Armenian-Americans

From Being to Feeling American

Anny Bakalian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351531153
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Études sur la communication

Assimilation has been a contentious issues for most immigrant groups in the United States. The host society is assumed to lire immigrants and their descendants away from their ancestral heritage. Yet, in their quest for a "better" life, few immigrants intentionally forsake heir ethnic identity; most try to hold onto their culture by transplanting their traditional institutions and recreating new communities in America. Armenian-Americans are no exception. Armenian-Americans have been generally overlooked by census enumerators, survey analysts, and social scientists because of their small numbers and relative dispersion throughout the United States. They remain a little-studied group that has been called a "hidden minority." Armenian Americans fills this significant gap. Based on the results of an extensive mail questionnaire survey, in-depth interviews, and participant observation of communal gatherings, this book analyzed the individual and collective struggles of Armenian-Americans to perpetuate their Armenian legacy while actively seeking new pathways to the American Dream. This volume shows how men and women of Armenian descent become distanced from their ethnic origins with the passing of generations. Yet assimilation and maintenance of ethnic identity go hand-in-hand. The ascribed, unconscious, compulsive Armenianness of the immigrant generation is transformed into a voluntary, rational, situational Armenianness. The generational change is from being Armenian to feeling Armenian. The Armenian-American community has grown and prospered in this century. Greater tolerance of ethnic differences in the host society, the remarkable social mobility of many Armenian-Americans and the influx of large numbers of new immigrants from the Middle East and Soviet bloc in recent decades have contributed to this development. The future of this community, however, remains precarious as it strives to adjust to the ever changing social, economic, and political conditions affec

1
Introduction: Assimilation and Identity

My parents met through the Armenian Presbyterian Church, which both their parents helped found, in West New York, NJ. They were very active in the church and Armenian activities while they were growing up. [Father was U.S.-born and mother was born in Turkey but immigrated when she was four years old.]

After they married, and my sister and I were born, they moved to Fair Lawn, NJ, and bought a home. We were the only Armenians in town, except for an elderly minister who would visit us occasionally. I was two years old and my sister was five. That is when our separation from the Armenian community began. We grew up as Americans with American friends. Our parents didn’t speak Armenian at home, and we never learned the language. As our older relatives became lost to us, our ties to our Armenian roots became obscure. As a teenager, I went through a time of intense pride and interest in my Armenian heritage, but with the turmoil of the 1960’s, that was replaced by other concerns. My sister and I have married non-Armenians, and our children are another generation removed from our roots. We teach them, with pride, the history of the Armenians while we encourage their progress in America. (Forty-two-year-old male respondent)

I am a third-generation American-Armenian, regrettably I know little about the Armenian background of my grandparents. My grandmother came to this country when she was only sixteen, so she was more American than Armenian.

I enjoy my Armenian roots, go to Armenian events whenever I can and always feel a common bond with other Armenians. (Fifty-one-year-old female respondent)

This book describes Armenian-Americans, individually and collectively. The above comments from two survey respondents illustrate the main themes that dominate the discussion: the assimilation of people of Armenian descent in the United States of America and their continued pride and identity in their ethnic heritage.

Assimilation has been a contentious subject for Armenian-Americans. With promises of wealth, power and prestige, the host society is assumed to lure immigrants and their descendants away from their ancestral roots. While few immigrants have actively embraced cultural change, welcoming a fresh start in life, most have tried to maintain their heritage and recreate new communities in the New World. The success of such efforts remains under dispute. The issue has consumed Armenian-Americans ever since they first landed in America over one hundred years ago. Assimilation has been widely debated by scholars and the lay public to the point where it has been likened to an obsession.¹ It has also been called the “white massacre,” a poignant analogy to a people who have historically suffered numerous massacres and a genocide.²

Armenian-Americans see themselves as descendants of a very ancient people who emerged in the mountainous region of northeastern Asia Minor some twenty-five hundred years ago and have survived, against all odds, a long and turbulent history. At the threshold of the twenty-first century however, the Armenian people and their unique material and nonmaterial culture are perceived to be in jeopardy for lack of an autonomous homeland, their dispersion in a diaspora, and their small size (approximately 6 million worldwide). Moreover, to many, it seems that their very physical survival is repeatedly threatened by massacres, earthquakes, and political turmoil around the world. To mention but a few examples from the most recent past; one is reminded of the well-established Armenian communities in Lebanon and Iran that have been destroyed or uprooted, and the Armenians in Sumgait and Baku who have been killed or expelled from their homes. The precarious existence of the Armenian people and culture fuels this debate with urgency and timeliness. Armenian-Americans are burdened with the insecurity of a collective future, locally and globally. Not surprisingly, for Armenian-Americans, assimilation is a very sensitive topic that hovers, like a specter, in the forefront of their being.

On the one hand, there are some who have accepted assimilation as a foregone conclusion perceiving ethnic maintenance efforts as temporary palliatives. They have been too keen to notice the galloping erosion of the immigrant language and culture. This position is not new; even the earliest settlers were cognizant of the forces of assimilation. This is illustrated by an editorial that appeared in the Fresno (CA) Armenian paper, Asbarez, on July 7, 1911:

The most important question confronting the Armenians of California, and in the United States in general, is that of remaining Armenian.

The Americanization of Armenians is certain to come, all we can do is to delay the day. (Quoted in LaPiere 1930, 316-17)

On the other hand, there are those who have argued that Armenians are distinguished by unique historical and cultural features that make them resilient to the forces of assimilation.³ Armenians take pride in their history, their persistence as a people for thousands of years, their unique language and alphabet, their national church, which has since its inception in the fourth century A.D. fused together the sacred and secular destinies of its people. The Genocide and its subsequent denial by Turkish governments remain at the forefront of Armenian collective consciousness, serving as a common denominator and strengthening the boundaries that carve up a separate sense of peoplehood.

Most recently, the survival efforts of the victims of the December 1988 earthquake in Soviet Armenia, and the resistance of the residents of mountainous Karabagh against the Azeries are taken as illustrations of the indomitable will of the Armenian people to endure and perpetuate their culture, much like the heroic courage of David in his stand against the giant Goliath. These sentiments are best portrayed by fellow Armenian-American author, William Saroyan (1984):

I should like to see any power of the world destroy this race, this small tribe of unimportant people, whose wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled, literature is unread, music is unheard, and prayers are no more answered. Go ahead, destroy Armenia. See if you can do it. Send them into the desert without bread or water. Burn their homes and churches. Then see if they will not laugh, sing and pray again. For when two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a New Armenia.

Indeed, the proponents of this viewpoint observe that, contrary to predictions, the Armenian-American community has grown and prospered over the years and many Armenian-Americans have achieved prominence without denying their ancestral origins.

All this preoccupation with assimilation remains mostly rhetorical and speculative. Armenians in the United States are a little-studied group that have hitherto been called a “hidden minority” (Rollins 1981). Studies in the social sciences on Armenian-Americans have been few and far between; mostly descriptive accounts of traditional Armenian institutions.⁴ This book aims to fill that gap. It provides a sociological analysis of Armenianness as it unfolds with the passage of time and generations in the United States. This entails an examination of the processes of assimilation and ethnic maintenance in personal expressions and an ethnographic description of Armenian-American communal structures.

The empirical data used in this volume is based primarily on the results of a large questionnaire survey that was mailed to men and women of Armenian descent in metropolitan New York and New Jersey in 1986. The main sample was chosen randomly from mailing lists of all Armenian churches and voluntary associations in the study area. It was supplemented with a snowball sample of individuals who were not organizationally affiliated. The survey yielded 584 respondents; hereafter referred to as sample, survey, or New York study. The qualitative data was derived from in-depth interviews with informants actively involved in Armenian-American communities, both on the East and West coasts; participant observation of the New York/New Jersey community; and published material. Vignettes and anecdotal evidence gathered from these sources are used to buttress and humanize the quantitative evidence. Methods of data collection and a description of the sample are explained in greater detail at the end of this chapter.

Milton Gordon’s (1964) conceptual framework on assimilation was used to collect and analyze the data on Armenian-Americans. He postulated that there are seven subprocesses of assimilation (explained fully below), and that immigrant groups proceed at a variable pace along each of these continua. The underlying assumption of this study is the “straight-line” model (Sandberg 1974), which predicts a decrease in adherence to ethnic culture and behavioral forms with length of history in the United States. Nonetheless, assimilation is understood as a dynamic process that may be reversed, at least in theory. The aim here is not to measure how Armenian-Americans have become similar to other ethnic groups or mainstream Americans, but to measure their departures from traditional Armenian value systems, behavioral forms, and life-styles.

The results of this survey establish that generational presence in the United States is the most powerful variable in explaining assimilation. The immigrant generation’s cultural and behavioral patterns are taken as the statistical baseline, and all departures from that imply a movement along the continuum toward more assimilation. Therefore, change is measured in the degree difference between the first and subsequent generations. The foreign-born or immigrant generation is defined as the first generation. The second generation consists of the U.S.-born children of the immigrants. The third generation are men and women who with one or both parents are U.S.-born. And the fourth generation are those who with their parents and at least one grandparent are also U.S.-born.

The observations presented here are believed to be representative of Armenian-Americans. This term encompasses a wide spectrum of people. The universe of Armenian-Americans consists of men and women who reside in the United States and trace descent from the ancient land and culture of Armenia. This is a subjective definition based on identity; it inevitably produces wide within-group variations by generational presence in America, recency of immigration, legal status, country of birth, religious affiliation, mixed parentage, socioeconomic status, knowledge of Armenian language and culture, political/ideological beliefs, degree of involvement in ethnic communal activities, and so on.

This study demonstrates that American-born descendants of Armenian immigrants have undergone significant assimilation in the United States. For example, the Armenian language is no longer used as a means of everyday communication. The secular culture, even cuisine, is relegated to special occasions and acquires symbolic connotations. Frequency of attendance at Armenian religious services is gradually reduced, as is participation in communal life and activities sponsored by Armenian voluntary associations. Social ties, even intimate relations and conjugal bonds, with non-Armenians become increasingly the norm. But this is only part of the story. The majority of Armenian-Americans, even the great-grandchildren of the immigrant generation, continue to maintain high levels of Armenian identity, fierce pride in their ancestral heritage, and a strong sense of we-ness or peoplehood.

What might seem as two contradictory processes, a zero-sum pie, do indeed coexist. I propose here that processes of assimilation and maintenance of ethnic identity go hand in hand. This is possible because Armenianness changes in its form and function. Later-generation Armenian-Americans are best described by the concept of “symbolic ethnicity” (Gans 1979). Symbolic Armenianness is voluntary, rational, and situational, in contrast to the traditional Armenianness of the immigrant generation, which is ascribed, unconscious, and compulsive. Symbolic Armenians acknowledge and are proud of their ethnic origin. Symbolic Armenianness pertains to the realm of emotions but makes few behavioral demands. The generational change is from “being” Armenian to “feeling” Armenian.

Human action is assumed to be purposeful, creative. People use the little margins of freedom and limited choices they have to play an active part in structuring their social world. Assimilation and ethnic maintenance do not just “happen” to immigrant groups. Immigrants are not passive victims in the drama that forces them to make choices between their cultural survival and their mundane, existential survival. Armenians, like most immigrant groups in America, have established churches, schools, mass media, and myriad other organizations to enact their cultural heritage in a new land, under new conditions, as they have tried to pass their ancestral legacy onto subsequent generations. It should be noted, however, that the emergent structures are rarely exact replicas of the ones left behind in the “old country” or countries, as the case may be. The Armenian-American subculture is a creative adaptation to a new and different life. Likewise, assimilation and the changing nature of Armenianness are not acts of callous betrayal, but innovative responses to changing structural conditions and personal needs.

The ethnicity of later-generation Armenian-Americans is different in nature and degree from that of the immigrant generation. Ethnic identity for American-born generations is not at the core of their role expectations and self-image. American-born upper-middle-class symbolic Armenians have more freedom in deciding their personal identities. They may choose to be Armenian, Armenian-American, American-Armenian, American, or whatever else they want. Moreover, symbolic Armenians may change their identity as often as they want. Identities may fluctuate over the course of one’s life, when facing specific audiences, and in response to changes in the larger environment or the diaspora.

For Armenian-Americans, the boundaries separating Armenians from non-Armenians, “us” from “them,” are generally self-imposed, shallow, and mutable. By contrast, the identity of Armenians who lived in the Ottoman Empire, as those of the Middle East today, was ascribed by the social and political system they were born into. That is, the markers that separated Armenians from non-Armenians were imposed by forces outside the Armenian collectivity. It should be noted that an ascribed identity is far more likely to determine the life-styles and life chances of a group member than a voluntary identity. In sum, the varying versions of Armenianness should be recognized as the outcomes of complex historical and dialectical processes. Country of birth and childhood socialization, generation, and even cohort effect are important variables in understanding the behavior and attitudes of people of Armenian descent.

The study emphasizes the sentimental component of symbolic Armenianness, making a case for increased situational, individualistic forms of expression and the importance of convenience in its application. Most frequently, Armenianness is manifested during one’s leisure time. Armenian identity for later generations is no longer exclusive, all-engulfing, but tangential to people’s lives and daily preoccupations. Consequently, its liability is also limited, making it easier to be a symbolic Armenian.

It is generally hypothesized that the higher the social class, the less the ethnic identity and commitment. I find that Armenian-Americans with higher educational attainment in the sample are more likely to be structurally assimilated; that is, they are more likely to have non-Armenian friends and spouses. However, structural assimilation does not significantly alter their levels of Armenian identity. With continued assimilation and upward mobility, if Armenianness is to survive in the United States among large proportions of men and women of Armenian descent, it can only do so in its symbolic form.

It should not be forgotten that the popularity and renewed interest in ethnicity in recent decades coincides with its increased societal legitimation and the improved socioeconomic status of most white ethnic groups including the Armenians. With higher levels of education, occupational prestige, and income, later-generation Armenian-Americans are less ashamed to be vocal about their immigrant roots. Ethnicity is less embarrassing today than it was during the first half of the twentieth century precisely because it is only sentimental, romanticized ethnicity. The results of this study clearly show that there is no “return” or “revival” to behavioral forms of Armenianness.

The argument th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Armenian Americans
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Assimilation and Identity
• 2 Church and Politics
• 3 The Armenian-American Community
• 4 The Debate over Language
• 5 Sources of Identity
• 6 Conclusions: Intermarriage, Symbolic Armenianness
• References
• Appendix (copy of questionnaire)
• Index