Going Places: Slovenian Women's Stories on Migration

Introduction

1 Introduction Mirjam Milharčič Hladnik This book is based on the written and oral records of the personal experiences of women migrants from a small land in Central Europe. The letters, narratives, life stories, and testimonies cover a span of three to four generations of women who faced an unknown world, conquered fear, gained control over their minds and bodies, and began the age of self-determination. They represent a record of the interpretation of national identity and gender roles through a female migrant perspective during a time when national identity and gender roles were challenged by two world wars, in turbulent times before World War I, and in the unique moment after the independence of Slovenia in 1991. Slovenia is a small triangle of land where the Slavicspeaking world that stretches as far as Moscow and Vladivostok meets the Latin universe that starts in Italy. The borderline between the Slavic and Latin cultures is joined by the German-speaking Austrians in the north. The three cultures contact, penetrate each other with words and expressions, exchange culinary experience, and sometimes intermarry but always stay separate as cultural and linguistic groups. In the second half of the nineteenth century when mass emigration began, no more than a million people spoke the Slovenian language; today, barely two and a half million speak it. When we put a century of Slovenian women migrants’ experience 2 going places in a brief historical context, we see their land—the Slovenian ethnic territory—subject to fast and dynamic trajectories in that period. Places of Departure: Shifting Boundaries A part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire for centuries, the territory encompassing Slovenia was divided into three parts after World War I. The largest part became a constitutional entity of the new Kingdom of Serbs, Slovenes and Croats; the name was changed to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929. The smallest part, Koroška in the north, became part of Austria as a result of a referendum. The much bigger western part, known as Primorska, became part of Italy as a result of the Rapallo Treaty. For Slovenians, this decision never meant anything except occupation. The population in Primorska, the region where three of the chapters in the book take place, suffered under the fascist regime from 1921 to 1943. This involved economic, social, and ideological measures that the Italian regime used to force the population to “become” Italian. When the measures stirred revolt, the answer was state brutality, forced migration, killings, imprisonments, and devastating tax policies. Among the population, the reaction was armed resistance and exodus. People left for Yugoslavia, Argentina, the United States, and Egypt; the latter destination was especially true for women. After World War II, most of the Primorska region returned to Slovenia, which became part of the socialist federation of Yugoslavia. Slovenia became an independent state in the process of the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991. Accurately determining how many people migrated from Slovenian territories is difficult. The reason is obvious: the statistics in countries of origin and in host countries usually used citizenship as the most important factor for defining migrants. In the period of mass migration, from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, Slovenians from different regions of the ethnic territory were citizens of many states: the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia , Italy, Hungary, and the Republic of Yugoslavia. Between 1901 3 Introduction and 1910, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was ranked first in Europe by the number of immigrants to the United States. Slovenians were part of Slavic-speaking peoples from Central and Eastern Europe who formed “one of the largest and newest groups of immigrants at the turn of the century.”1 American immigration authorities put Slovenian and Croatian immigrants in the same category. For the period between 1889 and 1914, some 450,000 Slovenian and Croatian migrants were reported. The U.S. census included a category about mother tongue and thus provided more accurate numbers. In the 1910 census, around 183,000 people declared Slovenian as their mother tongue. Using this data, we can estimate that more than 250,000 Slovenians migrated to the United States during this time. Slovenians were also leaving for Argentina and Brazil in South America as well as for other European countries. After World War I, the biggest emigration wave swept through Primorska, which was annexed to Italy. Between 1920 and 1940, fascist repression and poverty forced between...