This book analyzes the political experience of a small and
unique American ethnic group--American Latvians. This community was
constituted by post-World War II political refugees, who fled
Communism and arrived in the United States seeking safety and
protection. For decades, they insisted on preserving their ethnic
identity and therefore did not call themselves Latvian Americans.
Instead, they formed a distinctive double identity, that is, they
blended into the American society economically and socially, but
refused to become assimilated culturally and politically. The book
offers a detailed look into the life of this community of political
refugees, which also provides a novel perspective on the Cold War
as experienced by certain ethnic groups.
From a theoretical point of view, the book makes two major
contributions. First, it reasserts the need to understand the
generalized category of "white Americans" or "white ethnics" with
more nuance and attention to differences, and, second, it
strengthens the so-called realist claim that refugees are not like
other immigrants. In order to achieve these goals, the book
provides compelling descriptions and interpretations of the most
politically relevant moments in the experience of American Latvians
in the period between the 1950s and the 1990s. Concretely, the book
deals with topics as the American Latvians' anti-communist
activism, the impact of the hunt for Nazis on Latvian emigres, the
Soviet Union's anti-emigre propaganda campaigns and the exiled
Latvians' involvement in the politics of national liberation in
Latvia.
The author strives to reveal the complexity of the refugee
experience in the United States during the Cold War and its
aftermath. Since such aspects of the life of ethnic groups in the
United States have not been sufficiently studied, this book makes a
substantial contribution to a fuller understanding of American
immigration history and sociology of ethnic groups. It is well
written, expertly organized, and will be of interest to a large
readership at many levels of academia.
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