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Streetcar parishes : Slovak immigrants build their nonlocal communities, 1890-1945 /
Slovak Immigrants Build Their Non-Localù Communities, 1890-1945.
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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Selinsgrove :
Susquehanna University Press,
©2010.
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| Summary: |
Slovak Immigrants Build Their Non-Localù Communities, 1890-1945. This book examines how small immigrant groups created a community for themselves if they could never control their own piece of the city, an ethnic ghetto, in which all or nearly all residents shared the same Old Country home. For many immigrants, community was not geographically circumscribed. Creative means existed for drawing widely dispersed people back into an institutionally based community centered on churches, social clubs, fraternal societies, and sporting leagues. The Slovaks of Philadelphia offer one such case. These immigrants never had the numbers to dominate any one neighborhood, and dispersed over several places from the very first years of settlement. By 1910, Slovaks had already scattered far and wide across Philadelphia, with other sub-communities in nearby cities such as Clifton Heights, Pennsylvania, and Camden, New Jersey. Still, it is possible to map out a community centered not in shared land but in the churches and fraternal clubs to which a widely diffuse membership belonged. A translocal community expanded to contain people miles, even states apart, but contracted to exclude from social, worship, and job networks non-Slays living around the corner. Slovaks drew a series of cognitive maps centered on ethnic institutions that allowed them to share residential neighborhoods with various other groups while simultaneously layering different ethnic communities on the same few blocks. Although the book is a test case that examines Slovaks in Philadelphia, this non-localized process of community formation was replicated by many immigrant communities throughout industrial America, and thus tells us much about the Progressive Era immigrant experience. An examination of parish records and fraternal-club minutes from across industrial America demonstrates this pattern of selective and expansive community building was employed elsewhere in the country such as western Pennsylvania, Minneapolis, industrial New Jersey, and Cleveland, where Slovaks were more numerous than in Philadelphia. As members of a small ethnic group, often laboring in isolated yet multiethnic settings, Slovaks often had no other option but to find community among co-ethnics in creative ways. Using the institutions they built themselves, not the accident of who lived next door, immigrants attained the material and psychic benefits that enabled them to survive. --Book Jacket. |
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| Physical Description: |
329 pages : maps ; 25 cm |
| Bibliography: |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: |
9781575911359 1575911353 |