Text

theses

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of a community of Romanian immigrants and refugees who spent decades under one of the most repressive Eastern European communist regimes before resettling in the New York-New Jersey-Pennsylvania metropolitan area of the United States. The study articulates the mechanisms through which their experience of political repression has led to political withdrawal in the United States. Romanian immigrants and refugees have experienced both communist and post-communist Romanian politics as intrusive and destructive of community ties. Romanian politics reached beyond Romanian borders, infiltrated the émigré community in the United States, and gave rise to suspicions, political accusations, and arguments. These struggles have eroded Romanian churches and organizations, as well as people’s sense of a shared civic life. Romanian immigrants and refugees have also experienced American foreign policy toward Romania as harmful and unresponsive to their needs: in their view, it has been driven by strategic and economic reasons rather than a genuine concern for democracy in Eastern Europe. Thus, Romanian immigrants and refugees have developed a negative understanding of politics. For them, politics is contentious. It is corrupt and invasive, and drives people apart instead of bringing them together to identify common goals and work as a group to attain them. As a result, most Romanian community leaders steer their churches and organizations away from political discussions and concerns and focus on “apolitical” (i.e., ethnocultural) activities and events. A few Romanian community leaders engage in politics, but they do so from an “independent” position in order to avoid affiliation with political parties or interest groups.

ETD_6998

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Alina Vamanu

doi:10.7282/T3W0981B

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.