The Grasinski Girls. Mary Patrice Erdmans
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in Polish-American communities where their ethnicity was valued. As Angel explains, “Growing up in this community of Polish Catholic people, you have gotten all your self-esteem, so by the time you’re grown up, I mean, if somebody wants to say something about Polish, you don’t care, because your self-esteem, it’s already high. Like I said, when we went to high school, we were always looked up to because we were the Polish girls, you know, the pretty girls and smart and respectful. So that sort of validated it.” When they left the safe haven of the Polish neighborhoods they also left the mark of their stigma, their Polish names, behind. The two sisters who kept their Polish identifiers, Caroline Matecki and Nadine Grasinski, also remained within Polish communities—Caroline in Hilliards and Nadine with the Polish Felician Order of nuns. The others, as they moved into non-Polish neighborhoods, did so with non-Polish married names, which gave them the choice of whether and when to reveal their ethnic identity. For European Americans, the surname is a patent ethnic marker which becomes the lightning rod for prejudice and discrimination. Without their Polish maiden names (and by marrying men without Polish surnames), they decreased their chances of experiencing discrimination.13
For the Grasinski Girls, ethnicity is not a structural identity; that is, it does not determine social ranking, it does not determine resources and opportunities. For them, race is the structural identity. While their whiteness was seldom articulated in their narratives (they never talked about being white, but they did identify others as being black or Hispanic), they also did not use their ethnic identity to hide their race. That is, they did not claim to be Americans of Polish descent as a substitution for being “white.” Scholars such as Mary Waters have argued that European ethnicity persists into the latter generations because it helps whites to hide the privileges of their whiteness and gain access to multicultural resources.14 But I did not see this to be the case. The Grasinski Girls never pretended that their ethnicity was a structural identity. They never even hinted that being Polish was similar to being a racial minority. They do not claim the status of victims—that is, that Polish Americans are an oppressed people and therefore deserving of affirmative-action preferences.
While vestiges of historical discrimination may produce disproportionate underrepresentation in government, education, and religious institutions, while negative labels may still accompany Polish names, and while working-class Polish Americans do not have the economic power and status of the professional middle class, Polish Americans are nonetheless white.15 And, in a racist society, that matters. In order to understand ethnicity in the third and fourth generations, we need to separate it from whiteness.
For the Grasinski Girls, whiteness is an identity, while ethnicity is a culture. Identities locate us in the social structure, determining who is above and below us. It is in the presence of the other (e.g., the Dutch, or African Americans) that we see our relative position. In contrast, culture is a set of routines and values and as such it requires in-group members to teach these values and participate in the routines.16 Identities are salient because they order resources, opportunities, and networks, as well as determine privilege, define power relations, and differentiate positions of subordination and domination. But culture is meaningful because it patterns the routines of our lives, and it is those routines that challenge or reproduce the social structures. It is in culture that we find agency. So, what does Polish-American culture look like in later generations at the end of the twentieth century?
. . .
Today, the parish priest at St. Stanislaus in Hilliards is Father Vinh Le, an immigrant from Vietnam. They buy Polish rye bread in old Sercowo from the American Bakery, owned by Asian Indians. Polish is no longer spoken on the streets of the West Side, the dance halls are vacant, and today it is not the Poles who are being arrested for public drunkenness. The Polish Catholic Cemetery was renamed Holy Cross Cemetery in 1947, and the last issue of the Polish-language newspaper was printed in 1957. A few meat markets selling kiełbasa and herring remain open, enough so that we can still refer to the West Side as the place to buy Polish food. But Highway 131, built in the 1950s, slashed through Wojciechowo and Cegielnia. The houses left standing under the belly of the highway are unkempt and board-ragged. Suburbanization pulled many Polish Americans away from the city; urban renewal pushed out others. Declining property prices and wasted interiors lowered rents and brought in the poorer populations, which, as in other U.S. cities, have darker skin than the descendants of Europeans.17 Banks contributed to the destruction by redlining the highway-ravaged, racially torn neighborhoods.18
This transformation of the Polish neighborhood is recapitulated in Polish-American individuals. The Polish community no longer stands as a community apart from the city, and Polish-American culture no longer uniquely defines the self. By the later generations, these Americans claim some Polish (or German and Russian) ancestry, but they are not Poles, or even Polish Americans. Commenting on the draft of the manuscript, Fran was annoyed that I kept referring to them as Polish Americans: “I am an American first before I am Polish.” I asked her if she preferred the term “American of Polish descent” and she nodded in agreement.19 Caroline agreed.
Polishness for later-generation Americans of Polish descent is a consent identity—it is a choice. Like purchasing kiełbasa on the West Side, they can buy into their Polish heritage if they want. John Bukowczyk writes of the third generation, “Homogenized—or, for the upwardly mobile, assimilated—they were Polish-Americans only when they wanted to be.”20 And this homogenization was also partly a choice. The same assimilation processes affecting other white ethnic groups—intermarriage, suburbanization, mass consumer culture, and religious ties—took them away from co-ethnics and led them to forget and discontinue many of the cultural routines of Polishness.21 While some of the attrition was forced, assimilation also represented a conscious desire, and ability, to join the dominant group.22 They changed their surnames to avoid discrimination, but also so that their neighbors could more easily pronounce them.23 Thus, Grusczynski became Grasinski became Grayson (the name Joe Jr. used when performing as a country singer). And the Grasinski Girls married into Hrouda, Erdmans, and Hillary surnames.
Assimilation is linked to social mobility. Moving up the social ladder usually means moving away from the ethnic community.24 Yet, members of the middle class do not necessarily lose their ethnicity when they move to the suburbs, because they can keep ties to the community through participation in ethnic organizations, and keep an affinity to the culture through the reproduction of ethnic rituals.25 But the Grasinski Girls without the Grasinski name did not belong to ethnic organizations, did not share their everyday routines with co-ethnics, and did not consciously practice many Polish rituals. So, what does it mean when Mari says that her Polishness is “not something I think about, but it’s something that’s with me every single day of my life”?
. . .
A few years ago I visited Pittsburgh. I was living in North Carolina at the time, and I was looking forward to going “north” to an “ethnic” city with a history of Polish and Italian immigration. I could find only one Polish restaurant listed in the telephone directory and I convinced my non-Polish-American colleagues to go there for dinner. From the highway, we could see a large Polish eagle painted on the brick wall of the building, with an inscription written in Polish. When we arrived at six-thirty, a white-haired Polish-American matron gave us a menu that included pierogi, gołąbki, and kiełbasa. They served Budweiser. By eight, the mood of the place began to change. The waitresses were counting their tips and getting ready to cash out and go home, while young twenty-something kids in spiked blue hair and pierced body parts started arriving and a rave band set up on stage. A Polish restaurant by day was one of the best venues for new music at night. They had newspaper clippings framed on the wall to attest to both sources of fame—winner of the prize for best pierogi in town eight years in a row, and a glowing write-up on the music scene by a local critic. Polishness in a postmodern America.
We assume, perhaps too quickly, that Polishness derives from Poland. While it is certainly true that many routines within the ethnic culture originate in the home country and are carried over to the United States with the immigrant group, they always get transformed within the sociohistorical, class, and race culture of the new country. For example, the polka, traditionally working-class music, has changed