Who Are the White Ethnics?
One of my aims is to destabilize the understanding of white ethnicity as a uniform category. I do not, of course, neglect the racial privileges enjoyed collectively by white ethnics, and I closely analyze the dominant narratives that seek to fix the meaning of a group as a homogeneous collective. But I am also interested in mapping pluralities, marginalized perspectives, and the struggles over which pasts count as meaningful in the present. As a way of entering the complexity of this terrain, I trace here a specific contour of this struggle as it was expressed in the conflict over ethnic self-representation in a highly visible cultural institution, the Ellis Island Immigration Museum.
In her cultural history of Greek America, An Amulet of Greek Earth: Generations of Immigrant Folk Culture (2002), historian, folklorist, and fiction writer Helen Papanikolas features an archival photograph whose exhibit in the Ellis Island Immigration Museum stirred heated controversy. Posing for the camera is a group of immaculately dressed male immigrants in Utah in 1911. They are coal miners from the island of Crete. Gazing defiantly at the photographer, they conspicuously display their prized possessions: elegant suits, brand-new guns, and bottles of alcoholic beverage. Destined for consumption by relatives, or possibly prospective brides in the ancestral homeland, the snapshot captures a particular moment in the complex encounter between the immigrants and American modernity. In relation to the economy of labor, the photograph exemplifies a specific kind of performance. The laborers have meticulously scrubbed off those markers that scar their working-class bodies. The experience of dangerous, low-paying, dirty, and physically taxing labor associated with mining and railroad construction is rendered invisible. The body politic of labor is bracketed off for the sake of a photographic inscription that flaunts material possessions, showcases well-being, communicates vitality, and advertises economic progress. Paradoxically, as the men sport American modernity, they simultaneously declare their defiance to it. The brandishing of guns and alcohol stands as a potent symbol of competitive Cretan masculinity, proclaiming that local culture remains central to immigrant identity. In one crucial aspect, modernity does not compromise the past but enhances it. Surely, the signs of prosperity in the New World legitimize the immigrants’ break from the agricultural past, specifically their subjection of the self to migrant labor under conditions of industrial capitalism. At the same time, this material success amplifies the defiant male performance of enduring transnational continuities, a posture destined for domestic visual consumption.
A document of regional and gender pride in the past, the snapshot has sparked contemporary controversy. Its meaning has become contested. An obstinate artifact of a bygone immigrant era, the image currently appears in a variety of places (including the cover of this book). Readers of literature may be familiar with it from the novel Days of Vengeance, whose author, Harry Mark Petrakis, “[admired] the photo so much that he used it” to illustrate the cover (Georgakas 2003a, 46).3 Through this literary venue, the photograph has gained prominence as a document of Greek immigrant social history. Yet its display in the Ellis Island Immigration Museum in New Jersey—credited to Papanikolas’s curatorial decision—has stirred fanatical intraethnic dissent. Ever sensitive to the politics of cultural representation, some Greek Americans approach the photograph as a site of memory that is better forgotten than nationally commemorated. A New York–based lobbying group has “for years” been pressing the museum “to get the photo taken down and replaced with a wedding or some other conventional scene. They feel the photo is defamatory to the Greek image and not at all representative of ethnic values” (ibid.). The specific objection, as reported by Nick Smart (2005), is that it makes Greek America “‘look like a Greek Mafia,’ violent and intemperate” (119), a criticism that invokes the museum’s exhibition politics: the museum “makes no reference to the immigrant underworld of Sicilian mafiosi and Jewish prostitutes” (Lowenthal 1996, 160). The dissenters’ tactics have been aggressive and have included personal harassment. Commenting on this discord, Zeese Papanikolas (2003) offers the following testimony about his mother’s experience: “For years, wherever … [she] spoke and read on the East Coast she was shadowed by a Greek American woman who expressed her outrage at this horrible view of Greek immigrants with guns in their hands like mafiosi, and who insisted that my mother have the photograph removed” (13).
In a symbolically loaded commemorative monument such as the immigration museum—which “has become a status symbol” for families descended from immigrants who arrived in the United States through Ellis Island (Welz 2000, 67)—the lay public takes it upon itself to legislate the exhibition of the immigrant past. Vigilant in the politics of representation, it reacts against a portrayal that may blur the distinction between the Greek Americans, often construed as model ethnics, and the Italian American underworld, an image that has been partially responsible for turning the Italians into the “symbolic villains in the American imagination” (Novak 1971, 3).4 If “any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences” (Trouillot 1995, 27), here is an attempt at silencing the production of Greek American history at “the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives)” (26).
What is at stake when a photograph of working-class men who flaunt their newfound success—and who advertise, one might say, the magnanimity and freedoms of America by hiding the signs of labor exploitation—stirs passions as an improper sign of the past? We witness here the mapping of the past as a terrain of contested meanings. White ethnicity, a social category to which Greek America is commonly assigned by social discourses, unmistakably slips away here from its alleged cultural superficiality into an array of contested issues ranging from institutional representation to collective memory, authority, conflict, and agency. The friction over exhibiting the past directs ethnicity into the fray of heated cultural politics. It foregrounds the notion that the manner in which the past is made known to the public is not harmonious but is shaped at the intersection of competing views of identity in the present. Helen Papanikolas’s commitment to historical documentation and her authority to represent Greek America clash with the ideology of the model ethnic, the desire to construe an idealized positive image of ethnicity.5 Furthermore, how the past is made meaningful illuminates the kinds of identity that are desired today. As Jonathan Friedman (1994) observes, “the past is always practiced in the present, not because the past imposes itself but because subjects in the present fashion the past in the practice of their social identity” (141).
Who are the white ethnics here? Individuals committed to the realist representation of the past, or those determined to silence aspects of the historical record? Those who invest in exhibiting the past, or those who threaten to censor it? The public controversy over the proper display of immigrant ancestors reveals that there can be no single answer to these questions. By no means a transparent social category, white ethnicity is a construct of social practices and narratives that compete over the significance of the past in defining contemporary identity and the ways in which this identity is portrayed in the public. Of course, the idea of ethnicity as “invented, imagined, administered, and manufactured” (Bendix and Roodenburg 2000, xi) is a truism in critical scholarship, antagonizing the popular—and even sometimes academic—view of ethnicity as biologically innate and therefore immutable. Consequently, the critical responsibility becomes to investigate how pasts are made to matter in the production of ethnic meanings today: who produces usable ethnic pasts, how, and for what purposes?
In the remainder of this introduction, my task is to probe the production of usable pasts as a process crucial for identity making but also as an instrument for containing difference. I discuss this dual function in relation to white ethnicity, pointing out how the immigrant past is deployed as a resource not only to construct identity but also to sustain racial hierarchies. The discussion moves