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Who Is a “Real” Finn? Negotiating Finnish and Finnish American Identity in the Contemporary United States, Johanna Leinonen
- Michigan State University Press
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309 Who Is a “Real” Finn? Who Is a “Real” Finn? Negotiating Finnish and Finnish American Identity in the Contemporary United States Johanna Leinonen This chapter focuses on the processes of defining and redefining Finnish identity and traditions that are taking place among recent immigrants from Finland and American-born descendants of earlier Finnish immigrants in the present-day United States, utilizing oral history interviews that I conducted with thirty-five Finnish-born women living in Minnesota. By pointing to theories of ethnicity formulated by U.S. migration scholars, I examine how these processes of redefinition sometimes create frictions within an ethnic community and between different immigrant generations. The tradition invented by Finnish Americans in Minnesota—St. Urho’s Day—serves as a lens through which I discuss these points. The following quote is from an interview that I conducted in Minnesota with a Finnish woman who immigrated to the United States in 2000. The woman expressed her opinion on the tradition of St. Urho’s Day, popular in many North American communities with Finnish roots. She also reflected her relationship with the Finnish American community in Minnesota—that is, the community formed by American born descendants of Finns who had immigrated to the country during the years of mass immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “It’s like that ‘old-country culture,’ like an ideal of what the forefathers had, . . . they don’t necessarily even want to hear that in Finland we don’t anymore dance in rhythm of the Finnish zither around birch trees wearing birch bark shoes and national costumes, that [modern Finland] is more like Nokia and Bomfunk MC’s. . . . St. Urho? Oh, well, the joke is a joke.”1 As the quote reveals, the woman expressed frustration over how Finnish Americans imagined “Finnish culture” to be—for her, their vision was stuck in the national romantic ideals of an agricultural Finland that had nothing to do with the images that modern Finland (Nokia, Bomfunk MC’s) invoked in her. Constructed and Contested Ethnicity Like the woman quoted above, many recent immigrant women who participated in my research believed that their understandings of what it meant to be Finnish did not correspond with Finnishness Johanna Leinonen 310 represented in the remaining Finnish American organizations. This was also the reason why they rarely became active participants in them. Other researchers of Finnish American communities in the United States have made similar observations. Anja Hellikki Olin-Fahle, for example, exposed tensions between later arrivals and “old-timers” (that is, the earlier immigrant generation of Finnish Americans) in her study of a small Finnish enclave, the Finnhill, in a city on the eastern seaboard of the United States. One of Olin-Fahle’s interviewees, an “old-timer,” complained: “We want Finns to buy vacated co-op apartments but look what we get! These educated Finns look down upon us or do not join our activities.” A response by a “newcomer” reflected the negative feelings of the “old-timer”: “We got more education and training in Finland than the old Finns here. . . . . I think our interests and values are different. I think the old people’s idea of being a Finn is old-fashioned. People in Finland today do not read Kalevala.”2 Similarly, Sinikka Grönberg Garcia, a Finn who immigrated to the United States in the 1950s, described the separateness of Finnish and Finnish American identities in her book Suomi Specialties: Finnish Celebrations, Recipes and Traditions as follows: “Among the first generation of Finns in America there is a strong reluctance to being labeled ‘Finnish American.’ You are a Finn and want to remain one for a long time. After all, you didn’t come here to escape poverty or to avoid being drafted into the Russian Army. You came as a visitor, as a bride or groom, as au pair, or an exchange student on a scholarship. You came to learn the language. You did not need to leave Finland.”3 For Garcia, what really separated Finns from Finnish Americans was the fact that unlike earlier immigrants who were part of the proletarian mass migrations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, later immigrants did not leave Finland out of necessity: they chose to come to the United States voluntarily. In effect, she referred to differences in class and social status of different generations of Finnish immigrants as the main dividing factor between them. These kinds of tensions between immigrant generations are not...