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?