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Migration, Class, and Transnational Identities

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Contents

List of Tables and Figures..............................................................................................viiSeries Preface Donna R. Gabaccia and Leslie Page Moch...................................................................ixAcknowledgments.........................................................................................................xiIntroduction............................................................................................................11. The Homeland.........................................................................................................292. The Global Context...................................................................................................543. The Hostland: A Designed Nation......................................................................................704. Farewell My Village by the Sea: Working-Class Croatians in Australian Suburbia.......................................915. Ubi lucrum, ibi patria: Incorporation and Transnationalism of the Professional Cohort................................1286. The Croatian Diaspora: Transnationalism, Class, and Identity.........................................................1577. From Communism to Capitalism: Altered Values and Shifting Identities?................................................180Conclusion: Between or Beyond Nations? Class, Ethnicity, and Transnationalism in the Global Century.....................205Notes...................................................................................................................219Bibliography............................................................................................................229Index...................................................................................................................249

Chapter One

On a hot day in July 1997 I was walking down Zagreb's main street, Ilica, zigzagging through the crowd on the pavement, deafened by the iron clamor of trams passing by frighteningly close. I jumped into one and ended up pressed against a stranger, my nose filled with the summer smells of too many people cramped together in a small space. The unwanted intimacy triggered a typical Australian reaction to Europe: "This place is so crowded!" This was my first trip to Croatia after migrating to Australia. The emigrant's experience of "visiting home" included a strange mixture of feelings: wonder, bliss, familiarity, but also a trace of alienation and disorientation. Driving a car for the first time through familiar streets, they seemed narrow and curvy, something I had never noticed before. My friends' city apartments seemed to have shrunk, and the view from my parents' balcony on the eighth floor was dizzying. After only two years, my perceptions already had the imprint of life in a spacious Australian suburb.

I enjoyed this natural experiment on how quickly and unmistakably place and space influence us. Unwittingly, I was a subject of the "experiment." I was just starting research on migration, transnationalism, class, and identity, and the first part of my data collection brought me back to my home country. In a book on migration it is important to know where the migrants come from, what their country is like, how they lived before they left, and what they were taught to believe and strive for. Visiting Zagreb libraries was somewhat of a culture shock. Accustomed to the efficiency of computerized Australian libraries, I had to retreat to the dusty business of browsing through card catalogues. In the modern, recently moved, and re-opened National and University Library, they did not let me in because I did not have a library card and I could not have one made for me because I did not have a current Croatian identity card. I had to smuggle myself in with a friend's card, the time-honored self-help method against the "Catch-22" of bureaucratic obstacles. At the very beginning of my research trip I realized, with the help of my old friends, that I had already lost some of the highly valued survival skills that are often needed in southeastern Europe. After the two-month crash course, I regained most of them and was able to bring fourteen kilograms of papers, photocopies, and books with me on the plane to Australia as hand luggage.

This chapter, based on those fourteen kilos of paper, tries to answer the question "where do they come from?" for the two migrant cohorts that are the topic of this study. They, in fact, come from two significantly different social environments. The recent wave of urban professionals migrated from densely populated cities where, in contrast to the cities of the "new world," suburbs are usually high-rise and the city centers, built a century or more ago, project a historic rather than a business image. Old cathedrals and medieval bell towers dominate Croatian and other European urban centers, not the glass-and-steel business towers, the central business district's cathedrals of New World capitalism. In Croatian cities, the hectic traffic and the walking crowds coexist smoothly with a café culture developed to perfection; not being able to socialize daily with colleagues or friends in a favorite hangout means that something is seriously wrong with one's lifestyle. No professional community development projects are needed, but in turn the work ethic is problematic; well, one certainly would not place it among central cultural features. So different from Australia, I thought. In Croatian cities most people catch public transport to work and do their shopping in small corner shops that are literally just around the corner, a world where people live in the same house or flat for generations and know their neighbors well.

These cities of Croatia are still peripheral in European terms, as the country awaits to be admitted to the European Union, but the spirit and glamour of the nearby West penetrates them through imported fashion, music, magazines, movies, cars, and shopping stints to Italy, Austria, and further. Croatian cities are in many ways different from the metropolitan areas of North America and Australia where many Croatians emigrated, but then again urban culture is increasingly global, with necessary adjustments to local circumstances.

The other cohort—people who left Croatia in the 1960s—mainly came from the Dalmatian coast and islands, from small towns and villages. This is the type of environment that one can find in tourist brochures and advertisements: a glistening sea, bright blue skies, cozy inlets and white beaches with steep stony hills behind them ... and winds that blow the roofs away in winter when there are no tourists. This pristine heaven on earth, where in the past small parcels of rocky land could not feed large families, only emerged from poverty when discovered by hordes of western European tourists in the 1960s and 1970s. The majority of Croatian emigrants left their communities in "chain" or "cluster" migration, following their brothers, uncles, husbands, and fathers. Their villages and houses, their rosemary bushes and fig trees, their fishing nets and boats, and the smells and sounds of the sea have been forever remembered and always brought forward as a nostalgic point of reference. A city, whether in Germany, Australia, Canada, the United States, or even in their own country, could never become...