Migration, Class and Transnational Identities: Croations in Australia and America

Series Preface

Series Preface donna r. gabaccia and leslie page moch Migration, Class, and Transnational Identities is the third volume in the “Studies of World Migrations” series, following Leo Lucassen’s Immigrant Threat: The Integration of Old and New Migrants in Western Europe since 1850 and Nancy Green and François Weil’s edited collection Citizenship and Those Who Leave: The Politics of Emigration and Expatriation. It is the first contribution to the series written by a sociologist and it is an excellent example of how interdisciplinary the field of migration studies is becoming. Although Migration, Class, and Transnational Identities focuses on a little-known and relatively small migration from the Balkans to Australia, it is concerned with issues that are vitally important and interesting to the large group of social scientists and historians studying the transformation of migration streams as they respond to world historical changes such as the collapse of the communist societies and economies of southeastern Europe. Migration, Class, and Transnational Identities insists that class analysis needs to be at the center of our understanding of transnational migration and transnational ways of life. But this is no labor history of working-class mobilization. It is a finely crafted case study of real people and how class has shaped their lives across national boundaries and across time. Working as an ethnographer who is thoroughly familiar with the rural/urban divide in Croatia (when it was still part of Yugoslavia), Val Colic-Peisker traces the transnational ties, emerging ethnic identities, and life stories of the bluecollar workers who first ventured to far-off Australia in the 1950s and 1960s. A shared national origin or history gives these migrants little in common with the postcommunist intellectuals, professionals, and technical workers i-xiv_1-258_Coli.indd 9 9/23/08 11:10:45 AM x . series preface who have sought new economic opportunities in Australia during the 1990s; these newcomers think of themselves as cosmopolitans relatively unburdened by particularist identities as they seek to build professional careers wherever opportunity beckons. How much do national or ethnic Croatian identities matter for these two groupsofmigrants?Howdothetwogroupspositionthemselvesinrelationship to their old home in Europe and their new home in Australia? To each other? Few readers of Val Colic-Peisker’s work will doubt the continued salience of class in our own supposedly postmodern and postindustrial world. i-xiv_1-258_Coli.indd 10 9/23/08 11:10:45 AM ...