ORAL HISTORY: MIGRATION AND LOCAL IDENTITIES - Academia

Migration and NarrationAfter one person recounted her painful exit from Latvian-Americansociety, however, when her peers and elders rejected her sisterbecause she married a non-Latvian English-speaker, the conversationfairly soon became a sharp critique of the rigidity and exclusivity ofLatvian-American society. Her story seemed to give permission to severalother group members to recount their own experiences with rejectionby émigré society, sometimes bringing the narrator to tears.Why was there a difference in tone between the individualinterviews and the group forum? Why did the group setting elicitnegative responses and perceptions, while the individual stories hadbeen mostly positive?In the first place, professor Miezite posed the question slightlydifferently in the group interviews than it was done in the individualsettings. The term „automatic Latvian,” used in the group interviewsituation, is especially „loaded.” To some participants it could haveimplied a value judgment, a subtle criticism of those émigrés whostayed within Latvian society without self-examination and awarenessof other possibilities. Secondly, individual interviews generallyhad more of a time constraint, since often the person had to coverevents from his or her whole life in several hours, whereas in the groupinterview we dealt with a small aspect at great length. But thirdly, andI think most importantly, these differences demonstrate the powerof the group context and the profound influence that even seeminglysmall factors in the social or physical environment can have on an individual’sutterances and actions. The question in the group setting waspreceded by a lecture and discussion about different types of responsesamong Latvian-Americans to their ethnic identity and a critical evaluationof émigré society. These could have triggered negative memoriesand given permission to members to articulate them in this forum,again emphasizing the power of the interviewer and the audience,whether implicit or explicit, to influence what is being said. Fourthly,the negative stories might have been motivated to some degree by thenarrators desire to create a complete portrait of the „émigré experience,”to show to their compatriots in Latvia that émigré society is notsome idealized (or vilified), unreal entity, but has its own complex historyand ugly episodes.64