Abstract
Ciubrinskas draws on long-term fieldwork in Chicago among Chicagoans with a Lithuanian background. He argues for a grassroots understanding of transnationalism from a urban anthropology perspective which addresses intra and interethnic relations among Chicagoans with an Eastern European background who want to share ‘common’ cultural citizenship and (post-)socialist social capital. He explores two kinds of social enactment of difference: one based on identity politics and directed towards homeland nationalism and the other addressing post-socialist interethnic networking as a (post-)socialist legacy transplanted from Eastern Europe.
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Notes
- 1.
For many Poles, Chicago was seen as a friendly, even ‘Polish’, city (Pacyga 2009; Erdmans 1998). The ci ty of Chicago has been the largest Lithuanian city outside of Lithuania since the 1900s. In the early 1920s there were more ethnic Lithuanians in Chicago than in Kaunas, at the time Lithuania’s capital and largest c ity (Kavoliunas 1994). Only recently, London outnumbered Chicago with its Lithuanian immigrant population: according to official statistics in 2011 there were 40,000 Lithuanians in London (Lietuvos Rytas 2013).
- 2.
Forced migration of Lithuanian immigrants to the USA includes those political refugees and exiles, and their descendants, who, at the end of the Second World War, fled from the Communist regime in Eastern Europe to the West and became concentrated in the displaced persons (DP) camps in post-Nazi Germany. In the late 1940s they were given an opportunity to move to North America, the UK, Australia and so forth. At least 30,000 of these Lithuanians from the DP camps settled in the USA, of whom about 12,000–15,000 settle d in Chicago (Kucas 1975). Their experience in the DP camps became a social memory resource for later generations, was an exercise in living in a country (as well as in the city of Chicago) without really being a part of it, and served as a model identity after they settled in the USA. Most, if not all, of them underwent ethnic ‘Lithuanian’ enculturation in their families and Saturday schools, and through the efforts of the Lithuanian American Community. The term “DPs” was coined to refer to Lithuanian political refugees and exiles who reached the USA from DP camps in Germany at the end of the Second World War.
- 3.
Most were of the so-called DP generation who immigrated in the early 1950s after leaving the DP camps in early post-Second World War Germany.
- 4.
Likely all of the Lithuanian diaspora in the USA know that Lemont is the new centre of Lithuanian culture in the USA.
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Ciubrinskas, V. (2018). Transnational Fragmentation of Globality: Eastern-European Post-Socialist Strategies in Chicago. In: Pardo, I., Prato, G. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Urban Ethnography. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64289-5_25
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