Memories of Socialism in the Immigrant’s Suitcase

• In Event: Accessing Socialist and Post-Socialist Memory through Oral History

Abstract

This paper discusses the memories shared by immigrants to the United States relating to their everyday life during the socialist regime in Bulgaria, analyzing how the migration experience impacts memories and complicates the immigrant’s reflections and attitudes towards the past. The analysis is informed primarily by interviews with Bulgarians in Chicago and environs, but also other urban centers such as Philadelphia, San Francisco, and San Antonio. The study focuses on the most common themes (“sites of memory”) found throughout these respondents’ biographical narratives, in which their experience of the socialist past is described through their contemporary perspectives in immigration. Emotions, experiences, identity and cultural memory expressed in these interviews are viewed as part of the “immigrant’s suitcase” in addition to the physical objects carried by the migrant. The cultural biography of these objects and their role as “replicas” or symbolic substitutions of the motherland and the past, is also discussed in this context.

Author

• Dilyana P. Ivanova Zieske, The Field Museum