"Where Everyone Goes to Meet Everyone Else": The Translocal Creation of a Slovak Immigrant Community

Around 1910, immigrants were often characterized as living in homogeneous ghettoes. For Slovaks in Philadelphia and elsewhere in industrial America, though, community was not geographically but institutionally bounded. A trans-local community of churches and fraternals served as ethnic magnets, enabling Slovaks living miles apart to be elastic and selective when forming community. Translocal attachments freed immigrants from ghettoes, and a new paradigm for thinking of immigrant communities—translocal and institutional, not geographical—is proposed. Churches and fraternals served, too, as creators of a bi-national identity, for signifiers of Americanness were often adapted to suit immigrant needs, often at variance from native America's. Creative appropriation of Slavic and American culture to meet immigrants' needs also freed them from ghettoes as they negotiated a bi-national identity. This also enabled immigrants to live at peace alongside other ethnic groups with whom they had little contact, but this model of overlapping ethnic communities broke down when Slovaks encountered African-Americans. Through cultural productions such as articles on lynchings in the Slovak press, or minstrel shows at Slovak halls, immigrants learned to think of themselves as "white" people, and thus sadly to make the psychic distance from blacks as America's ultimate outsiders.