no single answer can capture the identity of these individuals. Caught in the disciplinary net of folklore, they are made to possess a premodern folkness. As subjects entangled in a specific historical negotiation with the discourse of Western Hellenism they represent exemplary modern Greeks. But in their performance of folk knowledge, they stake a claim not only to a Greek identity but also to an American affiliation. Simultaneously folk, white ethnic, modern Greek, Greek American, and American, they inhabit a plurality of subject positions and advance a complexity that interrupts any scholarly attempt to fix them as persevering folk or as ethnics on the verge of assimilation. The ethnographic encounter between Dorson and the Corombos family foregrounds the importance of history and discourse in the negotiation over the meaning of ethnicity. The poetics and politics that construe the ethnic family as Greek and American, folk and modern, ethnic and white, cannot be appreciated in its complexity without delving into the historical discourses that framed immigrant negotiation with American modernity. The family produces ethnic meanings at the intersection of the discipline of folklore, popular ethnography, and social discourses such as Hellenism.

This is, then, how this book will proceed, paying attention to texts and contexts, to history and discourse, to popular ethnography and professional anthropology and folklore, to intellectuals, academics, and the “folk” as they contribute to making usable pasts and situate themselves in relation to whiteness. It will look at the making of selective dimensions of the past and the way in which these structures of the old are given a new life, an animating ethnic purpose, today. My reading, then, of the transmutations of the past into the present finds inspiration in the critical project described by Said (1994) and introduced in the preface of this chapter, to examine, that is, dominant discourses “with an effort to draw out, extend, give emphasis and voice to what is silent or marginally present or ideologically represented” (66). In the remainder of this section, I proceed to discuss the three historical moments of representation that I outlined earlier in order to illuminate further intersections between the immigrant vernacular and modernity, and to identify additional ways in which canonical texts contain the plurality of ethnic pasts.

Transnational Pasts and the Making of the Modern Folk (Late 1910s, Early 1920s)

A photograph of early Greek immigrants taken in 1917 on the occasion of the Fourth of July celebrations in the nation’s capital dramatizes how the immigrants visually narrated their national pasts for public consumption (see Warnke 1996). In it, a Greek delegation poses in front of the U.S. Treasury, a neoclassical building located at the civic heart of the city. Strategically staged, the picture is rich in meaning; it showcases ethnic particularity as it simultaneously communicates cultural affinity with and political loyalty to the host nation. Variously dressed as ancient Greek soldiers standing on guard and as folk in dancing postures, the immigrants display their costumed bodies as signs of the temporal continuity of the Greek nation. They appear to embody the uninterrupted continuation of the ethnos, encapsulated around the two symbolic poles that historically organized Greek national identity: Hellas, the golden age of ancient Greece; and the diachronic heritage of the folk.⁹ The common people, according to the principles of Herderian romantic nationalism, were the vessel that preserved the authentic national spirit up to modern times, despite intervening and interfering foreign invasions and conquests.

But the photograph does not record a mere unreflective transplantation of Greek ethnicity into the host national space. It represents not the intrusion of a foreign body, but a negotiation that becomes evident once one decodes the additional signs that nuance the visual enactment of cultural and ethnic (racial) continuity. Posing in front of the neoclassical government building serves two functions: it showcases the political and cultural currency of ancient Greek culture in the United States while simultaneously advancing the immigrant claim to ownership of the cultural capital of classical Greece.¹⁰ The narrative of continuity and the adoption of ancient Greek political culture by the host society support the articulation of an ideological commonplace in Greek America: the persistent claim of the compatibility, even confluence, of American and Greek cultures. As the racial descendants and, by the principles of biological determinism, the cultural inheritors of classical Greece, Greek immigrants not only were endowed with the potential to embrace “Americanness” but also had access to “Ur-Americanness.”

The popularization of a resonance between an immigrant minority and its host, however, becomes politically possible on the basis of discontinuity. A banner announcing the “Upcoming Victory of the Allies”—conspicuously displayed at the upper center of the photograph—subtly redirects the interpretive framework. Read in the context of war politics, which promoted assimilation and framed the immigrant desire for political and social inclusion in American society, this sign marks a shift in the way in which immigrants saw themselves as political subjects. As historian Ioanna Laliotou (2004) shows, immigrants eagerly capitalized on Fourth of July parades as ideal public forums in which to reconfigure their political identification and proclaim their loyalty to America during a time of war. In this manner, the ideology of ethnic continuity was retained, but the narrative of national continuity was disrupted. On the one hand, the visual display of ancient Greek and vernacular forms pointed to “the cultural and civilizational value inherent in Greek descent” (124) and, therefore, to ethnic filiation. The performance of immigrant loyalty and belonging to the adopted homeland, on the other hand, served a denationalizing function. The declaration of political and social commitment to U.S. interests denationalized Greek history, since the display of Greek cultural symbols in the parades ceased to “operate as symbolic representations of national existence and sovereignty” (ibid.). Rather, their meaning was contained as depoliticized ethnic manifestations “of high cultural and ideological traits that were supposedly inherently embodied by Greek migrants” (124–25). Until the postwar rise of American nationalism, it was possible for the immigrants to publicly deploy a dual mode of identification for popular consumption. This investment in making the ethnic past conform with political expectations of Americanness was “based on the condition that America could accommodate transnational forms of identification” (125). But soon a militant assimilationism and exclusionist nativism coerced immigrants to rewrite their connections with their cherished pasts.

The site represented in the photograph is one among many—the home, the coffeehouse, the church, the workplace, the community, theatrical plays, regional societies, histories and folklore monographs, ethnic media, literature, intellectual and artistic societies—where early Greek immigrants negotiated the place of their pasts in America. The photograph simultaneously represents an instance of transnational continuity and a rupture from the ancestral nation-state as the primary site of attachment. The visual expression of ethnic continuity certainly imports the Greek state’s ideology, which, in the context of nation building, sought to integrate unlettered peasants into the grand narrative of the nation. Often told, most notably by Michael Herzfeld, this story of producing the folk as national subjects who embody the glorious ancient past redirects how we gaze at the photograph.

The immigrants at the U.S. Treasury perform a scripted version of the past, as it was produced at the time by Greek academic discourses, such as folklore, and by cultural movements, such as demoticism, both of which nationalized the vernacular. As folklorist and classicist Margaret Alexiou (1984–85) observes, the elevation of the peasants into a crucial component of national history must be seen in relation to political contingencies associated with the foundation of the modern Greek state early in the nineteenth century. “Only after the establishment of the Greek state, was the word laos used increasingly to mean ‘people’ in the Herderian sense of Volk, as carriers of the eternal spirit (pneuma) of the Greek nation (ethnos), whose values are transmitted ‘in the blood’” (14–15). The performance of immigrants posing in folk costumes constituted a modern folkness embedded in complex political histories and struggles to establish a nation-state and nationhood. It is necessary, therefore, to situate the representation captured in the photograph both historically and in relation to social discourses on Greek identity. In what follows, I will take a brief detour to discuss how the academic discipline of folklore construed the place of folk culture and the classical past in narratives of national identity and, in turn, how these narratives sought to contain the variability that defined peasant cultural expressions.

In the context of nineteenth-century Greek nation building and European power relations, turning the folk into national subjects served key political purposes. This explains the ideological significance of Greek folklore as a national institution whose production of truths about ordinary people was placed at the service of the state’s cultural politics. The systematic study of peasant culture was politically crucial at the time because it sought to legitimize the newly established nation-state. Greek folklore scholarship was staunchly empirical, yet ideologically invested in establishing an uninterrupted continuity between the ordinary people of the Greek countryside and ancient Greece. Selective customs and folk beliefs became the functioning link between the so-called golden past and the present, the latter envisioned by Western-trained Greek intellectuals and statesmen as a resurrection of the former. Long scorned and derided by the urban bourgeois, the practices of the folk, the laos, served as irrefutable evidence of racial purity, a sign that the spirit of Periclean Athens was transmuted into the greatness of folk poetry and song. Hence the name of the new discipline, laografia, the study of people (the Volk), instead of ethnografia, the study of the ethnos (the nation). As Michael Herzfeld (1986a) points out in his groundbreaking work on the politics of Greek folklore studies, it was necessary for the new discipline to prove that the folk constituted an organic part of the nation, that they “indeed belonged to the Hellenic ethnos” (13). “The ethnos,” Herzfeld writes, “did not need a branch of study of its own: it was one of the eternal verities, an absolute moral entity against which the laos could be matched and measured” (ibid.). By establishing the Hellenicity of the peasants, folklore scholarship legitimized the claim of the Greek nation-state to the cultural and intellectual legacy of ancient Greece. Such reasoning carried far-reaching political implications. If Hellas stood “as the cultural exemplar of Europe” (5), to claim that modern Greeks were racial and cultural descendants of ancient Greece was to declare their access to an Ur-European identity. The prestigious pedigree of the peasants carried inherent political implications. “Against the background of the Greeks’ dependence on European patronage” (6–7), Herzfeld writes, the claim to racial and cultural ancestry substantiated the European identity of the Greeks and made them eligible for European political and material support.

Seen against this historical background, the photograph testifies to the power of the discourse of Western Hellenism to shape the national and transnational expression of Greek immigrant identity. But it also demonstrates the immigrant performance of a larger, preemigration process of cultural containment. In nineteenth-century Greece, the state-sponsored nationalization of folk culture assaulted regional variation in order to domesticate its fragmentary potential.¹¹ It imposed homogeneity in yet another sense, when it purged vernacular practices that deviated from the construction of an ideal, virtuous folk. Thus, the photograph’s orderly symbolic arrangement edits out the variability and messiness of the social realities that defined the lives of immigrants who were fleeing the poverty of the Greek countryside for the promises of material prosperity in the United States.

Enabled by the labor demands of transnational capitalism, the movement of poor peasants to the centers of American industrial production set in motion the mass flow of immigrant vernacular cultures.¹² Greek immigrants imported to the New World highly variable folk practices consisting of multilayered secular and religious elements. On the broadest level, staples of the immigrant vernacular included, among others, storytelling, songs and dances, ritual laments, hospitality, traditions and beliefs associated with Orthodoxy, superstitions, folk healing, oral poetic traditions, and divination. The vernacular offered a rich, culturally expressive repertoire of oral genres that reproduced central community values. Didactic folk practices savored proverbs and tales that communicated moral values and folk wisdom. On the ethnographic level, the cultural field was crisscrossed by regional, class, and gender variation. Certainly, tradition functioned ideologically to reproduce the moral order. Patriarchy loomed large, expressed in vernacular forms, including proverbs, that represented women as weak and sexually vulnerable and that regulated their spatial and social movement in everyday practices. Socially constraining customs often sanctioned violence, most paradigmatically honor crimes, to enforce the traditional order.

But the vernacular also provided a venue for subversive language and activities resisting, to the degree possible, domestic centers of power as well as the encroachment of state structures and peasant exploitation.¹³ Anthropologists and folklorists have documented powerful subversive elements among the folk. Jokes challenged the authority of the priests (Orso 1979). Peasant protests challenged and ridiculed the landholding class and the authority of the state (Gallant 2002). Ribald jokes told within the intimate social circle of relatives and female friends challenged the stereotype of female timidity in rural Greece (Clark 1983). And vernacular poetry, as we will see in chapters 5 and 6, was deployed in local struggles against the intrusion of capitalism.

Furthermore, the vernacular never represented an insulated, singular culture. As historical anthropologist Thomas Gallant (2001) points out, “The view of the Greek village as isolated in space and frozen in time … at best is misleading and at worst inaccurate” (97). This observation is supported by a regional approach in scholarship that examines villages in relation to the histories and the political economy of their surrounding settlements and that challenges the assumption of Greek villages as fixed, stable, and uniform entities. The emerging consensus represents settlements in the Greek countryside as fluid and dynamic social units (see S. Sutton 1994) characterized by outward movements of seasonal emigration, networks of social relations in the context of regional festivals, and flows of repatriated immigrants. Moreover, rural populations were differentially exposed to modernity and urban lifestyles because of the uneven modernization of the Greek countryside and each group’s relative geographic proximity to or distance from towns and cities. Peasants therefore are best understood as national subjects enmeshed not only in a local symbolic universe and moral order but also in national discourses of identity and citizenship, the flow of extralocal symbolic resources, material culture, and economic networks of transnational capitalism in the industrial periphery.¹⁴ What is more, Greek-speaking refugees who fled Ottoman Turkey because of nationalist conflicts in the region (culminating in the 1923 compulsory exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey) represented a heterogeneous population, sectors of which were cosmopolitan and appreciative of high culture. Their presence in Greek America adds yet another layer, one largely unexplored, between the rural and the urban, and between the popular and the elite cultures, where the illiterate, the literate, the vernacular, and the literary intersected.¹⁵

The foregoing discussion helps me position the staged performance of identity at the U.S. Treasury in terms of transnational negotiations over the signifiers of Greek identity. The photograph captured a scripted presentation: it sought to synthesize the Hellenic and Romeic aspects of Greek identity in a highly stylized form for the immigrants’ nascent public presentation of the ethnic self to the American public. But it also signaled, as I have already pointed out, a moment of discontinuity. It announced a process in which the definition and expression of Greek vernacular culture were increasingly understood as a negotiation between ever-vigilant immigrant constituencies and the cultural and political demands placed upon them by their hosts. In other words, the encounter between the immigrants and American political modernity made the past not merely an issue of transnational connections but also a reflective ethnic process that was mediated by powerful national (American) discourses on the proper place of foreign pasts in the nation. To put it succinctly, narratives of national belonging in the United States shaped the content and boundaries of what could be counted by the immigrants as usable Greek pasts. To illustrate how immigrant folkness was understood and performed under these conditions, I now turn to another point of rupture: the racialization of the Greek immigrants in the United States. The following section shows how the making of transnational usable pasts in Greek America in the early 1920s took place in response to a social discourse that relegated immigrants outside proper whiteness.

Racial Pasts: The Rewriting of Transnational Pasts in the 1920s

“[T]he descendants of the undesirable Greeks may become loyal and useful American citizens,” asserted a 1907 editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle. Unlike “the Asiatics,” it added, Greek immigrants “do not differ from us so radically in all essential particulars as they can never assimilate, but must always remain a race apart” (quoted in Karampetsos 1998, 66). In its succinctness, this passage crystallizes the racialized logic of its era, identifying the Greek “new immigrants” as a distinct race and subsequently locating the newcomers within the hierarchical racial fault lines of American society (Almaguer 1994). Placed between unmarked American whiteness and “the Asiatics” commonly demonized as the “yellow peril,” the immigrants are relegated to an ambivalent position of simultaneous privilege and exclusion. Occupying a racial space higher than that of immigrants from Asia, they are deemed potential national subjects, their phenotype (the likeness in “all essential particulars”) conferring on them the privileges of citizenship from which Chinese immigrants were barred. Classified within the underbelly of whiteness, the undesirable immigrant is subjected to the disciplinary gaze of the dominant, his coevalness with American modernity denied, his national inclusion set tentatively in a remote future.

During the early twentieth century, Greek immigrants occupied a marked and unstable location, a potential component of the racialized nation yet outside it. The unmarked enunciation “us” naturalizes whiteness as the racial center and regulates national belonging. If whiteness, understood in contrast to blackness and to Native American “savagery,” stood as an undifferentiated monolithic category in the early years of the republic, the immense waves of immigrant laborers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries challenged those fixed racial categories. Largely a source of cheap labor for America’s burgeoning industrial capitalism, immigrants occupied an ambiguous racial location. Their phenotypical whiteness enabled their entrance into the polity as “free white persons,” making them eligible for citizenship under the reigning naturalization law. In this sense, “[i]t was their whiteness, not any kind of New World magnanimity, that opened the Golden Door” of immigration (Jacobson 1998, 8). Beneficiaries of racialized citizenship, the immigrants also partook in the privileges of whiteness, for example, becoming eligible under the 1905 homestead law to acquire property in what formerly had been Ute Indian reservation territory in Utah (Papanikolas 2002, 114).

Yet the immigrants also posed an anomaly in the political space of whiteness. Although they were legally white, their status as distinct national groups undermined their full inclusion in whiteness. As “in-between peoples” (Barrett and Roediger 1997), or “probationary whites” (Jacobson 1998), these Greek, Italian, Jewish, Polish, and Slovak immigrants fractured whiteness into a hierarchical plurality of races, fuelling debates over their capacity to participate in the racialized polity. Were southeastern European immigrants fit for the rigors of democratic government? Were they capable of exercising self-discipline? Did they posses the moral character necessary for making a constructive civic contribution to the republic? Or did their allegiance to ancestral ties and Old World political traditions threaten the smooth functioning of the polity? Did custom undermine modernity? Even worse, was it not the case that immigrant biological inferiority posed a genetic threat to the nation, promising nothing short of racial degeneration and chaotic disorder? How was it possible to test the immigrants’ fitness for self-government? Popular magazines and prestigious research centers, congressional debates and political speeches, immigration laws and civic institutions all generated a discourse classifying, assessing, measuring, evaluating, and predicting immigrants’ fitness and potential for assimilation. Phenotypes, genotypes, customs, habits, health, appearance, intelligence, cranial capacity, and work habits were all factors in locating immigrant groups in relative proximity to or distance from the center of whiteness, which in turn determined degrees of national exclusion and inclusion.

As Gunther Peck (2000) has shown in his impressive work on racial categories in the early twentieth-century American West, immigrant racial status was far from stable or permanent. Immigrant laborers, as well as established communities, were caught in shifting racial locations. While participation in labor unions, such as the Western Federation of Miners, could render immigrants white (220), discrimination in residential accommodations through city covenants refuted their whiteness. Transience “was almost always a marker of nonwhiteness in the West in 1900,” although “being a member of a residentially persistent community did not guarantee one whiteness” (166). Conversely, middle-class respectability bestowed the privileges of whiteness, though these rights were withdrawn to punish immigrants belonging to politically active nationalities. Whiteness, therefore, functioned as a coveted social space whose boundaries were tightly regulated:

There is much similarity between the case of the negroes and that of the modern immigrants. To be sure, the newcomers are for the most part white-skinned instead of colored … yet in the mind of the average American, the modern immigrants are generally regarded as inferior peoples—races he looks down on, and with which he does not wish to associate in terms of social equality…. The business of the alien is to go into the mines, the foundries, the sewers, the stifling air of factories and work shops, out on the roads and railroads in the burning sun of summer, or the driving sleet and snow. If he proves himself a man, and rises above his station, and acquires wealth, and cleans himself up—very well, we receive him after a generation or two. But at present he is far beneath us, and the burden of proof rests with him. (Fairchild 1911, 237)

Incorporating racist assumptions in assimilationist thought, this passage is paradigmatic of the kind of “progressive racism” (Michaels 1995) that was directed against turn-of-the-century southeastern European immigrants. Moreover, by linking race, class, gender, and the nation, this commentary underlines the pervasiveness of social Darwinism in narratives of assimilation. The assimilation of the immigrant is framed generationally, as a test to biological fitness. The author builds on a central motif of what Werner Sollors (1986) calls the “genetics of salvation.” According to this concept, American identity is “safely and easily received” by the native-born by virtue of birth and descent, “but [it is] something that foreign-born workers would have to strive long and hard to achieve” (88). Here, the labor conditions of industrial capitalism test racial immigrant fitness. The transformation of wage labor, a class location associated with nonwhiteness, into middle-class respectability, a sign of republican whiteness, mirrors racial inclusion. Not unlike the Protestant covenant with God, material wealth guarantees immigrant national salvation.

The making of usable ethnic pasts at the time constituted a precarious cultural project, one undertaken in the face of severe constraints imposed by the dominant society. This was especially true in the turbulent years following the First World War, when the volatile contingency of racial meanings and the fluidity of cultural and political immigrant affiliations in the early years of immigration turned into rigid patterns of identity ascription. American nationalism increasingly turned to militant strategies of conformity and racist policies of exclusion. Confronted with an acute domestic economic crisis, the rise of communism abroad, an increasingly powerful domestic unionism, vast cultural diversity, extensive urban riots, and homegrown terrorist acts, the federal government politicized ethnic identity. Appointing directors of Americanization to the Bureau of Education and the Department of the Interior and establishing a National Americanization Committee, the state launched a “crusade” of “intense Americanism” known as 100 percent Americanization (King 2000, 90). Aggressively embraced by such civic and patriotic organizations as the Daughters of the American Revolution, the National Security League, and the American Legion, the movement castigated immigrants for retaining their cultures. In addition, it also branded working-class unionism, which it often conflated with communism and anarchism, as un-American. This deployment of Americanism as an ideology to extinguish diversity and neutralize working-class activism demarcated the boundaries of whiteness in relation to Americanness, understood as uncompromising cultural and political conformity to the middle-class values of 100 percent Americanism. A state-sponsored “class vigilance” (Jacobson 1998, 72) endorsed by Congress and the media culminated in the arrest and eventual deportation of alleged foreign immigrant radicals, in violation of their civil rights and due process of law (Archdeacon 1983, 169).

This discourse of whiteness challenged immigrant narratives of continuity like the one performed at the U.S. Treasury. Greek exceptionalism, the claim that the Greeks were heirs to the ancient Greek civilization and, as such, were distinct from their southeastern counterparts (Anagnostu 1999), was dismissed by racist nationalists:

The modern Greeks like to have visitors believe that they are descended straight from the true Greeks of the days of Pericles; but if they are, then every Greek bootblack in New England is descended straight from Plymouth Colony. The Greeks of to-day—except on some of the Greek islands, which have been comparatively free from invasion and immigration—are descended from Asiatic and African slaves, Italians, old Bulgarians, Slavs, Gepidæ, Huns, Herulians, Avars, Egyptians, Jews, Illyrians, Arabs, Spaniards, Walloons, Franks, Albanians, and several other races. History has an unfortunate but incurable habit of repeating itself—and a word to the wise ought to be better than a jab with an eight-inch hatpin. (Roberts 1922, 232)

Popular classifications similarly placed the Greeks as undifferentiated members of a racially inferior Mediterranean race. “The driver mounted his quickly emptied wagon, with a curse upon the ‘Dagos,’ and the crowd informally discussed for a while the immigration question; its verdict being that it is time to shut our doors against the Greeks, for they are a poor lot from which to make good American citizens” (Steiner 1906, 283). The racialization of the new immigrants was convenient for those racists who appropriated anthropological typologies of European morphological variations and turned them into racial hierarchies. The strict morphological classification of the European people into three races—the Teutonic, or Nordic, race (which included northern Europeans), the Alpine race (which included southern Germans, Celts, and Slavs), and the Mediterranean race (which included the people of southern Europe) produced by the “scientific gospel” of the era, Ripley’s The Races of Europe (1915)—was appropriated by racist thinkers to reflect inherent racial inequalities (Bendersky 1995, 137). Thus, in the terminology of the era, the Nordic “long-headed dolichocephalic races from the zoological zone of Northern Europe” were posited as the superior type of all European races (ibid.).

While the narrative of progressive racism provided a location, albeit an ambiguous one, for southeastern European immigrants in the political economy of whiteness, nativist racism, in contrast, systematically denied them one. Racist nationalists drew immutable boundaries between racialized citizenship and the immigrants, barring the latter from participation in the polity. Access to whiteness here became a utopian impossibility, for the immigrants were seen as organically alien substances to the national body: “An ostrich could assimilate a croquet ball or a cobble-stone with about the same ease that America assimilated her newcomers from Central and Southeastern Europe” (Roberts 1922, 4). Racist nationalists dehumanized Greek immigrants, fixing them outside whiteness, even outside common humanity. The following announcements, which appeared in restaurants and newspaper advertisements, speak volumes to the extent of Greek humiliation: “No sailors, dogs, or Greeks allowed” (Akrotirianakis 1994, 26) and “John’s Restaurant, Pure American. No Rats, No Greeks” (Leber 1972, 104).

The link between whiteness and citizenship has been central to constructions of American identity. While this complex connection has been historically contested and, in the process, transformed, racial understandings of citizenship dominated the political establishment of the young nation and remained a preoccupation well beyond the arrival of successive waves of European immigration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Though implicit in colonial discourse and framed in opposition to the alleged savagery of the Indians, the relationship of whiteness to citizenship was enshrined in the laws of the new republic. As codified in the 1790 naturalization law granting citizenship to “all white free persons,” whiteness increasingly came to be understood not solely in terms of citizenship but most importantly in relation to moral and cultural values. An understanding of citizenship as practice, rather than mere political ascription, defined civic participation as the performance of certain related duties. Self-reliance, rationality, self-discipline, the ownership of property, temperance, and restraint, were essential ingredients of the civic contract between the state and a new type of republican citizen. Unlike the submissive, docile subjects associated with the monarchical dynasties that republicanism sought to replace, the new citizen was a reflective participant whose rationality and self-reliance were necessary for the proper functioning of the democratic process. Unlike feudal peasants, whose actions depended on royal decrees, custom, superstition, kin, and community obligations, the modern citizen was encouraged to act as an autonomous individual, exhibiting rational initiative in the making of the society over compliant submission to the traditional status quo.

Forgetting the vernacular past, then, a past that was understood in evolutionary terms as inferior premodern irrationality, debasement, dependency, backwardness—in short, as antithetical to American modernity—functioned as a necessary condition for the making of immigrants into citizens of the republic. The following recollection illustrates the connection between coerced cultural amnesia, whiteness, and Americanization:

[In the American Hellenic Progressive Association] you met people your age who had the same goals. To become American. You became American by giving up your parents’ ways because they also had to give them up so they wouldn’t stand out like a sore thumb. By giving up the Old World ways. We ran away from being Greek. We married non-Greek blonde women…. We made a conscious effort to forget Greece. (Anonymous interviewee quoted in Karpathakis 1999, 62)

In its association of forgetting the ancestral homeland, abandoning tradition, and embracing blondness—the icon of whiteness—the above passage illustrates immigrant acquiescence in the discourse of Americanization as total cultural, political, and racial assimilation. Because the immigrants’ past is understood as a source of pollution, the immigrants themselves were expected to undergo a profound transformation by surrendering their past to a new historical location. They were asked to abandon their memories and bury their ancestral ties in the landfills of history in order to cultivate new identities.

This vocabulary of radical rupture and discontinuity, pervasive in political discourse as well as in narratives of personal transformation, indelibly marked the immigrant encounter with American modernity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Academic monographs, popular magazines, immigrant diaries, research reports, immigration policies, and political speeches repeatedly refer to the forgetting of ethnicity as a condition necessary to reconstitute immigrants as American subjects. National belonging required de-ethnicization: the liberation of newcomers from ancestral ties, loyalties, and obligations through a process of social amnesia. Forgetting, as Ernest Renan’s (1990) often cited statement makes clear, “is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation” (11).

I have analyzed one specific Greek American response to the foregoing conditions in more detail elsewhere as a reflexive project of disembedding the self from traditional structures in order to claim full participation in modernity (Anagnostou 2004a). There, I showed that political and racist nationalism worked dialectically to make race and cultural forgetting crucial components of immigrant Americanization. In response to this predicament, a sector of Greek America’s middle class embraced whiteness as an institutional policy of racial exclusion as well as an everyday practice that sought to obliterate habits of thought and conduct that could be traced to the immediate Greek past. At the forefront of this emerging configuration was the American Hellenic Progressive Association (AHEPA), an organization that made a spectacle of the Hellenic past while purifying its vernacular counterpart. In public performances that staged the newly constituted American Hellenic identity, immigrants performed usable pasts that stressed their racial and cultural compatibility with Americanism. In ritual commemorations of the nation, this identity generated a visual economy that was intended to ingrain into newcomers a cultural and racial whiteness: draped in American flags, dressed in ancient togas or in the alternatively uniform costumes of Masonic lodges, immigrants marched in arrangements tailored to the expectations of their new national affiliation. Through their physical discipline and standardization of dress, they came to embody the values of the racialized nation. Highly stylized, the folk past was relegated to the margins, still holding symbolic significance as a link with antiquity—folk dances, for example, continued to be featured at AHEPA events—but being largely devalued as incompatible to American modernity. The configuration on the steps of the U.S. Treasury was superseded by a body politic that performed its ethnic ancestry in a manner that privileged “the externally directed model” of ideological Hellenism over the Romeic model of Greek identity (Herzfeld 1986a, 23). It visually inscribed the narrative of Greek cultural continuity in the political economy of American whiteness.

Mapping Ethnicity onto Race: From New Immigrants to White Ethnics (1970s)

I now move forward to the 1960s and 1970s to focus on a period that witnessed the articulation of a new social category, that of the white ethnic. A product of the volatile racial politics during the civil rights era, this classification sought to impose cultural coherence on and, in turn, to harvest the political potential of the descendants of the new immigrants. On the one hand, it advocated antiassimilationism, ethnic revitalization, and a return to the roots. On the other hand, coming “into existence as a labeled group in response to the civil rights and black power movements and the allied organizing of Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans” (di Leonardo 1994, 170), it operated as a potent political force in the competition for cultural and material resources.

“I am born of PIGS—those Poles, Italians, Greeks and Slavs,” Michael Novak (1971, 53) provocatively framed his confessional narrative, in an apparent intermeshing of personal and collective politics. A pioneer account in the now popular genre of growing up ethnic, this autobiographical work provided a testimony of how subtle and not-so-subtle coercion—by peers and institutions—and gentle encouragement—by wary immigrant parents bearing the scars of racism—led to ethnic self-effacement. An intellectual who professed a politics “rooted in the social and earthy sensibility of Catholic experience” (70), Novak claimed to give public voice to a collective that had been forced into silence. “The PIGS are not silent willingly” (53), he wrote. “The silence burns like hidden coals in the chest” (ibid.). The son of Slovak immigrants, Novak shattered this silence with all the intellectual might, eloquence, and political acumen that he had mastered in the corridors of the academy as a professor of philosophy and religious studies. He adopted the position of an intellectual committed to advancing the interests of white ethnics by articulating a sense of profound rage and discontent. “Such a tide of resentment begins to overwhelm the descendant of the ‘new immigration’ when he begins to voice repressed feelings about America,” he wrote. “[A]t first his throat clogs with despair” (61). The authorial exposé of private thoughts and feelings becomes a necessary step toward collective empowerment. “So the risks of letting one’s own secrets out of the bag are rather real,” he noted, casting his testimony as a vital crossing of boundaries between the private and the public.

The category “white ethnic” was crucial for Novak’s function as an intellectual who wished to advance the interests of an underrepresented and maligned population, the PIGS. The self-ascription PIGS itself—“an insulting, self-polluting label” (Abrahams and Kalcik 1978, 233)—makes the claim of “belong[ing] to the margins of society rather than [being] part of the center or establishment … [and] reverses the assimilation process and brings down on ethnics’ heads the charge of being different, non-Anglo” (233–34). This politics drew from a textbook case of panethnic identity construction: the making of a common cultural and historical experience and the subsequent construction of uniqueness through difference. White ethnics were assigned a shared history of discrimination, a cultural content, national and familial loyalties, close-knit solidarity, neighborliness, work ethic, attachment to locality, patriotism, and modesty. And, as the title of one section attests—“Neither WASP nor Jew nor Black”—this entity was sharply differentiated from what the author construed as rival social groups. Presented as different from “‘middle America’ (so complacent, smug, nativist, and Protestant)” (Novak 1971, 57), white ethnics were also removed from an arrogant and privileged liberal establishment. But they also kept a safe distance from radicalism, abstaining from interfacing with Jewish and black politics.

“Confessions of a White Ethnic” intervened in the ethnic politics of its era, purporting to represent white ethnics from an insider’s viewpoint. Novak wrote bitterly: “If you are a descendant of southern and eastern Europeans, everyone else has defined your existence. A pattern of ‘Americanization’ is laid out. You are catechized, cajoled, and condescended to by guardians of good Anglo-Protestant attitudes. You are chided by Jewish libertarians. Has ever a culture been so moralistic?” (62). Boldly entering into the fray of polemic ethnic politics, Novak spoke on behalf of the working-class and lower-middle-class ethnics—the laborers, “small businessmen, agents for corporations perhaps” (56), shoving their raging discontent in the face of 1970s America. Conscious of their parents’ humiliation as immigrants and forced to hide their ethnicity, the story goes, white ethnics played the WASP game, only to discover that the game was rigged. Their struggle to escape social marginality and economic stagnation was “blocked at every turn” (ibid.). Excluded from liberal-black political coalitions, denigrated as parochial, conservative, and racist by intellectuals, oppressed by middle America, silenced and misrepresented by the media, excluded by curricula and preservation societies, the white ethnic emerged as a profoundly resentful collective subject. “[F]eeling cheated” (ibid.) and abandoned, white ethnics witnessed the liberal sympathy extended to racial minorities while they themselves absorbed the scorn of East Coast intellectuals, who failed “to engage the humanity of the modest, ordinary little man west of the Hudson” (59).

Novak’s victimizing populism articulated ethnic dissatisfaction and resentment to subsequently harness it for a specific antiassimilationist and antimodernist agenda: the return to ethnic roots. His “politics of cultural pluralism, a politics of family and neighborhood, a politics of smallness and quietness” (8), sought to revive what he saw as the communitarian ethos that was stripped away from the immigrant Gemeinschaft. Indicting modernity for this outcome, he enumerated its ills. The culprit in this polemic was the modern individual, culturally disconnected and alienated, incapable of long-term ties and commitments, who resigned himself to the mercy of the free marketplace. Novak tenuously connected atomism, transience, and corporate capitalism. “Becoming modern,” in his view “is a matter of learning to be solitary,” to experience a life where “nothing [is] permanent, everything [is] discardable” (68). The assault on immigrant traditions—effected by militant assimilationism in the past and secular humanism in the present—devalues roots and disdains “mystery, ritual, transcendence, soul, absurdity, and tragedy” (67) in the name of rationality and progress. What this reconfiguration enables, according to Novak, is the making of ethnic subjects amenable to the demands of rational and individualized corporate culture. White ethnics—an inherent component of “network people,” as “socially textured selves, not individuals” (68)—functioned as a bulwark against this specific kind of assimilation. “Part of Americanizing the Indian, the slave, or the immigrant [was] to dissolve network people into atomic people. Some people resisted the acid. They refused to melt. These are the unmeltable ethnics” (69).

“[L]osing the sharp lust to become ‘American’” (4), the sons and daughters of the new immigrants are transformed here into white ethnics. Anthropologist Micaela di Leonardo (1994) has dissected the emergence of this category in the 1960s, illustrating its relation to the social and political currents of the time and to the specific interests it served. She bluntly maintains that the construct of “white ethnic community” as a homogeneous, working-class, close-knit set of coherent urban communities constituted an invented American tradition in that it falsified the social realities of the people who were made known through the category. What media, scholars, politicians, and ethnic leaders presented as a neatly demarcated collective was, in fact, as di Leonardo points out, an assortment of diverse, shifting, mobile, and residentially dispersed populations. Widely disseminated in popular culture, this was an ideological construct created as a political strategy to address profound social rifts. Represented as law-abiding, orderly, patriotic, and hardworking, white ethnics composed the silent majority that stood opposite the collectives pressing the federal government, the states, and social institutions toward reform and, often, radical change. The image of the white ethnic as social exemplar further polarized divisions in a society shaken to the core by the vocal activism of racial minorities, including the black power, civil rights, antiwar, and feminist movements. The ideology of the white ethnic was consciously embraced and promoted by the political establishment, di Leonardo (1994) maintains, outlining this dynamic:

The Nixon administration in particular sought to exploit and enhance these social divisions through the use of the polarizing discourse of the silent majority—as opposed to the protesting anti-administration “minority.” … [B]etween administration rhetoric and the media’s response, an image grew of this stipulated entity: the silent majority were white (implicitly, white ethnic), largely male, blue-collar workers. They were held to be “patriotic” and to live in “traditional” families—ones in which males ruled, women did not work outside the home for pay, and parents controlled their children. (175)

It is noteworthy that in the writings of ethnic intellectuals such as Novak, the making of the white ethnic followed the template of black nationalism. Di Leonardo, once again, notes: “[K]ey expressions of white ethnic resentment were couched in a language consciously and unconsciously copied from the blacks themselves. Notions of the strength and richness of white ethnic cultures and their repression by WASPs, for example, mimicked black cultural nationalist celebrations of black culture’s endurance despite white domination” (ibid.). But if the immigrant past served as a reference point for the ensuing white ethnic revival or new ethnicity—tentatively in the beginning, and with an increased ethnic confidence later—it was a past that had been seriously reworked for public consumption by the dominant society and the assimilated progeny of the immigrants. In the 1920s, the Chicago School of sociology and anthropology construed urban immigrants from southeastern Europe as caught in the duality “noble versus nasty peasant” (di Leonardo 1998, 87). They were seen “both as the inheritors of Gemeinschaft—the simple, humanly satisfying, face-to-face, traditional rural world that was giving way to the complex, anomic, modern urban world of strangers—and as rude, uncivilized peasants who must modernize, assimilate, Americanize in order to rise to the level of work and social life in the new industrial city” (di Leonardo 1994, 171). As we will see in chapter 2, the highly scripted ethnic festivals in the 1970s and 1980s, sanitized that past. Community closeness and access to an authentic folk past furnished evidence of exotic, domesticated otherness, while the rational management of the festival place implicitly communicated the modernity of the folk, neutralizing in the process the negative image of the uncouth peasant.

White Ethnicity as Contour

It is time to identify interconnections among the practices and moments of representation discussed above and to reflect on how specific intersections help us understand the making of ethnic pasts in relation to whiteness. The ethnographic encounter between the folklorist and the ethnic family; the staged performance of ethnic/racial continuity in front of the U.S. Treasury; the racialization of the immigrants as interstitial whites; and their ethnicization/racialization as white ethnics—all point to ethnicity as a contested terrain of cultural representations. We witness in these examples the power of dominant narratives to displace or marginalize nonhegemonic alternatives. The perspectives of the “folk,” immigrant rejection of whiteness, the anticapitalist function of the vernacular, and nonpopulist views of white ethnics are contained or rendered invisible by professional folklore, assimilationism, and populism. The analysis of these moments of representation in discourse and history makes it possible to illuminate struggles over the production of ethnic meanings and to rehabilitate what has been historically relegated to the margins. It will therefore provide the critical compass throughout this work.

Attention to history and discourse also brings to the fore the notion of ethnicity as a social field crisscrossed with historical junctures and disjunctures. My discussion identifies some continuities and discontinuities at work in Greek America: an ideology central to the constitution of Greek national identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the continuity between modern and ancient Greeks proved once again crucial for constructing Greek immigrants, this time as white Americans in the early 1920s. What is more, the continuity thesis was deployed to negotiate the dominant discourse of folklorization in the 1950s and to represent Greeks as white ethnics, not simply ethnic folk. Further historical links abound. The civil rights era representation of white ethnicity intersects with Dorson’s folkloric interest in ethnicizing the descendants of immigrants. But this construction of American ethnics as folk refrained from situating the ethnics in relation to American racial categories. It was the ethnics themselves who in their interaction with the folklorist articulated a view of themselves as white ethnic folk and quintessentially American, a location that escaped Dorson. And it is in the writings of an ethnic intellectual, Novak (among others), that the category of white ethnicity acquires cultural and political valence, becoming entrenched in the national imagination. In this intertwined web of representations, it is critical scholars such as di Leonardo but also occasionally the “folk” themselves that nuance the tendency of social and academic discourses to impose uniformity on the subjects they constitute.

The task here becomes one of finding ways not to allow dominant narratives—the historically privileged and therefore magnified contours of ethnicity—to hide from view a social landscape punctuated by enforced silences, marginalized alternatives, and muted political visions. And the more remote the pasts we investigate, the greater the risk of missing discordance, contestation, and protest. If the way in which dominant Greek American historiography treated that past serves as a guide, the telling of narratives that demarcate Greek America as a cultural whole in linear progression (toward success or assimilation, for example) makes itself vulnerable to charges of being a history of exclusions. Until recently, the immigrant and ethnic left, women’s perspectives, artists, non-Orthodox Greek Americans, civil rights activists, or homosexuals were treated as insignificant historical footnotes.

The analysis of ethnicity in terms of spatial and temporal interrelationships invites the metaphor of ethnicity as a social terrain crisscrossed by contour lines. The image of ethnic contours that I have in mind does not match the logic of a topographical map, where each contour marks a line of equal elevation and where contours never cross. In my view of ethnicity’s map, contours connect texts, statements, and practices that claim to represent ethnicity; because these representations are interrelated in vastly complex ways, ethnic contours intersect, tangentially touch each other, or converge in dense hubs. Ethnic contours meander through history to create unexpected connections and make their ways around dominant representations to open previously untraced links. Despite these fundamental differences between the metaphor of ethnicity as contour and the actual contours of the topographical map, I retain the topographer’s preoccupation with painstakingly charting the unevenness of a terrain through time. This attention to the ways in which contours are shaped diachronically foregrounds the potency of history to shape the terrain of ethnicity, the way in which past and present intertwine. This is why I favor the metaphor “contours of ethnicity” over the other frequent contender, “ethnicity as network.” The latter fails to capture the constitutive dimension of history in charting contemporary ethnicity. A cultural topographer pays paramount attention to the detailed mapping of differential altitude—that is, uneven historical depth—so unlike the even plane suggested by the image of the network. Densely packed contours represent steep slopes, while widely spaced contours indicate slight differences in elevation. The emphasis is on representing differences, irregularities, and complexities while not ignoring consistencies and similarities. With this image as a guide, the researcher becomes aware that in entering the terrain of white ethnicity, what is readily visible from one angle becomes invisible from another perspective; what appears to be a horizontal vista may in fact be punctuated by deep trenches. And one is made mindful that dominant representations of ethnicity may obscure the better point of vantage from which to consider minute features of the landscape. Those who wish to explore the complexity of this terrain must not lose sight of ethnic representations shadowed by dominant discourses.

In this book, I defer my ambition to undertake an inclusive mapping of Greek America’s contours of continuities, discontinuities, junctures, and disjunctures. I discuss here only those contours of the past that my specific interventions guide me to explore. I trace the continuing importance of the Greek classical past as a source of identity, community, and distinction in Greek America. I bring into focus a particular node where this past intersects with nostalgia for the preimmigrant folk and the discourse of New Age beliefs. One contour takes me to a feminist reading of the immigrant past. Another one leads me to consider the appropriation of the vernacular to advocate solidarity between Greek Americans and minorities. I sketch such contours in painstaking detail to show how and why the immigrant pasts that I outlined in this chapter continue to exert a powerful force on contemporary popular ethnographers.

Within this framework, I identify dominant views on ethnicity, contradictions, and contestation. I pay close attention to the incongruities that take shape every time a narrative about ethnic perfection is confronted by a countermemory about ethnic failure. In my mapping I attend to contours that exhibit unexpected twists and turns and intersect at surprising coordinates, having escaped the charting of specialized or amateur topographers. I am interested therefore in recovering ethnicity as a heterogeneous, uneven social field, an interpretive polyphony that is crisscrossed by languages of success and failure, loss and preservation, decline and reconfiguration, historical memory and ahistorical nostalgia, self-affirmation, and self-critique. The next chapter introduces such unanticipated contours. It outlines assimilation as ethnic production—not cultural loss—that simultaneously locates Greek America at the complex, fractal intersection among whiteness, the discourse of heritage, model white ethnicity, collective identity, and European Americanness.