Ieva Zake - American Latvians: Politics of a Refugee Community
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This book analyzes the political experience of a small and unique American ethnic groupAmerican Latvians. This community was constituted by post-World War II political refugees, who fled Communism and arrived in the United States seeking safety and protection. For decades, they insisted on preserving their ethnic identity and therefore did not call themselves Latvian Americans. Instead, they formed a distinctive double identity, that is, they blended into the American society economically and socially, but refused to become assimilated culturally and politically. The book offers a detailed look into the life of this community of political refugees, which also provides a novel perspective on the Cold War as experienced by certain ethnic groups.From a theoretical point of view, the book makes two major contributions. First, it reasserts the need to understand the generalized category of white Americans or white ethnics with more nuance and attention to differences, and, second, it strengthens the so-called realist claim that refugees are not like other immigrants. In order to achieve these goals, the book provides compelling descriptions and interpretations of the most politically relevant moments in the experience of American Latvians in the period between the 1950s and the 1990s. Concretely, the book deals with topics as the American Latvians anti-communist activism, the impact of the hunt for Nazis on Latvian emigres, the Soviet Unions anti-emigre propaganda campaigns and the exiled Latvians involvement in the politics of national liberation in Latvia.The author strives to reveal the complexity of the refugee experience in the United States during the Cold War and its aftermath. Since such aspects of the life of ethnic groups in the United States have not been sufficiently studied, this book makes a substantial contribution to a fuller understanding of American immigration history and sociology of ethnic groups. It is well written, expertly organized, and will be of interest to a large readership at many levels of academia.
Ieva Zake: author's other books
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Andrew J. Jolivétte
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AMERICAN LATVIANS
Politics of a Refugee Community
AMERICAN LATVIANS
Ieva Zake
First published 2010 by Transaction Publishers
Published 2017 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright 2010 by Taylor & Francis.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2010014941
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Zake, Ieva.
American Latvians : politics of a refugee community / Ieva Zake.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4128-1451-5 (alk. paper)
1. Latvian Americans--Politics and government. 2. Latvians--United States--Politics and government. 3. Refugees--United States--Political activity. 4. Political activists--United States--History. 5. Anti-communist movements--United States--History. 6. Latvian Americans--Social conditions. 7. Refugees--United States--Social conditions. 8. Community life--United States--History. 9. Latvia--Relations--Soviet Union. 10. Soviet Union--Relations--Latvia. I. Title.
E184.L4Z35 2010
973.0049193--dc22
2010014941
ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-1451-5 (hbk)
Contents
This book is a product of my more than a decade long interactions with the American Latvian community involving both informal observations and formal research. I began writing about the American Latvians in 1995 when I arrived in the United States as an exchange student. One of my very first papers written at University of Michigan was for an anthropology class where I used the American Latvian community in nearby Toledo, Ohio as the subject of my study. Their efforts at preserving Latvian identity, their cultural events and political meetings fascinated me. Everything they did seemed strangely familiar and alien simultaneously. Having grown up in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Latvia and strongly identifying as a Latvian I felt tightly connected to these exiles dedication to maintaining their ethnic identity. At the same time, I was frequently reminded about the many ways in which we were fundamentally different.
Admittedly, I had heard about American Latvians while growing up under the Soviet regime during the 1970s and 80s. Most of what I was had been exposed to was extremely critical of them. The Soviets perceived Latvian migrs as a threat and disseminated vitriolic propaganda against them. As most Soviet citizens, I was well trained at distrusting, but never openly questioning what I was told by the Communist regime. Undoubtedly, the vigilance of Soviet anti-migr propaganda heightened my and other Latvians interest in the exiles. The fact that the Soviets disliked and feared Latvians in the West so intensely made them appear powerful and almost heroic. At the same time, I knew that although Latvians in the West were Latvians, they were also Westerners and therefore very much not like me and anyone I knew. I was not completely sure if I could trust them and whether they trusted me. Overall, Soviet Latvians, including me, carried notably ambiguous and often confusing perceptions of the migr community.
I had first met a number of American Latvians during the early 1990s when they visited Latvia in increasingly bigger numbers. Just as I had anticipated, they were different from us. They spoke with a funny accent (it actually became a running joke among Latvians in Latvia to imitate the way that American or Canadian Latvians would always insert uh when speaking in Latvian). They were loud and unrestricted in their manners and laughed in public like nobody in Latvia would dare. They were smart and interesting and knew a whole lot of things that most of Latvias Latvians had never heard of. My parents attended a couple of lectures given by distinguished migr professors from the U.S. and talked for days about the ideas of democracy, liberty and free market that they had learned from these outsiders. The visiting exiles represented to me, my parents and majority of Latvians in Latvia, a life that we were longing for and yet did not know how to get there. Unsurprisingly, American Latvians were admired and envied by the Latvians who were slowly emerging from the grips of the Soviet regime.
At the same time, Latvians in Latvia could not help but notice that on many occasions Latvians from the West were clueless about our life in the USSR. American Latvians seemed so sheltered and unaware of the difficulties that Latvians in Latvia had gone through. Moreover, in the interactions between the migrs and the locals, it increasingly seemed that American Latvians looked down on Latvias Latvians as badly educated, brain-washed and mentally unhealthy paupers in a dire need for salvation. And it appeared that the migrs perceived themselves as the only hope for any improvement in Latvia. In response to this perceived arrogance on the part of the migrs, Latvians in Latvia harbored feelings of resentment. Some began saying that the exile Latvians had chosen the easy way out by fleeing the Soviets. Others were angry that the Latvians in the West had betrayed Latvians under the Soviet rule. As noted, Latvians in Latvia had very mixed feelings about American Latvians and other Latvians from the West and these sentiments began reaching the surface of the public discussions with increased regularity. In fact, they continue still today.
When I arrived in the U.S. my attitudes had been greatly influenced by these emerging conflicts between the two parts of the Latvian nation. I could not help but become aware of my differences from the American Latvians. To be sure, they treated me extremely well and welcomed me. Yet, I was unable to immerse myself into their community. Our experiences simply could not be matched and I often felt like an outsider although we all spoke the same language and shared a culture and an ethnic identity. Consequently, in my interactions with the American Latvian community I always remained a neutral observer. I was sympathetic, but I was not taking sides in the internal conflicts of the community. I understood them, but I was not one of them. Although sometimes frustrating, this disconnection, I believe, was actually helpful in the writing of this book. In it, I am engaged and sympathetic to the American Latvians, but I am also analytic and not emotionally attached.
When I began studying the American Latvian community as a professional sociologist I was quite surprised to find how little academic writing was available on this migr community. It seemed that refugee groups such as Latvians had arrived in the U.S. and become adapted to its culture and social context without anyone noticing them. While many other American ethnic groups received lots of attention from many different perspectives, it appeared that migrs such as Latvians or other Eastern Europeans of the post-World War II period were strangely non-interesting to academics, journalists or politicians.
These refugees had never complained or asked for help, they had worked hard and pushed themselves to succeed. They had sent their children to college and accomplished a comfortable middle class standard of living. And exactly because they had been so successful, they had become invisible as a distinctive ethnic group. However, the more I looked at their case, the more apparent it became that they were a truly unique minority with a compelling story to tell. They had a strong and persistent ethnic self-understanding and a sophisticated organizational network. They were articulate, mobilized, politically active and intellectually vigorous. They were also loyal to the United States and strong supporters of American values and political principles. They were a model minority that rarely received any acknowledgment. This book is my attempt to correct the omission of American Latvians from the literature about ethnicity in the United States and to offer a take on the nature of this ethnic community and its controversial place in American political context. The book argues that one of the most important factors that allowed American Latvians to preserve their ethnic identity was their well-defined political position. At the same time, their complex politics might have also been the reason for why they had remained intentionally or not unnoticed by the scholars of American ethnic history and sociology of immigration.
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