Migrating to America: Transnational Social Networks and Regional Identity among Turkish Migrants (International Library of Migration Studies)

MIGRATING TO AMERICA

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MIGRATING TO AMERICA Transnational Social Networks and Regional Identity among Turkish Migrants LISA DICARLO

Tauris Academic Studies LONDON • NEW YORK

Published in 2008 by Tauris Academic Studies, an imprint of I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com In the United States of America and Canada distributed by Palgrave Macmillan a division of St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Copyright © 2008 Lisa DiCarlo The right of Lisa DiCarlo to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978 1 84511 646 0 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Printed and bound in India by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd From camera-ready copy edited and supplied by the author

CONTENTS List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Glossary

xi

Introduction

1

1 - Locating the Laz

19

2 - Forced Migration: Cleansing the Pontus

45

3 - Hemflehrilik: Regional Compatriotism as a Bridge to the USA

55

4 - From Yuva to Papazlar: Transregional Migration

69

5 - Maintaining Regional Ties in the City

89

6 - Naming, Claiming, and Getting to Kennedy Kent

109

7 - Homecoming

125

Conclusion

149

Notes

161

Bibliography

169

Index

181

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS*

Woman with goat, Yuva Market in downtown Yuva Woman picking beet greens, Yuva

* All photographs © Lisa DiCarlo

viii xii 108

Woman with goat, Yuva

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to the people of Giresun, in all of their various locations, for sharing their lives and their stories with me. This work would have been an impossible undertaking without their cooperation. I would especially like to thank the Biçer and Kütük families in Istanbul, and the Çaki›r and Yanbul families in Giresun for opening their homes to me. They entertained endless questions from an inquisitive anthropologist with humility and patience. My work in Turkey is the result of a deep fascination with a country and a culture I came to know almost twenty years ago. The friendships I have maintained over that period of time sustained me during the challenging periods of my research. I would like to express my thanks to Murat Erman and his family for their hospitality and friendship over the years. This research would not have been possible without the support of the Fulbright Education Commission. I would like to thank Süreyya Ersoy for entertaining weekly discussions about Giresun and migration for the duration of my grant. He and the entire staff of the Istanbul Fulbright office heard more about my work than they ever imagined they could stand. I had tremendous support from my mentors at Brown, from the conceptualization of this project to the publishing of this book. Engin Akarl› was instrumental in helping me articulate my ideas in my research proposal. David Kertzer, William Beeman, and Nicholas Townsend provided crucial feedback and kept me engaged in tackling the larger questions, even when I was dealing with the tedium of life in the field. Fran and Calvin Goldscheider have been my greatest source of support, in countless ways. They made sure I ate while I was working. They made sure I had work.

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They included me in other projects outside of Turkey, while reminding me that what I discovered in Giresun was definitely worthy of sharing with a larger audience. Without their encouragement, I know I would not have published this book. I would also like to thank Kemal Karpat, Jenny White, and Carol Delaney for their encouragement and support. Hillary Crane has read and provided crucial feedback on more versions of this manuscript than she ever wanted to. Alexandra Zafiroglu, whether she knew it or not, led me to consider for the first time that I had been looking at Turkey for a long time without actually seeing it. Thank you, Alex.

GLOSSARY

dernek gecekondu Giresun Giresunlular Derne¤i hemflehri il ilçe Karadeniz/ Karadenizli Kennedy Kent köy/köylü lokanta memleket merkez muhtar New Yuva Pancar Papazlar pazar Pontus Rum yayla Yuva Yuval›lar Derne¤i

association, society, club ramshackle housing built by internal migrants in urban areas, lit. “built during the night” Black Sea province of Turkey hometown association of people from Giresun regional compatriot, fellow countryman administrative province administrative district, county Black Sea / Black Sea native pseudonym for US community of Yuva natives village / villager restaurant a person’s home district or native land administrative center village headmaster pseudonym for US community of Yuva natives pseudonym for village in Yuva district, also the word for beet greens, a staple of Black Sea cuisine pseudonym for Istanbul community of Yuva natives bazaar Greek word for the Black Sea region of Turkey Anatolian Greek summer mountain pasture pseudonym for the district of Giresun province that is home to migrants to the US hometown association of people from Yuva

Market in downtown Yuva

INTRODUCTION

Yuva In the Turkish Black Sea mountain villages of Yuva, young boys have dreams of pumping gas and working as line cooks in gas stations and diners along I-95 in the northeast corner of the USA that they know as “Kennedy Kent.” They talk about work permits and green card marriages long before they are old enough to have either of them. Young girls’ aspirations are fueled by their relatives’ discussions of marrying them off to the sons of co-villagers in Kennedy Kent. Children in Yuva seldom express an interest in education. Village women pick beet greens and hazelnuts, and try their best to keep their children in school while their husbands negotiate the precarious life of illegal migrants in the USA. Relatives and co-villagers alike constantly scrutinize their behavior as they raise their children alone and manage household affairs. These wives of absentee fathers, who have married and started families of their own, are once again watched and protected as if they were vulnerable young daughters. Local Yuva residents go to the jewelry shop to exchange dollars for lira, sent by their brothers, fathers, husbands, and uncles who are the heroes in Kennedy Kent. When men gather in coffeehouses and women in their homes, many of the discussions focus on news from their relatives and co-villagers in the USA. People in Yuva learn quickly who has won a green card, who has opened a business, and who has been deported. When migrants return to the village, they are often proud to report the addition of an American nickname: “My name is ‹hsan, but you can call me Eddie.”

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Papazlar In the Istanbul neighborhood of Papazlar, men from Yuva meet at the Yuva hometown association and discuss how a returning migrant from Kennedy Kent is running for mayor back in their home district of Yuva. They discuss their support for this candidate who knows the value of hard work. Even if he was only a dishwasher in the USA, this experience puts him in the category of the successful migrant, which makes him an attractive candidate for mayor. The mayoral candidate of choice in Papazlar is the one who will offer the most assistance to this community of internal migrants from Yuva. Both men and women are active in recruiting support for the Islamist party. Village women in Istanbul increasingly have time to participate in political activities as they settle into an urban schedule that does not include agricultural chores. Kennedy Kent In Kennedy Kent, Turkish migrants from Yuva run gas stations and diners that they bought from retiring Pontic Greek refugees. At night, these businesses sometimes function as hostels for male migrants who have recently arrived from Turkey. More established migrants lived in crowded apartments with their co-villagers from Yuva, work long hours, and send their money home to the families who are waiting for them. In the town neighboring Kennedy Kent, Pontic Greeks from Yuva and the surrounding area gather silently every May 19th in their local church to remember the victims of the Pontian Genocide during the violent transition from Ottoman Empire to Turkish Republic. This book explores the nature of migration and movement between a rural Black Sea district called Yuva and the urban and overseas communities formed by its inhabitants. It examines historical reasons for migration from the village and reveals how villagers from Yuva first migrated to America. It follows the internal movement of villagers to the neighborhood of Papazlar in Istanbul and analyzes their social networks, and shows how regional stereotypes work to reinforce urban social segregation of native city dwellers and migrants from rural areas. It also demonstrates how migrants and villagers employ various strategies to gain access to the community of co-villagers in America—in other words, how they get to the place they call Kennedy Kent. Furthermore, it reveals how the

INTRODUCTION

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migrant community in America maintains a presence throughout the social field of Yuva natives, in the village and in the minds of co-villagers everywhere.1 Transnational Migration: A Theoretical Framework Yuva natives who succeed in their attempts to get out of the village yet maintain strong ties to it are transmigrants, “... persons who migrate and yet maintain or establish familial, economic, religious, political, or social relations in the state from which they moved, even as they also forge such relationships in a new state or states in which they settle...” (Glick Schiller 1999:96). One’s status as a transmigrant depends on the nature of one’s relationships with people in the sending community and the community of resettlement. Using this definition makes it possible to see commonalities in the experiences of migrants from Yuva, whether they move abroad or within Turkey. Put another way, it enables scholars of migration to illustrate the similar relationships migrants can have with their sending and resettlement communities, regardless of the type of borders they cross when migrating. Glick Schiller writes that researchers who adopt transnational migration as the research paradigm “... must boldly sever their concept of society from their concept of national territory” (1999:99). Kearney reinforces this idea when he writes that “members of transnational communities... escape the power of the nation-state to inform their sense of collective identity” (1991:59). In other words, social fields that cross national boundaries allow transmigrants to identify with place of origin, destination, and perhaps points in between. In a more recent article, Kearney distinguishes between global processes as decentered from nation-states, and transnational processes that are “anchored in and transcend one or more nation-states” (1995:548). In many cases, it is possible to see that transmigrants themselves identify with a smaller region within nation-states. This is particularly true of Turkish migrants. As Yucel illustrates in his study of Turks in Germany, it is impossible to speak of “all Turks” or “all Turkish migrants.” He writes that “the differences among Turks, at least for the Turks themselves, are far more significant that the similarities. It is all too easy to create a false migrant type that exists not in the field but only in the minds of those who created it” (1987:118). In international as well as transregional internal contexts, Turks tend to group themselves accord-

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ing to region, or type of region, and then country, of origin. In the Turkish nation-state, where there are significant linguistic, ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic differences between east and west, coast and plateau, city and village, regional affiliation as a marker of those differences becomes a significant unit of identity.2 Migration from Yuva to Istanbul and international points beyond demonstrates the strength and importance of the social network in creating economic opportunities in geographically remote locations that are, in some ways, as familiar as the village. The circular migrant’s trajectory is representative of the flow of goods and services throughout the social field. More of a web than a chain, this social field of Yuva natives is the product of information, resources, and manpower shared between the inhabitants of the mountain village and the transregional urban and international communities created by migrants. Given the interconnected nature of Yuva natives in different locations, I found it necessary to study this migration web by examining the sending village in Yuva province, the transregional migrants in Istanbul-Papazlar, and the transnational migrants in New Yuva and Kennedy Kent. In this case, a multi-site study clearly reveals the complex construction of Black Sea regional identity and the existence of identical networking strategies in the internal as well as the international migration context.3 Turkish Transmigrants in Perspective The district of Yuva exhibits traits found in many sending communities. Similar to migrants from Mexico to the USA (Orozco and Lapointe 2004), villagers leave Yuva for economic reasons and in doing so pave the way for future migrants. Similar to other districts in Turkey that have established labor migrant communities all over the world (DiCarlo 2006), there are communities of Yuva natives in Istanbul as well as in the United States, France, Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands. Migrants from Yuva and their co-villagers maintain relationships that are built on and perpetuate reciprocal obligation, in the same way that rural Peruvians in Lima (Doughty 1970) and internal migrants in Freetown (Banton 1956) maintain ties to their co-villagers. This obligation manifests itself in the migrant’s remittances and assistance to others in migrating, as well as assistance with agricultural chores and house care in the home community in the migrant’s absence, not unlike the relationship between Dominican migrants to New York and their non-migrant

INTRODUCTION

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co-villagers (Grasmuck and Pessar 1991). Additionally, villagers and migrants from Yuva assist one another in finding marriage partners. The same practice can be seen in Greek migrants to urban areas (Sutton 1983; Friedl 1962). These exchanges between migrants and villagers create relationships of indebtedness that bind sending communities and migrants together. The part of this book that examines internal migration from Yuva to Istanbul demonstrates that it is possible to be in a foreign environment without leaving one’s country of origin. Rural-urban migration in Turkey typically results in segregated neighborhoods of urban natives and rural newcomers.4 Derneks (hometown associations) in many migrant neighborhoods serve as places where men can meet with their regional compatriots and learn about jobs, available apartments, and city politics (Engin 1995). This book shows that the Yuva hometown association functions identically in two environments that are considered foreign to Yuva migrants, even though one is within Turkey. The hometown association of Yuva natives in Istanbul has been recreated in America to meet the needs of international transmigrants. Indeed, many Turkish migrants in Europe have also established hometown associations in their host communities (Wilpert and Gitmez 1987). Of course, this is not a uniquely Turkish phenomenon. Finns in Sweden, Greek Cypriots in Britain, Portuguese in France, and Spanish immigrants in the Netherlands have also formed immigrant associations that reinforce their ties with each other and with their sending communities, as well as their common identity (Rex et al. 1987), as have Haitians in New York City (Pierre-Louis 2006), Mixtec migrants in California (Velasco Ortiz 2005), and internal migrants in Nigeria (Barkan et al. 1991) and Peru (Mangin 1959). The issue of forced migration presents itself early in Yuva migration history. As this book shows, it is arguable that migration from Yuva to the USA would have happened differently, if at all, had it not been for the population transfer between Greece and Turkey in 1923 and the interethnic violence preceding it. Few ethnographic works have dealt with forced migration from the Black Sea. Hirschon’s analysis of Rum (Anatolian Greek) refugees in Greece deals with the population transfer and resettlement of refugees in Piraeus (1999). Her study reinforces some of the attitudes expressed by Black Sea Turks and aging Rum5 refugees in America.

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Black Sea inhabitants, Rum and Turk alike, express a sense of regional identity that separates them from Greeks and Turks from other regions. Likewise, Greeks and Turks from other regions harbor stereotypes of Black Sea residents that distinguish them from the larger categories of “Greek” and “Turk.” Refugee residents of Piraeus who had had direct relations with Turks expressed no ill feelings toward them. Rather, they blamed the governments of Greece and Turkey for undertaking a population transfer that ultimately did not result in peace or harmony between the two countries. Finally, Hirschon reveals that the younger generations of Greeks in Piraeus were more inclined to articulate the atavistic hatred between Greeks and Turks. It is interesting to note that the generations who did not experience forced migration are the ones who harbor the greatest animosity. It is impossible to know whether those feelings would change if Piraeus, like Kennedy Kent, were home to Greeks and Turks. The more recent migration studies of the Mediterranean reflect the movement of labor migrants from the southern Mediterranean to the northern shores and from Mediterranean countries in general to northern Europe. This pattern is the product of labor agreements between European countries with a shortage of local manpower and Mediterranean countries with underemployed workers. (In the case of France and the Netherlands, it is also the product of migration from former colonies and provinces.) Although the labor agreements were designed to provide only temporary employment to labor migrants, the flow and location of people became difficult to manage. It has resulted in large Mediterranean communities of all types permanently settled in northern and western Europe. Many of these communities are Turkish, the largest of which is in Berlin (Mandel 1989). Grillo’s study of Tunisians in Lyon (1983), Brettell’s life histories of Portuguese migrant women in Paris (1982), Cole’s analysis of North Africans in Sicily (1997), and Carter’s examination of Senegalese migrants in Turin (1997) all reflect contemporary patterns of Mediterranean population movement. Turkish migration to the United States presents a departure from the classic pattern of Mediterranean migration into northern Europe. In one of the few articles written on Ottoman migration to America, Karpat writes that during the nineteenth century, while the Ottoman Empire continued to receive Muslims and Jews from other regions, a westward emigration of Muslims and Christians to

INTRODUCTION

7

the Americas was also taking place (1985:175). According to Karpat, the peak periods for immigration from Ottoman territories to North America were in 1896/97, following a lifting of a ban on Ottoman emigration, and between 1908 and 1914.6 After the Young Turks implemented laws that exempted Ottoman Christians from military service in 1909, more than a million Armenians, Greeks, and Syrians left the Empire to find work in America. Existing records do little to shed light on the ethnic identity of the immigrants. US immigration officials did not record immigrants’ religion, and the most precise accounting of origin until 1895 only indicates whether immigrants came from “Turkey in Asia” or “Turkey in Europe.” Once immigration officials began recording country of origin along with ethnicity, there were still other problems with the statistics. Many Muslims, fearing religious discrimination, registered under Christian names in order to gain entry into the USA (Karpat 1995:233). These factors contribute to an overall unsatisfying account of the migration that occurred. Still, Karpat estimates that of the 1.2 million people leaving Ottoman lands for North America between 1820 and 1920, 15 percent, or 200,000, were Muslim, 50,000 of whom were ethnic Turks.7 In assessing the settlement patterns of Black Sea Turks in the USA, it is particularly revealing to note that both New Yuva and Kennedy Kent neighbor Pontic Greek communities. There is a clear pattern of settlement in close proximity to fellow inhabitants of the Black Sea. This has much to do with the origins of Black Sea migration, and the fact that many Turks come to be small business owners by purchasing diners and gas stations from retiring Pontic Greeks. Rather than settling in larger Turkish communities in New York City, such as Sunnyside in Queens, the Black Sea Turks moved in alongside their fellow countrymen—the Pontic Greeks. The Turkish consulate in New York estimated that as of 1999, there were 120,000 Turks residing in the combined area of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. They believed approximately 7,000 of them to be students. If the Turks in this area typify the most recent wave of immigrants from Turkey, it can be said that the majority has come, over the past twenty years, in pursuit of economic stability and a better life in general. This particular pattern represents a departure from the established Turkish migrant labor destinations. Why would Turks risk coming to a country that is not home to well-established communities like the ones in

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Europe or Australia? While consulate workers in New York attributed it to the fact that it is easier to be illegal in the USA than it is in other countries, it is impossible to ignore the persistent pattern of migrants choosing to go where their hemflehri (regional compatriots) are. In other words, there is migration from Turkey to the USA now because there was migration from Turkey to the USA in the past. Once a community of hemflehri has been established, it is an open invitation for others to follow. People come with the implicit understanding that they will receive assistance from their compatriots. In the case of the Turks from Yuva, they also had material proof that their co-villagers were benefiting from migration. Of the 243 houses in the Yuva district village of Pancar,8 113 were the newly constructed, multistory homes of labor migrants in America. I conducted ten months of fieldwork in Turkey, from September 1998 to July 1999, taking a break at the midpoint to visit the community of migrants in New Yuva and Kennedy Kent, USA. I returned to Yuva in the summer and stayed for the homecoming ceremony and the beginning of hazelnut harvest. I resumed fieldwork in New Yuva and Kennedy Kent once I returned from Turkey in August, spending a total of six weeks in both places over a sixmonth period. I spent a total of ten weeks in the village of Pancar in the Yuva district of Giresun province, and the rest of the time in the Papazlar neighborhood in Istanbul. With the exception of my initial journey to Yuva, my trips to the village coincided with those of migrants from the Papazlar9 neighborhood in Istanbul. I also traveled to Yuva for local festivals, such as Hidrellez and Yedi Mayıs (see chapter 5). These are regional days of ritual that require access to the Aksu River in Yuva and to the Black Sea. In Yuva, I surveyed the population of the village of Pancar, which is spread out over a mountainous region. During the winter months, there were only 20 occupied homes in the village. This number increased significantly during the summer, when retired urban migrants and mothers with children made their annual pilgrimage back to the village. The highest occupation of the village occurred from the end of July to mid-August, which coincides with the annual homecoming festival. During my time in Papazlar, I conducted research in Gül Sitesi, an apartment complex that exclusively housed migrants from

INTRODUCTION

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Pancar. I was able to find other migrants from Yuva district around Papazlar with the help of hometown association members and their wives. I interviewed a total of 100 migrants and members of their city households, as well as their relatives in the village who stayed behind. I was fortunate to find ‹hsan Ardın10 alive and well at his home in Istanbul. He is often named as the first villager to migrate to the USA, and the one who helped so many from Yuva get to Kennedy Kent. His stories about his relationship with the Rum who had passed away long before I began my research provided important information about Lefter Çember, the man who started the movement of Turkish Yuva natives to the USA. I supplemented my information about Lefter’s life with biographical accounts of refugees who left the Black Sea region of Turkey during the same period, and under similar circumstances. I conducted repeated in-depth interviews with the first generation of Turkish migrants, probing their experiences and their perceptions of the later generations of migrants. These interviews were conducted with individual migrants in their homes, as well as in their usual gathering places: Ali Seyahat’s jewelry shop in Yuva, and the dernek and pharmacy in Papazlar. With the exception of my interviews with ‹hsan Ardin, I was allowed to use a tape recorder and take notes during these interviews. My interviews with ‹hsan Ardin during my year in Turkey were all conducted at his home in Kartal. I saw him again in the USA at his home near his son’s diner. I took notes during our talks, and called him repeatedly for clarification. I also found it useful to check the information participants gave me with other people in the community. During most of my evenings at the dernek, I would go and sit at an empty table. Men would come over and sit down, sometimes alone and sometimes with other men, and they would either tell me their stories, other people’s stories, or ask me about America. Everyone knew why I was there, and this gave people the opportunity to participate when they felt comfortable. It took a couple of weeks for the men to get used to the idea of my being there, on several levels. My presence was a violation of many unspoken rules: women should not be in male space, or foreigners in a place reserved for hemflehriler, strangers should not be trusted, nor should illicit activities be spoken about. During conversations at the

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dernek, I was not allowed to use a tape recorder. No one minded that I took notes, but they were hesitant to speak into what they thought might be a “government microphone.” It was risky, they felt, to speak about unreported income from abroad, undocumented movement across borders, and fraudulent documents, among other things. I had to be careful not to ask specifically about those topics or take notes when they were being discussed. Learning about women and their lives was easier, simply because they were not a part of any activities that would, if discussed, jeopardize the business of getting to Kennedy Kent.11 I spoke with women in their homes or in the homes of other women during the day. Families in the community invited me to dinner almost every night. This afforded me a glimpse of family dynamics, and an opportunity to interview families as a whole. In all of the cases, I started with a list of questions that prompted further discussions about their migration from the village and subsequent movement. One technique in particular seemed to draw people out. After noticing people’s fascination with pictures of their relatives in America, I offered to take pictures of villagers in Turkey and hand deliver them to migrants in Kennedy Kent. This was an exciting offer to many of the women I met. They immediately understood that I would be able to meet their husbands and quickly assess the situation in the new country. I took some thirty pictures of women and their children when I went to Kennedy Kent. I delivered the pictures, which gave me instant access to the migrants in America. Most of them were happy to see pictures of their families and wanted me to return to Turkey to deliver photographs of them in Kennedy Kent. Some received the photos sheepishly and did not allow me to photograph them. These were the men who were involved with or living with other women. The decision not to report this to the women in Turkey was an easy one. I was not there to stir the proverbial pot. My aim was only to study the nature of their social networks. Varsa da Yok and Other Obstacles Studying migrants means studying people who are, for at least part of the time, in between one place and another. While getting a sense of the dynamics of migration patterns is difficult, getting to know the individual people who move is harder. Without moving alongside them, the researcher is left with a fragmented glimpse of

INTRODUCTION

11

people in motion. From September 1998 to July 1999, I moved alongside migrants from the Black Sea village of Pancar in Yuva province to the shantytown of Istanbul called Papazlar. This meant setting up two home bases—one in Papazlar, and one in Yuva. I established relationships with two families who graciously welcomed me into their homes in Yuva, and I secured an apartment in Papazlar for my time in Istanbul. “Sora Sora Ba¤dat Bulunur”* The idea of researching chain migration from the Black Sea to the USA developed while I was conducting fieldwork in the Turkish community in Queens, NY. Turks in Queens often joked about a clannish group of “Laz” who were buying up gas stations on Long Island. According to the Turks in Queens, these Laz migrated to large urban areas within Turkey and were known for opening bakeries and pastry shops. If I could locate the Laz community in Istanbul, I was told, they would find the relatives of the gas station owners for me. I soon learned that there were two types of Laz. There were the ethnic Laz, the famed bakers and pastry chefs, who have their own language and come mostly from Rize and the surrounding areas of the easternmost corner of the Black Sea. Then there were the people commonly referred to as Laz because they were also from the Black Sea. Inland Turks refer to both as “Laz,” which initially made my work a bit more difficult. My participants fell into the “figurative” Laz category, and I located them, as is customary in Turkey, by asking around. I started in a Black Sea restaurant on the Bosphorous run by two “real” Laz from Rize. They told me to investigate the Giresunlular Derne¤i (Hometown Association for People from Giresun). There I met Refik Bey, an established third generation migrant from Giresun proper who ended up helping me a great deal during my fieldwork. He directed me to the Yuvalılar Derne¤i (Hometown Association for People from Yuva) and made the necessary phone calls to arrange an introduction. According to Refik Bey, all of the gas station owners on Long Island were “figurative” Laz, and they were from a district of Giresun province called Yuva. I would have to go to the dernek to learn the name of the * Turkish proverb - lit. By asking, one can find the way to Baghdad; fig. You can reach any goal by proceeding step-by-step.

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specific village. I was fortunate that most people from Yuva inhabit one small spot in a very large city. Still, my research would have taken so much longer if I had not immediately invested in a cell phone. I gave many people from Papazlar my cell phone number and they were kind enough to honor my “strange” request that they give it to anyone they met from Yuva. This is how I made many contacts. Many of the Yuva natives drive taxicabs in Istanbul and they would pass my number along to any co-villager passengers. My other form of contacts was through the derneks. I passed my cell phone number out at meetings and explained what I was doing. I received many calls from people eager to tell me about their experience moving from Yuva to Papazlar, and the experiences of their relatives and co-villagers in New Yuva. This was an excellent way to meet men from Yuva, but it took a lot of work to meet the women. Women do not go to dernek meetings, and they certainly don’t drive taxis! Only when I broke into the more conservative community of Yuva natives was I introduced to migrant women. The men whom most urban secularists would condescendingly refer to as fundamentalists were the ones who were willing to show me their homes and introduce me to their wives and sisters. It was, at times, exhausting to sit through evening after evening of proselytizing. They seemed to want my salvation as much as I wanted their stories. In the end, we were able to strike an effective balance between discussions of Islam and the people’s conversion to an urban lifestyle. My conservative participants were eager to escort me around the city to meet similar and not-so similar people so that I could tell them what I thought about their co-villagers. I spent the first two months of my fieldwork in Papazlar interviewing men in the dernek and women in their homes. I observed the inner workings of the social network of people from Yuva. My intention during this time was also to learn as much as possible about the villages of Yuva, specifically the village Pancar. Once I felt I had enough information about Yuva, I made arrangements to go there. As it turned out, an acquaintance of mine had attended university with the mayor of Giresun. I was received by the mayor, thanks to my contacts in Istanbul. I had the complete cooperation of his assistants in getting to Yuva, 41 km away, and meeting the people I had heard about. In retrospect I can see that the residents of Papazlar were not entirely convinced of my intentions to go

INTRODUCTION

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there and study their friends and family. Nor were they certain that I was merely an anthropologist. I stayed in a hotel in Giresun the first night and traveled to Yuva the following day. No one was ready to extend that famous Turkish hospitality—not until they trusted me. In his study of Brazilian Japanese return migrants, Tsuda explains that the natives’ understanding of the anthropologist is partly informed by the identities that the anthropologist brings to the field, and partly by the pre-existing social roles that seem to apply (2003:10). My reception in the community of Yuva natives was dependent upon my behavior, local stereotypes of women and Americans, and the behavior and reputation of the people who were kind enough to help me. In the initial stages of my research, I was keenly aware of myself as an observed observer. The following illustrates one of the classic difficulties encountered by anthropologists: gaining the trust of one’s participants. I was forced to make my first trip to Yuva in the company of Mustafa C., one of the mayor’s security guards. Since Mustafa was on duty, he was also in uniform. We made our initial foray into Yuva by stopping to meet the mayor of the district, Mehmet Sonbul. He was suspicious when I told him of my plans, but intrigued that an American female would travel alone to the Black Sea for any reason. He volunteered his assistance whenever I needed it and promptly invited me to spend a week in the home of his second wife. I agreed to meet him back at his office at the end of the day. Mustafa and I continued through Yuva by car on a road that was prone to breaking up and sliding into the river below during heavy rains. It was a misty fall day, and most of the people were inside. The people we encountered outside were women gathering wood or picking pancar, which is best translated as beet greens - a Black Sea staple. We stopped to talk with a woman who had a basket full of wood strapped to her back. She was approximately 60 years old, morbidly obese, toothless, and suffering from goiter. When she saw Mustafa’s uniform, she assumed he was there from Giresun to collect taxes. Mustafa introduced me and explained to her that I was looking for families with relatives in America. If there was any subject more taboo than the number of residents per household, it was the number of relatives living in the USA. Her churlish response

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summed up the sentiment of the respondents during my early period in the village: “Yok. Varsa da yok!” (“None. Even if there are, my answer is still ‘none.’”) As it turns out, this woman was the aunt of a migrant I knew in Papazlar. I found out later that two of her sons were in America. On several occasions, I discovered that people were withholding information from me. I found out late in the year that the mayor’s sister, brother-in-law, sister-in-law by marriage, her husband, and their children were all living in America. I learned about this from residents of Papazlar, and the mayor confirmed it. When I asked the mayor why he hadn’t told me, he said he didn’t want to include his family in my book. I found out about many migrants by asking people in Papazlar about Yuva residents, and vice versa. It felt a bit like a game. People would “confess” to knowing if I confronted them with the facts, but they would not always tell me otherwise. I heard from one man in the USA that there had been a big sting operation in Yuva a few years back. The rumor was that an American woman in the USA married a man from the village so he could get a green card. She was working, it was believed, as an undercover agent for the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). She went back to Turkey with him to meet his relatives, and upon returning to America, her husband was arrested at the airport. They were traveling with five or six other villagers who were carrying fraudulent documents. The INS had them deported, and then raided a restaurant in New Yuva that employed people from Pancar. According to village lore, this is how it became difficult for people from Yuva to obtain visas to go to America.12 In visiting approximately thirty villages of Yuva, stopping to knock on doors or talk with people we saw on the road, most people were willing to talk about families other than their own. Yet not one would give me the exact location of their acquaintances in America, or say how long they had been there. According to preliminary informal surveying, everyone went after winning the visa lottery. No one knew of any undocumented migrants. On the trip with Mustafa to the highest village on the border of Yuva and another district, three hours from the Black Sea by car, one muhtar’s (village headmaster) assistant took us to the jewelry shop where, he told us, it would become apparent whose relatives were in America. The jewelry shop is a currency exchange counter that happens to sell gold. All the children come in with dollars

INTRODUCTION

15

in search of lira. These are the children and grandchildren of migrants. Even high up in the mountains, people manage to find a way to get to America. Being so clearly associated with Mustafa C. and the mayor created problems, however. Mustafa’s uniform was intimidating to villagers, and he was considered an outsider in Yuva. The mayor had his own agenda. He wanted to enhance his status by being seen with a foreigner. This was supposed to make up for the fact that he had never traveled to America. (His challenger in the upcoming election was a return migrant who had worked in America for twenty years.) The mayor was happy to take me around to all of the villages of Yuva to meet people. It took us two days of campaign-motivated social calls to reach Pancar, the main sending village of the American community. Far from being problematic, I believe that my gender actually contributed to my ability to move easily between men’s circles and women’s circles. However, it had everything to do with the type of woman I chose to be during that time. I took great care not to mimic the dress of secular urban Turkish women while doing fieldwork. I obviously did not fall into the same category as the women from American television shows—a point of reference for many Turks when imagining American women. The combination of my curiously “Turkish” language skills and my inconspicuous attire made me more familiar than foreign. It was certainly easier for the community to adopt a female than a male. This is what ultimately happened. It did not take long for word to circulate that there was a female student anthropologist attending dernek meetings and visiting the hemflehriler in their homes. They knew I was there to fulfill a requirement for school—in essence, to work. They saw my situation as similar to theirs. I was away from my family, working under difficult conditions, doing what I had to do to maximize my economic potential. I was a migrant just like them! The only confounding factor was my gender. I was female, and yet I was having a typically male life experience. Ultimately, being female worked to my advantage. The men in the community treated me with respect and were concerned about my work because it lent some degree of legitimacy to their own lives. Once they felt that they could trust me, they offered every kind of assistance to help me meet people from the community. I

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eventually blended in at the dernek. The men got used to seeing me there night after night. When they started inviting me home for dinner, I understood the advantages I had as a woman. No western male would have been invited home so quickly to meet the women of the community. It was also advantageous to be known as a married woman. I brought pictures of my family to show people. Everyone knew when I went home to see them in the middle of the year. They gave me gifts to bring home, a party before I left, and they were deliberate in their attempts to cheer me up when I came back to Istanbul. This was clearly an experience with which many people identified. Keeping a low profile was impossible. I did not realize that I had initiated a study that involved so many illegal immigrants, and the migrants in Istanbul were eager to demonstrate the importance of their co-villagers’ presence in America by advertising my project in whatever way possible. Newspaper reporters called my cell phone for interviews. Television crews came to the dernek meetings to film me sitting at a table with people from Giresun. I was forced to stand up and speak at almost every meeting. Yuva natives and journalists alike were anxious to know what I thought of the people, the food, and the Black Sea, and they wanted stories about migrants. My project was described in several prominent newspapers as a study of illegal migrants from Yuva. I never spoke about it in this way, but people who know Yuva know that any study of migrants from Yuva will be a study that involves illegal migrants. People were so eager to see the name of their natal village in the paper that they described my work in a dramatic way. During one of my stays in Giresun, there was a demonstration against Italy for harboring Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the Kurdish People’s Party. Mustafa C. was on duty during this demonstration, and I went with him to observe. While we were walking alongside the parade of protesters, someone handed me a Turkish flag. Several journalists, having noticed my presence at the demonstration, took that opportunity to alert their friends in the camera crew. Here was an American, a friend of the Turkish people and the only foreigner in town besides the Russian prostitutes, marching in support of the Turkish government. It must have been an irresistible story. The television crews came over and started to quiz me on my opinions regarding Italy and Ocalan. What do Americans think?

INTRODUCTION

17

What do Italian-Americans think? The pictures in the newspaper the next day portrayed an American of Italian descent happily marching alongside Turkish demonstrators. I had set out that day to watch the demonstrators. I ended up watching them watch me. I believe what follows is an accurate description and analysis of migration from a small Black Sea sending district to destinations in the USA that are elliptically referred to as “Kennedy Kent” by the migrants themselves. Anthropologists have questioned the curious practice of providing pseudonyms for place names while at the same time supplying maps that make it easy to learn the names of the actual locations (Small 1997). While the practice of veiled disclosure also strikes me as problematic, I use pseudonyms here to protect the people who participated in research for this book. Chapter one examines ethnicity in Turkey and specifically on the Black Sea. It explains regional stereotypes of Black Sea people throughout Turkey, and the different meanings of “Laz.” It briefly examines the history of Giresun province and explains the current conditions in Yuva district and the village of Pancar. Chapter two briefly examines the events leading up to the first wave of migration from Yuva district to the USA. It reveals how the population transfer between Greece and Turkey was the catalyst for Turkish migration from the village of Pancar to America. It gives ethnographic accounts of the original migrant and the three men who first followed him. It examines the relationship between hemflehri, and shows how regional affiliation on the Black Sea transcends even the most rigid ethnic boundaries. Chapter three examines the pattern of migration from the village of Pancar to Papazlar, a gecekondu (shantytown) community in Istanbul. It briefly explains the rise of the gecekondu in urban Turkish areas, the politicization of squatters, and the ruralization of urban areas. Included in chapter three is a description of men’s and women’s daily lives, and how life changes for rural-urban migrants. Furthermore, it explores how categories of foreignness are defined for city dwellers and rural migrants. Chapters four and five reveal how migrants participate in institutions that reaffirm their village ties and regional affiliation. It discusses the notion of concentric spheres of affiliation, and attempts to elucidate how transmigrants maximize their economic potential by engaging in relationships that call upon different aspects of their

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identity. Chapter six looks at the community of transmigrants in New Yuva and Kennedy Kent, USA, their relationships with hemflehri in America and in Turkey, and the influence they exert on the village and the community in Papazlar. Chapter seven looks at the village today, and analyzes the changes that have taken place as a result of the emigration epidemic. This chapter ends with an ethnographic account of the annual yayla (summer mountain pasture) homecoming celebration, which examines the changing meanings and functions of this ancient ritual.

1. LOCATING THE LAZ “Laz hamsi bal›¤› sever.” Black Sea coast people eat anchovies. (Turkish proverb regarding similarity)

Regional affiliation that persists in Turkey today has its roots in the ethnic and religious diversity that was characteristic of the Ottoman Empire. Although Turkish identity is the foundation of the modern nation-state, with the majority of the population being Sunni Muslim, Turkey is home to multiple faiths, ethnicities, and more than thirty languages. This chapter explores the identity of the Laz or the people inhabiting the Black Sea region. It discusses the commonly held national stereotypes of the Laz and shows how regional affiliation overlaps, in the case of people from Yuva, with a superimposed ethnic identity. Finally, it describes daily life in Yuva and the importance of migration to the people who live there. Ethnicity and the Black Sea Turks With the founding of the new Turkish Republic in 1923, Ataturk’s wish was to distance the new country from its Ottoman past, and bring Turkey closer to Europe and the European idea of a nationstate. To that end, fundamental aspects of daily life were radically altered during this period, including the adoption of the Gregorian calendar, changing the weekly day of rest from Friday to Sunday, banning the fez, and promoting secular public life. Linguists invented an alphabet specifically for the Turkish language, and the Arabo-Persian alphabet was effectively banned from public texts within a period of six months after an aggressive nationwide campaign to teach all Turkish citizens, children and adults alike, the

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new Latin alphabet (Lewis 2002). In addition, scholars were assigned the task of finding material evidence that would link ethnic Turks to the civilizations in Anatolia that actually predated the arrival of Turkic tribes to Anatolia (Kinross 1989). Ataturk’s primary aim was for every citizen to identify primarily and exclusively with Turkish national identity. The population of the new republic was already being reconstructed through forced internal migration to repopulate abandoned areas, populations exchanges between Turkey and nations such as Greece and Bulgaria, and in the case of the Armenians in the eastern part of Turkey, deportation.13 In addition to changing the alphabet and reforming the vocabulary in an attempt to reflect a “pure” Turkish linguistic identity, written communication in minority languages was banned. The changes were sudden and radical, and compliance was mandatory throughout the nation. More than eighty years later, the inflexible relationship between state and society has resulted in the slow reemergence of public acknowledgement of ethnic diversity in Turkey. For example, after a long period of the oppression of minority languages and cultures, national television stations are slowly beginning to broadcast Kurdish-language programs, and Alevi holidays are celebrated in public.14 There are still 34 languages spoken throughout the country.15 Each region exhibits its particular manifestation of what it means to be a Turk, based on local ethnic cultural legacies. While there are commonly held stereotypes about people from all areas of the country, Black Sea Turks occupy an interesting and sometimes contradictory position in the national ethos. A basic map of Turkey reveals that the Bosphorus empties out into the Black Sea just above Istanbul. However, the Black Sea region associated in the popular imagination with the Laz begins in Zonguldak, with the eastern region starting with the province of Ordu and running east through Giresun, Trabzon, Rize, and the coastal portion of Artvin. This region is separated from the interior plateau by the Pontic mountans, which run parallel to the Black Sea coastline. The northern slopes descend to the coast and the southern slopes connect to the interior highlands. Travel through this mountain region reveals distinct and separate forms of rural society. Indeed, there is wide variation in architectural styles, clothing, agricultural technique, kinship terms, village settlement patterns and, many other aspects of peasant life. Contact and interac-

LOCATING THE LAZ

21

tion between the inhabitants of the northern and southern slopes is at best intermittent, and it can be said that they live in different worlds.16 The Pontic Mountains also create extreme ecological contrast. While inhabitants of the interior plateau experience significant snowfall and a drier environment, coastal inhabitants experience moderate changes in temperature, more humidity, and more average rainfall than any other region of Turkey. The most widely circulated images in Turkey of life on the Black Sea usually depict men, women, and children in local dress walking under large, black umbrellas. The rain and moderate temperature variation produce a lush coast with extremely dense forests on the high mountain plateaus. Landslides are fairly common in this area of constant rain. An aerial view of the region reveals scattered hamlets as opposed to uninterrupted coastal and mountain settlements. Land is usually planted in a terraced pattern and cultivated by hand, as tractors and farm animals cannot work efficiently on such steep grades. The Black Sea possesses a topography that more closely resembles Georgia, to the east, than the rest of Turkey. The way the inhabitants of this region adapted to their environment has contributed to inland Anatolians’ tendency to distinguish themselves sharply from their northern neighbors. Common Regional Stereotypes Before I made my first journey to the Black Sea, I spent some time in Istanbul quizzing city dwellers about the region. I came to understand that “Laz” has two meanings. The first is “Laz by association.” Most inland Turks identify all Black Sea inhabitants as Laz, not unlike Americans might identify all inhabitants of Appalachia is hillbilly. When they refer to Black Sea inhabitants as Laz, it is an ethnic identity that is generalized to everyone who lives on the coast because the ethnic Laz are historically associated with that area. The term is also used to refer to Turks who occupy the majority of the coast westward from Giresun, which includes Yuva district. According to popular belief among inland Anatolians, all of the people who live on the Black Sea are Laz. The Laz speak a language that is unrelated to Turkish. No one is really sure where the Laz came from, or whether they actually came from anywhere other than where they are, but this doesn’t stop people form hypothesizing that

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they are somehow related to the Celts since they also have bagpipes and fiddles and wear plaid clothing. This argument is easily bolstered by the evidence that many Laz have red hair, blue eyes, and freckled skin. Their lively style of dancing what is called the horon is unlike anything witnessed in other areas of the country. The Laz also enjoy a steady diet of hamsi (anchovies) and cornbread. Inland Turks will report that all Laz tuck weapons into their boots and belts. Laz women reportedly undertake all chores associated with the household and maintaining the land, while the men fish and make pastries as their main professions. While some urban Turks describe Laz men as hard working, it is just as common to hear that they are quite lazy. This is only one of many conflicting Laz stereotypes. Another involves their level of intelligence (as a group, of course). Either all Laz are extremely clever, or all Laz are extremely dim. Whether being described as clever or mentally deficient, the consistent pattern seemed to be that they were always described in terms of extremes, and usually both ends of the spectrum. The most common perception of how the Laz differ from other Turks concerns language. In addition to having their own language, they are viewed as speaking an inferior version of Turkish that shows complete disregard for verb forms and vowel harmony.17 As if that were not enough, they are also believed to be more talkative than the average Turk. Karagöz shadow plays, a popular form of entertainment during Ottoman times, often included the character “Laz,” who is described as [Someone] who comes from the Black Sea coast, is either a boatman, woolbeater, or tin smith. He has a strong Black Sea coast accent. He is very talkative and also speaks quickly. He takes approximately fifteen minutes just to say “hello” and is always very jittery. As he is usually so busy talking himself, he cannot listen to other people or follow what they say and has a habit of becoming angry in a very short time. [The character] Karagoz often has to forcibly close the Laz’s mouth in order to get a word in himself.18 Laz jokes are popular in Turkey. There is even a rumor that Laz jokes originated on the Black Sea. They usually involve the antics of Temel and Dursun, two Laz who always end up in odd situations.19 There are numerous Laz joke books and even websites ded-

LOCATING THE LAZ

23

icated to Laz humor. There are even jokes about Laz immigrants in America: Before Temel left for America, his friend Dursun told him that if he extended the length of the last syllable of each word he spoke, he would have no problems being understood in English. Temel remembered Dursun’s advice, and “Taksiiiiii!” seemed to work just fine when he needed a ride form the airport to the hotel. When he stopped in his first bar, he ordered a drink by saying “Viskiiiiiiii!” He thought to himself, “I’m going to do just fine here.” Cemal, another Laz, was sitting next to him at the bar: Cemal: Laz misuuuuun? (Are you Laaaaaaaz?) Temel: Eveeeeeeet. (Yeeeeeeees) Cemal: Niye ingilizce konusuyoruuuuz? (Then why are we speaking Engliiiiiiiiish?) Another commonly held belief in Turkey is that the majority of overseas labor migrants are Laz. This is difficult to verify because preliminary rural-urban migration distorts the proportion (and origin) of rural migrants who leave Turkey from large urban areas. Giresun, the province examined in my research, is one of the top ten sending communities in Turkey.20 However, as I will explain, the residents of Giresun—and Yuva—are only “Laz” in a certain sense of the word. In addition to being associated with bakeries, it is also common to hear that people from Giresun and Trabzon work in construction when they migrate internally. It is a common belief that there is even a construction “mafya” in Turkey run by people from these Black Sea cities. This ties in with the common—and perhaps, accurate—perception that Black Sea people stick together and help their own. At Karadeniz Taksi on the Golden Horn, I did not find any drivers who were from regions other than the Black Sea. As I will demonstrate later, this clannish behavior is not unique to the Black Sea inhabitants. Rather, it is a function of local regional constructions of “us” and “them,” and the use of social networks that reinforce regional ties and connections. In colloquial Turkish, the term “Laz” is used to refer to all Turks who live on the Black Sea. This conflicts with use of the same term

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to refer to the Black Sea residents who are ethnic Laz and call themselves Lazi.21 The Lazi live at the eastern end of the Black Sea coast, in an area starting in the town of Pazar and continuing to the Choruh River. They are believed to have migrated to the area from pre-Muslim Georgia. They speak Lazuri (Lazca in Turkish), a Caucasian language that is from the Zan subgroup of the Kartvelian language branch and closely related to Mingrelian and Svan.22 As of 1980, there were 92,000 ethnic Lazi in Turkey, 30,000 of whom were monolingual Lazuri speakers.23 Although the majority of Black Sea mountain inhabitants are not ethnic Laz, Meeker describes a Laz-Turk cultural continuum that includes all inhabitants of the Black Sea region, whatever their ethnic origins, as a result of living in the same region and being influenced by neighboring regions. Meeker’s analysis of Black Sea mountain identity shows, for example, how certain Caucasian traits shed light on centuries-old customs of Black Sea mountain society (1970). He mentions several aspects of contemporary life on the Black Sea that are also mirrored in neighboring Black Sea cultures. As Meeker’s analysis of settlement patterns shows, most Anatolian settlements are nucleated, while Black Sea mountain villages are composed of scattered hamlets that sit on hilltops or mountainsides. Typical houses have stone foundations and lower stories built into mountainsides, with wooden upper stories. The bottom floor serves as a winter stable for cattle. During the summer months, the animals are taken to high mountain plateaus called yayla. Black Sea villagers tend to cultivate millet and American corn, similar to other communities of the Southern Caucasus. This differs from wheat, the crop typically cultivated by inland Turks. Meeker points out that Turkish Black Sea mountain communities and the Caucasus share similar characteristics of social organization. Both regions exhibit intense solidarity among patronymic groups “... not typical of the smaller more fragmented patronymic groups of central and western Anatolia” (1970:14). He also mentions the similarities between the tradition of mock abduction associated with marriage ceremonies in the Caucasus and certain rituals involved in traditional Black Sea marriage ceremonies. In addition, he draws a connection between the two regions and their extreme emphasis on female chastity. He notes that in the Caucasus it is clearly a pre-Islamic feature and suggests that the same may hold for the Black Sea region.24 Women of the Caucasus and the

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25

Turkish Black Sea alike are largely restricted to the social contexts of the households to which they belong as wives or unmarried daughters. Although Meeker conducted his study more than thirty years ago, many of his descriptions still apply. Women and men mingle socially only on rare occasions. The typical home is still filled with female friends and relatives during the day, and the men of the house conduct their social affairs in public squares and coffee houses. Women manage the household and most of the chores associated with the cultivation of various crops. The ubiquitous kofin (large basket), called a sepet in Yuva and described in Meeker’s study of Of, is still strapped to women’s backs all along the Black Sea. Black Sea Turks share certain characteristics with Pontic Greeks as well as their neighbors of the Caucasus. In fact, Black Sea Turks are not the only victims of mistaken identification. Mainland Greeks as well as Rum from other areas of Turkey condescendingly referred to Pontic Greeks as “Laz” (Lazoi).25 They were also famous for their blood feuds, their attachment to weapons, their preoccupation with honor and reputation, and their careful attention to female chastity. The Greeks claim ownership of the term “Laz,” and that it is a mispronunciation of “Greece lives!”: ...and it honors the Pontic Greeks’ resistance to the Turks. The etymology involves a tradition that the Turks cut off all the tongues of all the males of one generation of Pontic Greeks which led to their peculiar pronunciation of “Greece lives!”, i.e. “Laz”, and also resulted in their bad accent in Greek. It is interesting that these associations revolve around differentiations of male and female (the women’s tongues were not cut, but they are said to slur their words anyway) and violence. These categories are all closely connected with the Pontic people’s reputation.26 In addition, Pontic Greeks and Black Sea Turks are said to share certain details of folklore, elements of dress, musical instruments, and styles of dance. While these features appear to be related to older Caucasian traditions, their exact origins are difficult to establish. Whatever their origin, Black Sea Turks, Pontic Greeks, and their neighbors of the Caucasus exhibit shared cultural traits that, when taken as a whole, demonstrate similar responses to the

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region they inhabit. The result for Black Sea Turks and Pontic Greeks is a sense of shared experience and lifestyle that easily separates them from their fellow citizens to the south and west. Giresun Province Although it is said that the population west of Trabzon, including my area of inquiry, Giresun province, is predominantly ethnic Turk, inland Turks insist that people from Giresun are Laz.27 They harbor deep beliefs that people from Giresun aren’t trustworthy, second only in this regard to people from Trabzon. “They will help you as long as there’s something in it for them, but once they get what they want from you, you’ll never see them again.” It may well be that Giresun has this particular reputation because it was historically inhabited by Pontic Greeks. Giresun is the modern name for Cerasous, a city founded by colonists from neighboring Sinope in the eighth century B.C.E. Tradition has it that it was from here that Lucullus brought back the cherry tree to Italy, a legend that probably stems from the fact that the Latin word for cherry is cerasus. There appears, however, to be no basis for this story. The classical name for the city was revived in the Byzantine era and was used by local Greeks up until 1923, when they were deported from Turkey in the population exchange that followed the Greco-Turkish war of 1919-1922. The former Greek Orthodox church of St. Nicholas in the lower town has been restored and is now open as an ethnography museum. The Greek sea captains of the town in times past left offerings here in the form of models of their ships, in thanksgiving to St. Nicholas, their patron saint. With the exception of the St. Nicholas church and a couple of old homes, all remnants of Giresun’s multiethnic past are gone. There is some question as to whether all of the Christians left or just blended in. In the past ten years, Giresun has come to experience a new wave of ethnic diversity. For the past four decades, the province has been a top sending community for labor migrants in larger urban areas as well as abroad. The city population is approximately 500,000, with an estimated 1.5 million natives of Giresun merkez (administrative center) working in Istanbul. While Giresun does not offer employment opportunities to Turkish laborers, it is a common destination for suitcase merchants coming from Georgia, Ukraine, and Russia. According to local Giresun officials, suitcase merchants

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have had a presence all along the Black Sea since the collapse of the Soviet Union. They typically travel to Turkey bringing goods to sell in the Turkish bazaars, and returning from Turkey with goods to sell at home. The suitcase merchants are mostly female and range widely in age. I saw grandmothers as well as young women selling their goods at the bazaar. There are two types of open markets in Turkey. One is a revolving market, which is in a different location each day of the week; the other is the sabit pazarı, which roughly translates as “stationary market.” (In Istanbul, there are several historic and popular stationary markets, such as the spice bazaar and the covered bazaar.) On the Black Sea, the ubiquitous Rus pazarı (Russian bazaar) attracts many curious visitors. It is not so much that the products or the low prices are particularly interesting. The curiosity revolves around the women selling the products, and the possibility that these women are also selling themselves. The Rus pazarı in Giresun started out as a small, revolving market. A few years ago, the city built a permanent structure for a stationary Rus pazarı. Merchants rent their stalls on a monthly or weekly basis. These stalls are transformed at night into makeshift sleeping areas. After the market closes at 6 p.m., women pull down their metal shutters, or just pull curtains over their tables, and out come the hotplates for cooking and the mattresses for sleeping. They have tiny televisions, electric heaters, and portable radios. They eat canned food and drink instant coffee. I came to know some of the suitcase merchants through my friend Mustafa. He would make his rounds at the market in the evening to make sure no one was harassing the women. They were friendly and obviously trusted him. I went with him on several occasions and listened to him talk to the women about their families in the former Soviet Union. The women at the Rus pazarı in Giresun were mainly from Georgia. Many of had been widowed during the civil war and were trying to support their children. I met several women from Russia, one whose son was in New York studying to be a dentist. She was passing time, waiting for him to bring her over. None of the other women seemed to have any feeling about America as a viable destination. They were thankful to be able to come to Turkey and eke out what living they could as suitcase merchants. Business was always better in Turkey than on “the other side.” Turks in Giresun adhere to sweeping generalizations about for-

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eign women, and “Russian” women in particular. They do not differentiate between Russians and Georgians, or between suitcase merchants and prostitutes. All of the women are “Russian” and all of them are definitely Nataflalar (lit. “Natashas”), which is slang throughout Turkey for Russian prostitute.28 There are indeed foreign women working as prostitutes in Giresun, but not all of them are Russian. They dress differently from the suitcase merchants. They wear more makeup. They are found in a different part of town. I was unable to locate a single woman who engaged in both trades. The prostitutes and the suitcase merchants did not criticize one another. They understood that war, national bankruptcy, and civil unrest all put women in situations that they would never choose for themselves, whether they were selling their bodies or selling portable radios and sleeping on a mattress in a marketplace in some foreign country away from their children. They were surviving the best way they could. All hotels in Turkey have multilingual signs in the rooms with instructions on how to proceed in the event of fire or an earthquake. Along the Mediterranean and the Aegean, these signs are in German, English, French, and, only recently, Russian. On the Black Sea coast, especially around Trabzon, the signs have been in Russian and Georgian the longest, and the information pertains to hotel policies regarding room usage. One gets the impression that every hotel is also a brothel. The Black Sea coast, for the time being, seems to be draped in a permanent fog of illicit behavior that is largely associated with foreign women. As for Yuva, it has its own seedy association with the sex trade. There is a brothel on the road between Yuva and Giresun, and it is owned by two brothers from Yuva. Many of their clients are from Yuva, and according to village gossip, the current mayor should have his own room there. I went to the brothel one night with Mustafa. It sits back from the road on a hill facing the Black Sea. The brothel looks like a restaurant from the road. The rooms are behind the restaurant in a smaller building. The women are of different ages and from different countries. Most of them speak broken Turkish. None of them wanted to be seen speaking to the resident anthropologist. Yuva District Yuva is commonly described as the poorest district in Giresun

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province. It has experienced consistent poverty-driven population loss for at least sixty years. The movement started when residents of the province of Giresun experienced famine due to several consecutive years of bad crops. People left the villages and moved to larger cities in Turkey such as Istanbul, Ankara, and Bursa. In the 1960s, Giresun successfully applied to have its residents included in the international labor agreements between Turkey and various countries in Europe. Most of the participating residents of the city of Giresun went to Germany. Some villages of Yuva sent laborers to Germany, but there are others whose workers went exclusively to Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. During the same period of time, significant population movement continued within Turkey, from Yuva to urban areas such as Istanbul, Gebze, and Bursa. Migration to America from the Black Sea originated from a village in Giresun’s Yuva district. Since Yuva has only been an independent sub-district for less than a decade, Yuva’s vital statistics and records were combined in surveys of another sub-district, which makes it difficult to understand the nature of demographic changes in the area. The fact that other sub-district is coastal further complicates any attempts to draw plausible conclusions about Yuva’s demographic history. Coastal inhabitants often engage in fishing and other activities that are not an option for those who live in the mountains. The diet is different on the coast, housing is different, and the relationship between coastal towns and the city of Giresun differs for those districts sitting on the main highway. The population of Yuva district in 1967 was 24,672, while Pancar village had a population of 555. As of 1995, Yuva contained a merkez population of roughly 4,500 and approximately 22,000 for the 31 villages of Yuva district. Pancar had 1,250 people listed as residents of the village in 1995. As I found out, official tallies did little to clarify the reality of the village population. Of Pancar’s 243 homes, only twenty were occupied during the winter. The home with the highest number of occupants contained five people. Yuva is a pseudonym for the name people use to refer to their natal land. It is a pseudonym for a district, not an individual village. People did not speak of their village, Pancar, when they spoke of life in the village. They spoke about life in Yuva and it was understood that they were talking about life in one of the villages of Yuva. Perhaps this way of identifying home has to do with the fact that village lives spill over into the merkez, or center of Yuva.

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Children from all over Yuva come to school in the merkez and women buy and sell goods at the open market every Friday in the center of Yuva. The post office and the doctor’s office are both in the merkez, which sits at the bottom of the valley on both banks of the Yuva River. People have to come down from the mountains to access these services, as well as to exchange money at Ali Seyahat’s jewelry shop, to socialize at the coffeehouse, and to buy bread or baskets for harvesting. The village closest to the merkez is Akarl›, and it takes half an hour to travel there on foot. The village at the other end of the district is three hours away by car. There is one other merkez in Kufltepe, 2.5 hours by car from the center of Yuva. Many of the locals run errands and make purchases by frequenting that location instead of coming all the way to Yuva merkez. When people speak of traveling to the merkez, they do not refer to it as the city. Going to the city means going to Giresun, or even Istanbul. If people need to go to the post office or the doctor, or anywhere else at the bottom of the valley, they speak of going to the merkez. Yuva is a mountainous district. The villages cover large areas of steep terrain, and the houses are spread out. The people who live midway up the mountain and lower engage primarily in agricultural activities. The most common crops are corn, hazelnuts, and cabbage. Houses typically sit right above the fields belonging to the family. The people who live higher up, where the terrain is steeper and less amenable to planting, are typically involved in animal husbandry. While this division of labor is generally based on geography, it is also determined by the amount of land one owns. Inhabitants of the lower villages who do not own land also engage in animal husbandry. Furthermore, households that are supported by one type of labor will often engage in the other out of necessity. Sheepherders also grow crops for their household, and croppers usually own a few animals to produce wool for their clothing and dairy products. In cases where croppers have animals that need to be taken to pasture in the spring and summer months, some villagers exchange plateau access for crops. Others must rent time on the plateau. They pay kirtil, or land tax, to the owner. The price depends on the size of the land and the length of the season. Due to the steepness of the terrain, all of the harvesting, sowing, pruning, and planting are done by hand—mostly female hands. There are no threshers or tractors in Yuva. People use mules for

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carrying any loads too large to fit in a sepet, a large woven basket that women wear strapped to their backs during agricultural work. Sheepherders and croppers live according to slightly different schedules. For the people higher up on the mountain, the busiest months are between April and August. By April, the snow has usually dissipated enough for herders to make their initial trip up to the yayla, or plateau, to bring the animals to pasture. The entire family goes together on foot, leading the animals up the winding paths of the mountain. According to the older generations in Yuva, it was not uncommon in past decades to see entire extended families or even whole villages converging on the same yayla. Depending on which plateau a family uses, the journey can take anywhere from two to four days.29 Men and women pack supplies onto their mules in preparation for the journey. They bring enough provisions to feed their families during the journey and for several weeks thereafter. The young children do not have any responsibilities during the ascent to the plateau. The parents tend to the animals as the children follow alongside the mules. Right before sunset, the families stop and set up tents. They drive stakes into the ground and tie up their animals for the night. Sometimes the day’s journey ends at a kelif (a preexisting stone structure with four walls and no roof).30 The family uses a felt covering weighted down with large stones. The kelif is used as a large sleeping area for the entire family. After preparing the sleeping area, the woman builds a fire and prepares food for her family. At sunrise, the family packs its belongings, unties the sheep, and resumes the journey up the mountain. Each day is the same until the family reaches the plateau. Yayla göçü, or migration to the plateau, is an annual ritual for all inhabitants of the Black Sea Mountains. The families who grow hazelnuts, corn, and cabbage also travel to the mountaintops for some time every year. After the second corn harvest, which roughly falls in the last two weeks of July, farming families pack their provisions in a similar fashion and head up the winding roads to spend some time relaxing with their families before hazelnut harvest begins in mid-August. It is a time to enjoy the clean air and the idle company of one’s relatives. When migrants in Istanbul express their ambivalence about urban life and its schedule that seems to ignore the seasons, they usually mention the nostalgia they feel during yayla season. When Black Sea migrants in America

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talk about returning to Turkey for vacation, they do not mention the Aegean coast or the Mediterranean beaches. They speak of returning to the mountains, their mountains, to make the annual pilgrimage to the plateau. This annual migration that was a vital part of their transhumant past continues to shape their annual journeys back to the village, no matter where they happen to be working. Traveling up to the plateau is now a way of reaffirming village ties and reconnecting with the mountainous region that is their home. The inhabitants of Pancar, my village of inquiry, were farming families. Houses in Pancar sat at the top of cabbage fields and hazelnut groves. My first stay in the village fell between harvesting periods. It was beneficial to see the village during the cold months, when most of the houses were empty and the families were in Istanbul. This was the annual slow season. Older people went to Istanbul for the winter months to be with their families. Only people who had no home of their own in Istanbul or did not migrate were present. This included the families of migrants who had not yet established a residence in the city, and families with no relatives who migrated within Turkey. Of Pancar’s 243 houses, only 20 were steadily occupied throughout the winter months. Migration has changed the appearance of the village. Of Pancar’s 243 homes, 130 can be described as standard village homes that one sees all over Yuva. The standard village home has one floor. If it is constructed out of wood, and the wood is left in its natural color. The roofs on wood houses are usually tin. If the house is constructed from cement or cinderblock, which many of the newer standard village houses are, it is painted white and may have blue trim around the windows. The standard village homes have a fireplace in the main room, which is off of the kitchen, and a stove for cooking. The other rooms of the house are not heated in the winter, and everyone sleeps in the main room for warmth. All of the homes in Pancar have electricity, and most have indoor plumbing with a Turkish-style toilet. All of the homes that have not been completely abandoned have satellite dishes for television, even those that are wood and look as if they might fall over in a strong wind. The remaining 113 homes are the newly constructed, multistory homes of absentee villagers, or Amerikanc›lar.31 These new homes are often constructed next to the migrant’s former home. I often

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thought this was a way for villagers to compare the migrant’s former socioeconomic status with his new status as a labor migrant. The new homes are either brick or cement, and they are typically three stories high. ‹hsan Ard›n’s home will have three stories when it is finished, and Ferit Yahyao¤lu’s home has three as well. When I went into Ferit’s new village home, which sits next to the one he lived in as a child, I was struck by the similarity of its interior to plush homes in urban Turkey. Ferit’s house had baseboard heating and two western toilets. It was completely carpeted, with the exception of the kitchen and a small tiled entranceway where people customarily remove their shoes before proceeding any further. Ferit’s salon had a couch, two chairs, a coffee table, and area lighting. There was also a large cabinet with glass doors used for tea sets and dishes for entertaining. In the living room, which is more for family than for guests, there was a huge television. Ferit’s television was the largest in the village. The television was the object of orientation in the living room. The couch and the chairs were definitely arranged for optimum viewing. There were six bedrooms and two bathrooms on the second and third floors. One Turkish-style toilet was located off of the kitchen. There was no dining room. Ferit and his wife usually ate at the table in the kitchen, or in the living room in front of the television. When they had guests, they would pull out small individual-sized tables for their guests to eat on in the salon. Ferit’s house was built with the intention of providing a constant view of the adjacent mountainside, the mountains behind it, and the valley below. Although the Black Sea mountain region is not known for its sunny climate, Ferit’s house captured a lot of natural light. This was one of the most remarkable differences between old homes and new homes in the village. The older homes had small windows and were generally dark. The new homes were extremely bright on the inside. Aside from the 243 houses, the village of Pancar contained one mosque and a one-room elementary school that had been shut down some years earlier due to a decrease in the number of children. During the year, the village’s six school-aged children attended the school in Yuva merkez. A paved road leads to the village from the center of Yuva, but the roads going through the village are unpaved. There was no communal space in the village besides the village well, mostly frequented by women and children, and

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the mosque, which was male space. Women gathered in each other’s homes and men went to the center of Yuva to socialize. Children used the area in front of the closed elementary school as a makeshift playground. When men gathered, they did so at the jewelry store of Ali Seyahat, the mayor’s office, or the coffeehouse. During the warmer months, men would sit around a flimsy card table on crates and plastic chairs outside the general store. I noticed that men usually frequented only one place. They would greet each other in passing, and perhaps stay to talk for a few minutes, but the people who gathered at the jewelry store did not usually stay long at the mayor’s office and vice versa. The political orientation of the mayor’s office regulars depended on who the mayor happened to be at the time. When Ibrahim was mayor, the usual visitors were members of ANAP (Anavatan Partisi, or Motherland Party, said to be slightly to the right of center), the party of Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz. After fiükrü became mayor, the men visiting were supporters of his party, MHP (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, or Nationalist Movement Party). The old ANAP crowd migrated to the coffeehouse. Women in the Village Women in Black Sea villages are known all over Turkey as hard workers. Urban Turks say that the women do all of the work because the men are all working in Germany. The women in the village say they do all of the work because the men are at the merkez all day. It was interesting to start the morning off in the merkez and take note of the men sitting and talking in the jewelry shop or in front of the basket maker’s shop and then to go to the village and see the women doing domestic and agricultural chores. Even when the men are in the village and unemployed, home is a female place during the day. Home is for women and children. Men spend much of their time out of the house. Fevziye wakes up with the morning ezan (call to prayer) to a dark sky and a quiet house. After her prayers, she goes out to feed the goats and chickens. She makes breakfast for her husband and children, ages 10, 7, and 5. Breakfast is often leftovers from dinner—some lahana çorbası (cabbage soup), a little mısır ekme¤i (cornbread), and börek (a layered casserole of soft cheese and filo dough). After putting breakfast on the table and waking the children for school, Fevziye begins to tidy up the sleeping area, while

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being close by to fill everyone’s tea glasses during breakfast. During the winter, the entire family sleeps in the living room near the potbellied stove. Even though the fire is put out before bedtime, the room stays warmer than the rest of the house. The beds consist of pullout couches and cotton mattresses on the floor with large comforters. The couches are returned to their daytime forms, and Fevziye carries each mattress into the bedroom. Fevziye does some light housekeeping while waiting for her husband and older children to leave the house. Hakan is unemployed, and he goes to the coffeehouse to read the paper and socialize with the other men during the day. The children get on the bus that takes them to the K-7 school in the merkez. The youngest child stays with Fevziye. She begins her chores by taking the carpets outside to clean. She hangs them over the branch of a tree and hits them with a broom to rid them of the dust and crumbs from the previous day. While she is doing this, her sister-in-law Fatma comes to the house. She stops to offer her tea. Fatma helps Fevziye carry the rugs inside and then finds a seat on the couch to begin her needlework. Fevziye cleans the house while Fatma keeps an eye on Arzu, Fevziye’s youngest child. After the noon prayer, Fevziye and Fatma go to the home of her mother-in-law and prepare a lunch of ›s›rgan (stinging nettle) puree, pancar corbas› (beet green soup), yogurt, and bread. Hakan comes for lunch and leaves again. After lunch, Fevziye leaves Arzu with Fatma and her mother-in-law to go collect wood. She puts on the sepet and goes into the dense wooded area near her house to gather fallen branches for the stove. It takes more than two hours to fill the large basket, and the wood will be gone in three days. On the way home, she stops to get Arzu. The other children arrive from school shortly thereafter. After the mid-afternoon prayer, other female relatives come to Fevziye’s house and help her prepare food. The women are sisters and cousins from Hakan’s side of the family. The ones who don’t help with making yufka (the thin dough used in börek) will sit and knit or make lace goods. No one sits idly. The boys play outside and Arzu stays inside with the women. The older she gets, the more she will be included in the activities of the house. Hakan eventually comes home for dinner just before the evening prayer. After the prayer, the family eats. Hakan watches television while the women clean the kitchen and serve tea. The visitors leave

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before the last prayer of the day. Women take turns helping one another in the village. Depending on the season, the woman will either go to harvest tealeaves, pick corn, pick hazelnuts, gather beet greens, gather wood, or take the livestock out to feed. Village women are responsible for all of the above-mentioned tasks. (Men only participate in agricultural activities during intense harvesting periods, and then only with crops that can be sold, such as hazelnuts and corn and sometimes cabbage.) When women are not traveling from one spot to another with large bundles of wood strapped to their backs or gathered in the ever present sepet, they are inside, making yogurt, yufka for hamsi böre¤i, cheese, misir ekmegi, pancar corbasi, or ›s›rgan, which is said to cure cancer and allergies. Cooking is a collaborative effort among female relatives. The husband’s female kin visit each other on a daily basis if distance permits. When a woman walks into her sister-in-law’s house, she is offered tea and something to eat. Shortly thereafter, she rolls up her sleeves and starts to help with whatever domestic chore is being performed—tidying up, making yufka, or making lace goods. Most women travel from home to home with a bag full of needles, string for lace and yarn for knitting. Idle hands are frowned upon for Turkish women, and when they aren’t serving someone else with their labor, they are creating handmade goods for a trousseau or for the weekly bazaar. Some women make colorful socks, lace doilies and table runners, tablecloths, booties, and knitted trim for towels. They sell these items at the weekly bazaar, or they save them for home use, or their daughter’s trousseau. Selling these items at the bazaar does not yield a huge profit. Most village women produce handicrafts so there is very little demand for these items. Sometimes the women travel to the bazaar in Giresun to sell their goods there, or they get orders from their relatives in Istanbul or America to make a tablecloth. It is common practice for women to send handmade goods to their relatives in New Yuva. Village women have busy, task-oriented lives. They hear about the difference between their lives in the village and the lives of their co-villagers in Istanbul—or in America. What they don’t learn from direct contact with migrants, they observe from the television that is usually on. Televisions are in every home in the village. There are televisions in the restaurant in town as well as the coffeehouse. Women watch television as they knit, prepare food,

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clean, and visit each other. Turkish movies in which characters act out the cultural clashes between villagers and city dwellers are numerous. There are also shows that tell the story of return migrants’ difficult reentry into Turkish society, such as Gurbetçiler and Almanc›lar (both terms currently used to refer to Turks in Germany). Along with the stereotypical Turkish dramas, Dynasty and Beverly Hills 90210 attract many village viewers. Impressions of America The women in the village were eager to meet me and wanted to have me in their homes so they could learn more about America. They wanted the chance to confirm or debunk the stories they heard through village gossip. Was it possible that a teenage girl could have her boyfriend sleep with her in her parents’ house? When did I lose my virginity? Did my husband care? Is it true that women cheat on men? Is it true that when Americans get divorced, the woman gets a lot of money? Are people really preoccupied with taking each other to court? What are black people like? Why do Puerto Ricans let their daughters wear makeup to school? All of these questions led me to ask people what they “knew” about America. Everyone in the village—admittedly not a high number during the winter months—knew something about America. This knowledge came from their conversations with migrants, with other villagers about migrants, and from television. The first and most obvious observation was that the standard of living in America was higher than in Yuva. They saw large houses on television and heard about them from their contacts in America. Everyone seemed to have seen the photograph of co-villager fiükrü “Larry” Elmalı standing in front of a mansion. fiükrü implied when he wrote home that this was his mansion. Other migrants later found that the limo in front of the mansion was his and the mansion belonged to one of his clients. fiükrü/Larry does quite well as a limo driver, but not that well. ‹hsan Ardin’s sons are wealthy enough to have large homes with swimming pools, and several of Ferit Yahyao¤lu’s children own homes in Kennedy Kent. The men who were still living year round in the village were only there because they had not yet figured out a way to get to the USA. It was generally understood that villagers in America worked extremely long hours. Upward mobility was available to all people who were willing to work hard. This impression was usually fol-

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lowed by some comparison of hard-working Turks with lazy zenciler, a pejorative term for blacks. Blacks were poor because they were lazy and deviant. Villagers had heard talk of blacks on welfare, blacks in prison, and blacks holding up the gas stations and diners of their co-villagers. How could an entire race of people in America decide not to live by the system? It was inconceivable to villagers that there would be two different Americas, just as there are two different Turkeys. All they knew was that their co-villagers were there doing work that no one else would do. It was also confusing to hear about ethnically diverse communities in America and not see them on shows like Friends. While villagers knew America was a land of immigrants, they were shocked to learn from their co-villagers that these immigrants included Indians, Pakistanis, Arabs, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Guatemalans. They were accustomed to thinking of America as a white, Western country, like a second Europe (where Turks are now the largest ethnic minority). They had heard stories of Turkish children attending school with Puerto Rican girls who were allowed to date and wear makeup at a very young age. They knew of fiükrü/Larry’s live-in relationship with a woman from the Dominican Republic. They often compared Latinas in the USA with Russians in Turkey. Villagers knew about white America from watching television. Their migrant co-villagers had not settled in established white American communities and thus could not offer them much information on that sector of American society. They had the impression that white American men were usually wealthy and white American women mostly thin and blonde. White American couples neglected their children and focused all of their energy on making money. This is why white Americans had such a high divorce rate.32 To villagers, America is a place with no customs or traditions (“Amerika’da örf ve adet yok.”), and Americans a people with no customs or traditions. No one lives in a village, no one stays married, and people even change their religion—unthinkable for a villager. Turks in the USA, however, do not become American, villagers say. Just as it was possible to be in Istanbul without being a city dweller, it was possible for their co-villagers to be proper Turks in America. Although the general impression was that Americans are experiencing a type of collective identity/morality crisis, it was still considered a better place to live than Turkey. Everything was thought

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to be easier there. Even working hard was easier because there was work to be done. The women in the village expressed little hesitation about the desire to move to the USA. While many studies have shown village women to be extremely attached to their village environment, these women felt they would benefit from moving. They are ready to leave the village as soon as the opportunity arises. Migration and Marriage in Yuva Meeker observed that in the Black Sea village he studied, marriages are arranged “by the respective fathers of the girl and boy... it is unlikely that men are, as a rule, greatly influenced by the opinion of their wives” (1970: 207). By contrast, in Ilcan’s study of a Black Sea village she calls Saklı, she notes that marriages are negotiated by two households. In particular, she writes, “... women’s informal marriage negotiations tend to be influential. Local women are very active in the search for brides and tend to seek out women with whom they can get along (1993: 241).” Other ethnographic works (Magnarella 1974, Delaney 1991, Pierce 1960) support Ilcan’s observation. My own research indicates the arrangements are initiated by women, negotiated primarily by women, and supervised by women. After the mothers have decided that the union will be auspicious, the fathers are brought up to speed and expected to take over. Fathers, in other words, enter the process at the end, when it is time to talk about bafllık (bride price). Potential brides in Yuva must be virgins. It is best if they are young. It helps if they are attractive, but it is more important for them to be handy around the house and hard workers in the fields. It is convenient if they live on neighboring land, so that the husband’s family can use their fields. It is even better if they are extended kin, so that the fields remain in the family. It is easier if the mothers of the couple get along well. It is mandatory that the young bride be willing to submit to the will of her new husband and mother-in-law. As to the potential groom, he must come from a decent family. Ideally, he should be in the market for his first bride, not an additional one. He should be a hard worker. His family should be able to pay the bafllık. Although few scholars have addressed the topic, it is clear that migration has affected marriage arrangements in rural Turkey in a number of ways. When migration became a real possibility for the

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men and women of Yuva in the mid-1980s, villagers amended their criteria for potential spouses. Today, the most important factor appears to be the degrees of separation between the potential spouse and an American green card. The ideal groom is either a migrant himself or the son, grandson, brother, or nephew of a migrant. If he is a migrant, it is more desirable that he be legalized and not one who got to America by jumping ship or crawling through the woods to cross the border. The obvious logic here is that legal migrants can supply a more stable source of income than those who have to rely on working under the table and not getting caught. It does not matter what his initial status in America was, or how he came to own a legitimate green card. These factors do not affect the migrant’s ability to earn money once he is legal. Return migrants who have green cards are desirable spouses because they are all thought to be wealthy. Suspicions of wealth are easily confirmed by a quick inventory of the migrant’s material possessions— a car, jewelry, central heat, indoor plumbing, a three-story house. Return migrants who were deported and forbidden to return to the USA are considered unsuccessful and potentially unproductive. Transnational mobility can make the ugliest, poorest villager seem like a prince.33 A man who is old, unintelligent, and unattractive can marry the youngest, prettiest girls in the village as long as he is able to send her money from America or take her with him. Likewise, access to the new colony can transform an unattractive girl into a highly desirable bride. If a woman has migrants in her immediate family, or if she has a green card and can travel easily to the USA, the idea is that she will be able to bring some of that mobility to her husband’s family. Perhaps she can get her husband into America, along with all of his male relatives. This ability can cancel out a woman’s age, unattractiveness, and even her indiscreet behavior. During one of my first evenings at the Sonbul household, ‹brahim’s sisters and second wife were inquiring about my family. I pulled out pictures to show them my partner and stepson, father and stepmother, mother and stepfather, brother and second wife, and half sister. They were happy to learn that my sister was unmarried. Feride Sonbul asked me if my sister would consider marrying her son, even if only for money, so that he could go to America and work. Feride’s son was only sixteen, and my sister was 23 at the time. It didn’t bother Feride that my sister was seven years older

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than her son, that they did not have a common language in which to communicate, or that my sister was a Rockette in Las Vegas and a shameless infidel. Only one thing mattered to Feride Sonbul at that point in the conversation, and she seemed to have the full support of the other women in the room. My sister could help her son get to America. From that point onward, village women would start conversations by asking about my sister. When would she be coming to visit? Could I convince her to marry a Turk? Ultimately I was able to turn the conversations around to get women to talk about marriage arrangements—with the understanding that my sister was strictly off limits. Emine Gül lives in Pancar with her husband Okay. They married when Emine was 16 and Okay was 17. They are now 31 and 32, with four children. The oldest, Mustafa, is 15 years old. His youngest sibling, Ayse, is 7 years old. Emine has already found a young bride for Mustafa. She and her neighbor promised their children to each other when they were barely old enough to walk. According to Emine, she and Nilüfer were pregnant at the same time. They joked about having children who would one day marry each other. The negotiations started as light, casual conversations between two pregnant neighbors. When the babies were born, they played together. They grew up together. This was an opportunity for Emine to monitor the young girl’s behavior and see if she would be a compatible match for Mustafa. Likewise, Nilüfer was able to see what kind of person Mustafa would become. Just as important would be her assessment of Emine as a potential mother-in-law for her daughter. Since Emine and Nilüfer were friends, the decision was an easy one. Mustafa and Hülya would marry when they became young adults. Okay is not a migrant, but his brother and nephew both work in Kennedy Kent. The details regarding their status as immigrants are sketchy, and this leads me to believe that they are working illegally in the USA When people have relatives with green cards, they usually have very detailed stories to tell about how they went to America with fraudulent documents, worked under the table, and emerged victorious years later as legitimate laborers. Sometimes they tell stories about the day someone learned he had won the visa lottery.34 In short, if they have progress or success to report, they usually do so openly. But in spite of their precarious status in

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America, Okay’s brother and nephew represent hope to Nilüfer. Perhaps Mustafa will be able to go to America, too. Maybe he will eventually be able to bring Hülya. If Hülya works, maybe she can send some money home. Maybe Mustafa and Hülya will build a big house in the village, or maybe they can send money for Hülya’s family to add some floors to their own house. More than likely, most remittances that are sent will go to Mustafa’s family, since Hülya will be considered a member of Mustafa’s household after marriage. Mustafa is in the ninth grade. He is a bright boy, but he does not put a lot of effort into his schoolwork. His uncle and cousin have managed to make good money in Kennedy Kent pumping gas. He assumes he will be able to take part in what has become the traditional livelihood of the village—making do in America. Getting there, he has learned, is only a matter of logistics. Either God will help him and he will win the visa lottery, or his community will help him by paying the money for documents that will get him out of the country. Where he will land is up to the people who sell the documents. Perhaps he will go straight to New Yuva. It is also possible that he will have to follow in the footsteps of so many who have already made the journey, passing through the woods at an undisclosed location to cross the US-Canadian border on foot. It should be clear by now that many village people make farreaching assumptions about the future of their children. These assumptions are largely based on migrants’ narratives. Nilüfer’s hopes for Hülya are based on stories she has heard from Emine and other villagers regarding Mustafa’s uncle and cousin in America. The only certainty at the time of this writing is that Mustafa and Hülya will marry each other when they are old enough. It is difficult to know for sure if, or how, Mustafa’s intentions to migrate will be realized. His uncle and cousin could both be deported. If his uncle is working the typical eighteen-hour day, he could be one of the men who come back to Yuva young enough to keep working but too exhausted to manage. In some instances when men succeed in getting to New Yuva or Kennedy Kent, they can only stand to work for a few years before they are physically and mentally exhausted. They usually return to the village to rest. Even if Mustafa succeeds in getting to America, there is no guarantee that he will be able to bring Hülya immediately—or at all.

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Recent history has revealed a fairly common pattern of the solitary migrant male leaving his family back in the village. This is especially true for illegal migrants going to America. Nilüfer is willing to assume that Mustafa will experience some degree of success. The best possible outcome would be for Mustafa to get to America and send for Hülya. Her assumptions are far-reaching, indeed. She believes Mustafa will then build a house in the village and Hülya will send money to her family. They will return to the village during yayla season, and more often if possible. The situation could play out in any number of ways. Another possibility is that Mustafa will go to America and Hülya will move to Istanbul/Papazlar to enjoy a non-agrarian life and be close to co-villagers. If Mustafa makes enough money, Hülya will not have to work and she will be able to return to the village for the summer. Perhaps Hülya’ parents will be able to secure a residence in Papazlar through Hülya and Mustafa. If they do establish a home in Istanbul, it is certain that Emine, Mustafa’s mother, will eventually spend winters there. There were a couple of worst-case scenarios that no one wanted to think about. One involves Mustafa leaving Hülya behind and never coming home. This is not unheard of in the village. Hülya would be suspended in motion, unable to live her life as a free adult female. Married women who are abandoned by their migrant husbands, while the object of much pity, are under constant scrutiny. Many Turkish television movies involve stories of village women whose husbands have been working for years in Germany without returning. The children are ridiculed; the wives are at once helpless and dangerous. Emine and Nilüfer like to think that the community in Kennedy Kent exercises a certain amount of authority in this situation. Indeed, the men who desert their families have to travel far from Kennedy Kent to avoid physical harm. Most men feel that taking a lover is a necessity, and infidelity is a consequence of having to be away from home. Complete abandonment of one’s family is considered treason. Nevertheless, it still happens. The other possibility is that Mustafa will simply fail. He may be deported. He may never actually make it to America. Nilüfer is not basing her choice of son-in-law on any known fact. She is basing her choice on the possibility that fate may look kindly upon Mustafa, and that Hülya and her family will be included in this success. Yuva is 41 kilometers east of Giresun, and 12 kilometers inland.

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The people from Yuva, while they consider their land to be attached to the Giresun municipality in some way, feel that they are completely different from the people of Giresun. The feeling is mutual for city dwellers. The city people of Giresun thought I was crazy for going to Yuva. They warned me that the homes would be dirty and that the people are uneducated. They have the same attitudes about villagers that people in Istanbul have about all people on the Black Sea. Of course, these are the things people “know” about their entire country without ever having seen it. The Black Sea is just another region attached to another stereotype. It seems to occupy the same category in Turkish minds that Appalachia occupies in American minds. In my field notes, I started to refer to it affectionately as “Kenturkey.”

2 FORCED MIGRATION: CLEANSING THE PONTUS “Consuls Bergfeld in Samsun and Schede in Kerasun report of displacement of local population and murders. Prisoners are not kept. Villages reduced to ashes. Greek refugee families consisting mostly of women and children being marched from the coasts to Sebasteia. The need is great.” German Ambassador Kuhlman to German Chancellor Hollweg, December 13, 1916.

Origins of Current Migration In order to understand the origins of the current pattern of migration from Yuva to other areas, it is essential to examine the events that unfolded much earlier in the Ottoman Empire and surrounding areas. This chapter describes the social position of Pontic Greeks in the Ottoman Empire during the time when the idea of the Turkish nation-state was taking shape. It shows how the national agenda of achieving an ethnically homogeneous Turkish Republic played out on local levels in an ethnically diverse land, specifically the Black Sea region of Turkey. The account of Lefter Çember, the Rum refugee whose departure from Yuva ultimately acted as a catalyst for chain migration from Yuva to the USA, is not unique. Similar stories are presented here to illustrate the plight of Pontic Greeks in general in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire: flight, forced migration, and a lingering attachment to their ancestral land. McCarthy describes the period from 1878 to 1912 as one of unparalleled internal peace and steady population growth for

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Anatolian Muslims as well as Christians (1983:117). With the introduction of the railroad and improved roads, food could be distributed more evenly throughout the Empire to prevent famine. There were no significant plague epidemics during this time, and wars that involved Anatolian soldiers were not fought on Anatolian soil. McCarthy estimates that the ethnically diverse population of Anatolia grew at an average 1.1% annually after 1878 (1983:118). September 1911 marked the beginning of an eleven-year period of war and population loss for Anatolia.35 War reached eastern Anatolian soil during the Ottoman-Russian war of 1914, and was soon followed by Armenian and Nestorian insurrection and civil war in the city of Van. During this time, ethnic and religious affiliation became more important than loyalty to the Empire. When the Turks defeated the Russian army in 1918, the Armenians in the eastern provinces fled into Trans-Caucasia, and Christians all over the Empire became the object of much animosity and suspicion. Christians and Muslims had always occupied slightly different roles in Ottoman society (see Aktar 2003), but they were all Ottoman citizens. From this point forward, Christians would be categorized as separatists and treated as such. The Greco-Turkish War began in May of 1919 with Greek military occupation of Izmir/Smyrna. It ended in September of 1922 with Ataturk’s army defeating the Greeks and forcing them to leave the burning city of Izmir. Although Izmir was the military focus of the Greco-Turkish conflict, the war spread to Greek and Turkish communities throughout Anatolia. Civilians from both sides took up the cause and the result was devastating. Whether or not individuals intended it, they stood or fell with their religious group, and lived, died, and migrated as Greeks, Armenians or Muslims (McCarthy 1983:121). Halo (2000:119) identifies the years between 1912, the start of the First Balkan War, and 1920 as a period of mass migration for Anatolian Greeks. While this was not the official, state-sanctioned, compulsory migration that would follow in 1923, it was the result of a national hostile sentiment and violence inflicted upon the Greek population. One can argue that the political climate left the Greeks no choice but to flee the country or to hide their identity. Ladas (1932) also contends that that Greeks were already leaving Anatolia in large numbers by 1914. McCarthy suggests that the main period of Greek emigration came at the end of the Greco-Turkish

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War in 1922. He states that “... most of the Greeks of Western Asia Minor left before or with the evacuated Greek troops. The Greeks of the Pontus and eastern Thrace soon followed and those who remained were forcibly taken to Greece, in exchange for Greek Muslims, under the terms of the Lausanne Treaty of 1923” (1983:131). According to Ladas, the population exchange between Greece and Turkey involved a painful uprooting of Muslims and Christians on both sides of the Aegean. If there had not been widespread violence and, later, an official agreement between Greece and Turkey, no one would have chosen to move.36 There are conflicting reports regarding the actual number of Greeks who were in Anatolia and who left during the early years of the Turkish Republic. According to McCarthy, the Greek Census of 1928 is the only accurate measure of Greek migration from Turkey to Greece. After making adjustments for the presence of Armenian refugees in the totals, deaths of refugees between 1922 and 1928, and Anatolian refugees who migrated elsewhere between 1923 and 1928 after first coming to Greece, McCarthy suggests that 850,000 would be the lowest possible estimate (1983:132). Hirschon estimates the number to be closer to more than a million Greeks (1998: xvi). Biographical accounts suggest that even before, and in the years leading up to the Treaty of Lausanne, many Greeks—and other Christian minorities—left Anatolia, or died in the process. As of 1922, the Greek population in Anatolia had already decreased by 25 percent, a year before the Treaty of Lausanne was signed. Turks and Greeks in the Pontus The relationship between Pontic Greeks and their Turkish neighbors is difficult to categorize. There were areas in the mountains where Turks and Greeks had separate, neighboring villages, while other villages had both Turkish and Greek neighborhoods. In some areas, intermarriage was not uncommon. Meeker’s study of Of (1970), another Black Sea mountain village, reveals a Greek-speaking Muslim population in the mountains along the Black Sea. He describes the process by which the Greeks left the coast and established high mountain villages as the Turks moved into the coastal areas bordering the mountains. He also writes about Turks who moved to Greek villages and learned Greek. According to Meeker, the Greek speakers of Of were famous for their Muslim religious

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teachers (1970:37).37 These Greek speakers call themselves Turks, and at the time of the Empire, both Greeks and Turks in the area referred to themselves and each other as “Ottomans” (1970:37). The village Meeker studied, still intact as recently as 1970, stands as proof that there were Greeks who did not get counted during the population transfer. Some Greeks escaped forced flight by moving to a different area and hid their ethnic identity to avoid persecution. This decision underscores the significance of the Pontic Greeks’ attachment to their ancestral land. It would be difficult to say how many Greeks are still living in the mountains of the Black Sea. The oldest living inhabitants of Yuva were small children when the population exchange with Greece took place. By 1925, approximately 185,000 ethnic Greeks had been removed from Pontus and “returned” to Piraeus and other areas of Greece. Pontus includes the entire province of Giresun as well as other provinces, and the records do not specify exactly where the Greeks lived prior to being forced out. Current maps show that one in three of the villages in Yuva had church ruins. It is difficult to say how many of the other churches had been converted into mosques. People are hesitant to talk about it.38 Residents of Yuva maintain their claim of longstanding presence on the land they presently occupy. When the residents of Yuva talked about the time surrounding the population transfer, it was in hushed voices. The members of the oldest generation, now in their early 80’s, remember the stories their parents told about the Rum villagers who were forced to leave:39 We all lived together in our villages. There were some separate villages, but mostly there were just Turkish quarters and Rum quarters in the same village. The children played together. We traded with them. We gave them wool, and they made clothing and blankets. They gave us eggs and we gave them yogurt. We worked our fields together. When it was time to harvest the crops, we would all get together and do one field at a time until all of the fields in the village were done. The Rum living higher up let us use their pastures. We helped them in other ways. We would bring them what they needed from town. In our villages, there was no rebellion. The army came and forced them to leave, and then burned their property. There is nothing left besides the bridges (Ferit Amca, 85).40

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In other districts, the Turkish villagers participated in burning down Rum homes and killing the inhabitants. Residents of Bulancak and Allucra report that their grandparents helped quash the rebellion that they feared would erupt in their communities. According to personal accounts, it was belived that Rum inhabitants all along the Pontus were planning a coup and that they wanted an independent region. They were thought to be receiving assistance from Greece and to be extremely well organized. The villagers who traveled regularly to Trabzon were eventually accused of espionage and loyalty to Greece. They were burned and hanged in the village and their homes were torched. Historians confirm the level of violence associated with the Rum (and Armenian) presence in the Giresun area of Pontus (Ilgazi 1997; Balcıo¤lu 1987) in the final years of the Empire. However, it is difficult to know whether the people I spoke with are the descendants of people who actually participated in the massacres led by Topal Osman, the most notorious mercenary bandit in the Ottoman Empire and Giresun’s most famous citizen. For that matter, it is now impossible to verify that Ferit Amca’s village was always harmonious, and that the harm inflicted upon the Rum residents was strictly orchestrated by mercenary Turkish gangs. To be sure, local oral accounts are selected variations from the repository of social memory shared by the people who inhabit this region. 1922 was a time of great human suffering. People in and around Yuva choose their words carefully when they talk about it. Some of the younger, nationalistic residents who do not want to air the dirty laundry of the Young Turks defend Ataturk and speak of the rebellious, separatist Greeks. The older residents, who, in the waning years of their own lives, remember their co-villagers in a positive light, may not want to reveal the atrocities they committed during a heated, conflict-ridden time. In a sense, the actual truth becomes less important than the stories people tell. As Herzfeld writes, “... people deploy the debris of the past for all kinds of present purposes” (1997:24). The residents of Yuva are prolific storytellers. Events that ultimately led to chain migration from Yuva to America were taking shape during the Greco-Turkish War of 1919. I was fortunate to meet the three remaining men who had direct interactions with the first migrant from this area. They all tell the same story about how they finally succeeded in getting to what is now called New Yuva, but only one man was able to retell the

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story of Lefter. ‹hsan Ardın, commonly referred to as the grand amca (uncle) of migration from Yuva to America, was actually the first Turk to migrate to America from Yuva. The first migrant villager was a young Rum refugee named Lefter Cember. He told his story to ‹hsan Ardın when they were both grown men in America. Lefter Çember The story of Lefter Çember is famous in Yuva and other parts of Giresun. Lefter was from a Rum village high in the mountains of what was then Espiye, now Yuva. Born in 1913, he was the youngest of seven brothers and sisters. The oldest sibling was a labor migrant in Russia in 1921, when Lefter’s village was torched. The entire family fled from Yuva on foot for fear of being killed. They decided to make their way to the coast, taking the high mountain roads to avoid attracting the attention of the Turks. They were going to pay someone to smuggle them onto a boat that was headed for Russia. They intended to find Lefter’s oldest brother, who had been working there for some years. When they passed through Bulancak, Turkish nationalists killed several of Lefter’s siblings. The remaining siblings and the parents starved to death on the road. Lefter was the sole survivor from his family. He buried his siblings and his parents one by one, taking the coins out of their pockets so he could buy food. He emptied the money from the pockets of the corpses he saw along the roadsides. He used part of the money he collected to bribe a sailor into crossing the Black Sea and taking him to Russia, where he looked for, and eventually found, his brother. They supported themselves in Russia by making sweet cakes and desserts and selling them at bazaars and on roadsides. They saved up enough money to travel to Greece, but after living there a short time, when Lefter was 15, the brothers migrated to America. Lefter’s older brother died of a heart attack a few years after they arrived in the USA. Lefter first found work as a tailor’s apprentice in New York City, and later worked in Greek restaurants sweeping floors and washing dishes. He immersed himself in the Pontic Greek community and lived with different migrant families. Eventually he opened a flower shop in Manhattan on the East Side. Lefter was in his 50’s when he began to feel his lack of connection with his earlier life. He began to think about his parents and how they died. He felt alone in the world and slightly guilty that he was the one who had survived the tragedy of the

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Greco-Turkish conflict. It was at this point that he decided to go back to Turkey to visit his natal village and the place where he lost most of his family. Although Lefter’s story may seem extraordinary, flight from Anatolia during the war period often happened in this way. For example, Thea Halo’s biographical account of her mother’s flight from a village close to Giresun bears some of the same characteristics as Lefter’s story.41 Themia “Sano” Halo’s family was forced to leave their Pontic village in the spring of 1920. They were escorted by soldiers, who led them on a journey through Turkey toward Syria. After seven months of traveling on foot, the family escaped from the soldiers and hid in the nearest town. By the time the family reached Karabahçe, a town between Diyarbakir and the Syrian border, three of Themia’s siblings had starved to death. Her mother gave her to an Arab family who agreed to feed her in exchange for domestic labor. Themia lived with this family while her mother, father and younger brother starved to death in the streets of Karabahçe. Themia eventually left her new family because of the abuse she suffered at the hands of the mother. She ran away to Diyarbakir, where she was taken in by an Armenian family, and eventually married off at the age of fifteen to Abraham, an Assyrian man three times her age. After they married in Syria, Abraham brought his wife to New York City, where he had been living for over ten years. Another biographical account illustrates another possible outcome for Pontic refugees. The story of Tamama “Raife” starts with a description of the summer day in 1973 when Kayhan, a young man in Ankara, discovered that his great Aunt Raife was actually not related to him at all, that her real name was Tamama, and that she was Rum (Andreadis 1993:14). Tamama’s childhood village was not far from Gebekilise, Lefter’s village. Her family lived in a high mountain village in the district of Espiye that had separate Christian and Muslim quarters.42 By her own account, the inhabitants of the two quarters got along well and there were never any problems. In October of 1916, the Christian inhabitants of the village were ordered to gather from their homes only what they could carry and come to the church. From the church, soldiers escorted them through the mountains and down to Sebastaeia/Sivas, a journey of 200 kilometers. The

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family lived on the streets of Sivas for over a year. Tamama and her siblings resorted to begging for food out of desperation and hunger. Tamama was finally taken in by a Turkish family who had been feeding her for several weeks. She was ten years old at the time, and the year was 1918. When the Russian army was defeated, the word spread that Pontus again belonged to the Turks, and the Christians could return to their mountain homes. Many refugees left Sivas and returned to Espiye, only to learn that the Greek army had taken Izmir/Smyrna and were approaching Ankara. After seeing that all of their homes and churches had been burned, most of the refugees from Espiye boarded boats, just like Lefter, and headed for Russia. From there, the majority went on to Greece. According to Andreadis, by the time the Lausanne Treaty was enacted, most of the Christians had already fled the Pontus. Tamama was not among those who returned to Espiye, but members of her family were. Her parents and brothers died during the period of exile in Sivas. Her aunt and sisters eventually established a home in Greece, and it was not until 1973 that Symela, Tamama’s sister, decided to initiate contact with her sibling who had chosen to stay and live in Anatolia as a Turk. Tamama, who had taken the name “Raife,” followed the last wishes of her foster father and kept her ethnic identity hidden from the younger generations in the family. One can almost visualize the reactions of her Turkish family when a Greek woman knocked on the door of their home looking for her long lost sister. Conclusion A brief look into Ottoman history reveals that flight and forced migration are not unique to the period or to the group of people mentioned above. Inalcik writes, “As was true in the Byzantine and Iranian empires, the Ottomans, too, applied the policy of forced deportation of population in an effort to get rid of a rebellious ethnic group or colonize a particular area important for the state” (1994:32). Rebellious Chepni Turcoman inhabitants of the Black Sea were forcibly moved to Albania in the fifteenth century; Serbian peasants and Turcoman nomads were forced to settle in villages around Istanbul that had lost their Greek populations after the siege of Constantinople in 1453; Jews from the Balkan provinces were moved to Istanbul to repopulate and stimulate new econom-

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ic activities in the new Ottoman capital. Finally, the plight of Pontic Greeks at the end of the Ottoman Empire is not unlike the experiences of the Armenian and Assyrian communities in other areas of Anatolia. Yuva first experienced significant population loss during the violent years surrounding the population transfer between Greece and Turkey. The first people to leave were not migrants, but refugees. Staying was only an option for Rum who could be taken in and hidden by their Muslim co-villagers. There are very few people who are still alive to retell the events leading up to the mass exodus of Rum inhabitants from the Pontus region. Of the three people mentioned above, only 89-year-old Themia Halo is still living. All three of the accounts reveal examples of how people not only lost the right to their ethnic identity, but the very places they were from. Lefter, Themia, and Tamama were all given the option of blending in, at first superficially. The gradual disenfranchisement started with the symbolic violence of a name change. Leftheris was Lefter to the Turkish villagers. Themia became Sano to her Arab employers, and remained Sano for the rest of her life, even once she came to America. Tamama went through a series of transformations. First she decided not to leave her Turkish family and go back to Espiye. Then she was given the name Raife by her foster father. Finally, she became Muslim None of these refugees were able to return to the homes they knew as children. The land was all that remained. Iondone, Themia’s ancestral village, does not exist on Turkish maps. It can only be found on historical Greek maps, and then it is only marked by crosses, which signify the previous existence of a Greek settlement. When Themia Halo tried to return to her natal village, it was as if it had never existed. Lefter’s experience was similar. Tamama’s relatives returned early enough to find the charred remains of their lives, but nothing is left today in their high mountain village. The stories live on in the minds of the present-day Turkish inhabitants of Yuva.43 They suspect that many of their former co-villagers moved to other areas in Turkey and integrated, as Tamama and Themia did. (This was undoubtedly much easier for homeless children to accomplish than entire disenfranchised families.) They also suspect that the Rum, prior to leaving, had time to bury precious gold icons and valuables in the ground near their homes. Opportunistic individuals from the village asked me several times

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to bring metal detectors and sophisticated x-ray equipment from America in exchange for their time and energy. They believed they could unearth enough gold to make them rich—without having to pump gas or wash dishes in America. There seems to be a clear distinction between the older villagers from ‹hsan Ardın’s cohort and the younger villagers regarding the plight of the Christians. The further people are from the actual events that transpired, the more willing they seem to be to accept the State’s version of what happened. They do not harbor any sense of sympathy towards people who only live in their parents’ memories. Perhaps more interesting are the attitudes expressed by the Pontian refugees. Lefter, Themia, and Tamama were victims of the Greco-Turkish War. The events leading up to their banishment from their homeland were orchestrated from a higher place than the village. Local hostilities were the product of a national agenda of intolerance. Soldiers and mercenaries, not co-villagers, rounded up all of the Rum and forced them to leave. It is with this understanding of the past that people such as Lefter and Themia were able to return bravely to their natal villages to see what was left. Indeed, that they would want to return to their natal villages at all seems anomalous. It illustrates how regional affiliation persists and transcends national and ethnic boundaries. These three Rum refugees, like their Muslim hemflehri, were Karadenizli—of the Black Sea.

3. HEMfiEHR‹L‹K: REGIONAL COMPATRIOTISM AS A BRIDGE TO THE USA

Hemflehrilik, or regional compatriotism, is the relationship that initiated and perpetuates migration from Yuva to the USA. This chapter examines conditions in Yuva in the 1960s at the time of Lefter’s return to his natal village, his unlikely relationship with three Turkish men who helped him find his village, and their journeys to the USA at the beginning of this unusual pattern of migration. Socioeconomic Conditions for Labor Migration After the population transfer between Greece and Turkey, it is said that Turkey suffered “... something like an economic paralysis” (Ladas 1932:728). The departure of 2 million Greeks by 1923 partially depopulated certain regions and professional sectors of Turkey. The territory of Turkey seems to include an overabundance of land in relation to its rural inhabitants. As of the 1960s, there was still not much inducement to institute modern methods of agriculture. Gaps remained in industry, shipping, and other professional occupations left by Greek and Armenian refugees alike, such as “petty trade, credit, internal wholesale trade, import and export, and in the overall financial structure of Turkey” (Aktar 2003: 81). Yuva experienced considerable population loss during the 1920s and again between 1940 and 1945.44 The latter period, due to several years of bad crops, was a time of famine throughout Giresun. Birth rates plummeted, mortality was high in all age groups, and

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young men left the villages in search of work in the larger cities in Turkey.45 This period marked the beginning of a growing pattern of internal migration from Yuva. Yuva in the 1960s had no paved roads, no indoor plumbing, and no electricity. Wood stoves heated the homes, and the sun determined the length of the workday. With the exception of a few people, most of the men in the villages were farmers. 90 percent of Giresun’s inhabitants listed “agriculture” as their profession in the 1965 Census (Giresun ‹l Yıllı¤ı 1967: 112). At that time, 45 percent of Giresun’s population was under the age of 15. Hazelnuts and corn were bringing less and less profits at the market, and there was no form of economic relief offered to farmers. Under these conditions, people were no longer able to live off of the land. Men who could not support their families “... secretly deserted the village to find work in Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, and Zonguldak, where employment opportunities were greater.46 It was during this time that men began leaving Turkey to work in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and other European countries. Labor Migration from Yuva in the 1960s Giresun province applied for admission to the EC-Turkey Association Agreement that was signed in 1963, which allowed the residents of the province to apply for work in European countries. This resulted in large-scale, state-supported migration from Giresun province to Germany, Belgium, France, and other participating countries. In Yuva district, entire villages would apply for work in the same location. As a result, there are mountain villages such as Kızılelma that have formed migrant communities in France; Ahalli, which sends most of its residents to Germany; Ömerli, which was a sending community for migrants to Belgium. In essence, there were legitimate, state-supported options for eligible Yuva natives who wanted to work outside the country at this time. Eligibility was determined on the basis of health, a minimum of three years of primary education, and a maximum age of 35 for unskilled workers, and 40 for skilled workers (Yucel 1987). Many of the Turks who participated in the Gastarbeiter program returned to Turkey in the 1980s (see Table 1).

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Turks Entering and Leaving Germany Years

New Entries

Returns

Balance

1973

249,670

87,094

+ 162,576

1982

42,713

86,852

- 44,139

1983

27,830

100,338

- 72,558

1984

34,114

213,469

- 179,355

1985

47,458

60,641

- 13,183

Source: Koray (1994:39)

Many others stayed and brought their families from Turkey. Today, there are almost 2 million Turks in Germany and almost 3 million Turks in Western Europe, making them not only Germany’s largest ethnic minority, but also the largest foreign population in Europe. Table 2 shows the results of approximately forty years of migration from Turkey to Europe:

Population of Turks in Selected European Countries Countries

Population

Germany

1,918,000

Netherlands

215,000

France

240,000

Belgium

85,000

Denmark

30,000

Austria

150,000

Switzerland

73,000

United Kingdom

20,000

Sweden

50,000

Total

2,781,000

Source: Sen, Faruk. 1996. “Turkish Communities in Western Europe.” In Turkey Between East and West. V. Mastny and R. Craig Nation, eds. Boulder: Westview Press. 233-266.

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The above statistics reveal the most common destination for labor migrants from Turkey. Even though this was state-sanctioned, legal migration, it still involved waiting for approval. It is not hard to imagine the discouraging ratio of employment applications to actual positions. Many migrants did not want to wait. Others, upon being rejected, decided to migrate illegally, or searched for other possible destinations. While many of their hemflehri were attempting to get to Europe, the people of Yuva were slowly beginning to move in a direction few people talked about. Lefter Çember’s Return to Yuva By the 1960s, Lefter Çember had a thriving flower business in New York City and was a wealthy man by village standards.47 He returned to Turkey during the summer of 1967, flying into Ankara and then boarding a bus for Giresun.48 This was his first time in the city of Giresun, since mountain people during his time generally lived off of the land and through trading with other villagers. Besides, Giresun wasn’t Giresun when Lefter lived in Anatolia, and it wasn’t Giresun on his map. It was Kerasunta, the name used before the Republican Turkification of Greek place names.49 When he arrived in Giresun in 1967, he looked for a minibus to Yuva. The ride from Giresun to Yuva seemed to take longer than the trip from New York to Ankara. He came to Yuva by bus one August day in search of someone who would drive him to his old village, Gebekilise, now called Ça¤layan. He wanted to see if there was anyone or anything left from his time there. There in the center of Yuva he met ‹hsan Ardın, who was working as a tailor. With him were Ferit Yahyao¤lu, the town baker, and Ali Seyahat, a truck driver and occasional labor migrant who was between jobs. The three men were intrigued with Lefter, as people from Yuva generally are when foreigners drop out of the sky and into their small community. ‹hsan, Ferit, and Ali accompanied Lefter to Ça¤layan. It took three hours to get from the center of Yuva to Lefter’s village. The three Turkish men were in awe of this foreigner who had come from America. They knew that some villagers, including Ali Seyahat, had taken jobs in Europe and in places like Libya, but not in America. After all, there was no official call for labor migrants from the USA the way there had been from Germany and the other European countries. They asked Lefter endless questions about life in

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America for three hours on the road to Ça¤layan. When they arrived in Ça¤layan, Lefter could find nothing of his old life. The wooden houses were gone. All that remained, apart from the stone bridges that were already ancient when he was a child, were the ruins of Gebe Kilise, the village church. The burnt remnants of the frescoes showed Jesus, Mary, and the saints with their eyes scratched out. Everything had been removed from the church—bibles, icons, everything. Lefter was able to find the spot where his house would have been by walking in a familiar direction away from the church. He saw nothing in the ground that hinted at an earlier period of settlement. He knelt down, kissed the earth, his piece of the earth, and said a prayer. After Lefter saw his old village, he did not want to return to the center of Yuva. He wanted to go to Bulancak, the way he and his family walked to the coast. ‹hsan Ardın, Ferit Yahyao¤lu, and Ali Seyahat went with him. It took six hours to drive through Keflap, Dereli, and into Bulancak north to the coast. At the end of the long journey, he saw the harbor where he had boarded a small boat for Russia many years before as a young boy and escaped with only his life and an address for his older brother. He knelt down, kissed the ground again, and said another prayer. Lefter thanked the young men for their help before getting on a night bus bound for Ankara. He appreciated their time and he probably couldn’t have made his pilgrimage without them. He invited them to look him up if they ever made it to America. He left the address and phone number of his flower shop in New York City. When he said goodbye to the young men, he had no idea what he would be getting into a few short years later. Lefter Cember made the pilgrimage that many Turks and Pontic Greeks make every year. For the Turks, it is a chance to see relatives and confirm one’s status as a successful migrant. For the Rum refugees, it is an attempt to reunite with the culture of their childhood—yayla culture. Black Sea Turks and Rum alike share this longing to visit the plateau. It is an aspect of regional culture that is shared across ethnic and religious lines. It became obvious to me that the population transfer did not result in the Rum feeling that they did not belong to this land, or that the land did not belong to them in some way. This was a population who had occupied the region for centuries. The annual pilgrimages demonstrate that Pontic Greeks still identify with their Black Sea origins.

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‹hsan Ardın I was fortunate to meet ‹hsan Ardın when I did. He had just undergone bypass surgery and was recuperating at his home in Kartal when I contacted him. He almost died during the operation and he was said to be very weak. When I arrived at his house the first time, he was up and dressed. ‹hsan Ardın, 68 years old, looked nothing like his co-villagers. He was wearing Levis and a black wool turtleneck. His designer glasses threw me off, as did the missing mustache. Everything in his house seemed consistent with what I had seen in other urban Turkish home of migrants. Only ‹hsan looked out of place. He sat with folded arms as I entered the living room, peering at me with clear blue eyes over the rims of his designer glasses. When I got close, he smiled a toothy grin, revealing the only visible marker of his village roots—gold caps on all of his bottom teeth. ‹hsan’s third wife made a huge meal of beet green soup, corn bread, fried hamsi, and börek. We talked and ate until I had to leave to attend a wedding. I came back to visit ‹hsan several times while he was in Kartal. Over the course of our visits, I learned a great deal about ‹hsan’s time in America and how he contributed to the formation of Yuva’s new villages—New Yuva and Kennedy Kent. ‹hsan, Ferit, and Ali, all married with children in 1967, and all steadily employed, were excited by the idea of flying to America and finding their old friend in his flower shop. Life had obviously improved for him since he arrived in New York. Why not them? Going to America meant something different from going to Europe. There was no structure in place that would pigeonhole a man as a Gastarbeiter. In fact, there was no system of any kind in place for Turks going to America. This meant that the possibilities were infinite. Among these, of course, was also the possibility of failure. Since all three men had jobs and families, they decided to draw straws to determine who would be the first to go. ‹hsan Ardın drew the shortest straw. The other men agreed to give him money for the trip, and in return he would help them get to America when he got settled. In 1968, at the age of 34, ‹hsan Ardın boarded a plane for America with a tourist visa in his passport, 250 Turkish Lira, and Lefter Cember’s address. When he got through customs and immigration, he went outside to get a cab. He showed the cabbie the address, but it was too late for the flower shop to be open. The cab driver turned out to be

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Greek and spoke a little Turkish, and he put ‹hsan in a hotel room for the night. He returned the next morning with a Turkish friend and they found the flower shop on the Upper East Side. ‹hsan worked for Lefter delivering flowers until he got on his feet. ‹hsan answered an ad in the paper and took a job in an envelope factory on Long Island. He worked at the envelope factory 7-5, then he came back to the East Side and worked as a tailor 7-11. From 111, he was a janitor in a Greek bar. On the weekends he worked in the bar as a dishwasher. ‹hsan worked constantly. While he was doing this and sending home remittances, he was also paving the way for the people he would help get to America in the years he spent there. The first year ‹hsan was in America, he didn’t bring anyone. He says he sent 70,000 TL home in 1969 and went home the same year with 32,000 TL in his pocket. Over the next three years, he managed to bring his wife, his children, and twenty people from Yuva. He figures he is responsible for bringing the first 250 people from Pancar and neighboring villages to New York.50 At first, he was just acting as a facilitator when people arrived. As the visa process became more difficult, he began his role as middleman between the people who wanted to come to America and the people who could get them documents. Of course, ‹hsan didn’t do this for free. ‹hsan’s wife did not like the isolation and helplessness she felt in America. She went back to the village with their daughter, while their four sons stayed with ‹hsan. ‹hsan married another woman while his first wife was back in Yuva. (This was possible because his first marriage involved only a religious ceremony and was not recognized by the Turkish state.) When his first wife and their daughter came back to America, their daughter stayed, and his first wife, humiliated, went back to the village. ‹hsan’s second wife passed away in America, and he later married his third wife (from Trabzon) who has a daughter from a previous marriage that ended when her husband died in a traffic accident. ‹hsan lost one of his sons to a heart attack during bypass surgery. The oldest living son is in New Jersey and owns a diner. He has a younger son in Delaware. His daughter lives in Kennedy Kent. They are all well off. They made their money in the restaurant business, buying diners and then selling them for a profit in New Jersey. His oldest son is said to be a millionaire. People say that ‹hsan is quite wealthy. He himself never took

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American citizenship, but he has a permanent green card—compliments of an immigration lawyer who only charged him 1,300 dollars in 1969—and spends half of his time in America, half in Turkey. ‹hsan is said to be unscrupulous, and people feel sorry for the wife who lives in the village. Apparently, he treated her badly. He left the village and rarely ever goes back, except to inspect the progress that is being made on the construction of a five-story house on a mountainside that overlooks the valley below. When he is in Turkey, he stays in his penthouse apartment in Kartal, which has a splendid view of the Bosphorous. ‹hsan is widely criticized for trying to make a profit off of his covillagers. He addresses this criticism with criticism of his own. How is he different from anyone else who is trying to make a living? Marrying into a family that has overseas relatives is an attempt to maximize economic potential. Everyone in the area is trying to realize his or her maximum economic potential, and he is helping them. ‹hsan doesn’t have kind words to say about the migrants he helped. He says that they are all uneducated and uncivilized. They are all çoban (shepherds), or hayvan (animals). Unlike the first few “pioneers,” the young immigrants never learned respectable skills. ‹hsan says he saved their lives. The least they can do is pay him for his help and be grateful. Ferit Yahyao¤lu I met Ferit Yahyao¤lu in Ali Seyahat’s jewelry shop, in the center of Yuva. He was one of the men who accompanied Lefter Cember to Ça¤layan in 1967. Ferit was the second of the three village men to go to America. Ferit Yahyao¤lu was 40 when he met Lefter Cember in Yuva. He had a wife and seven children, and was the town baker. Ferit’s family was one of the wealthiest families in Yuva. They owned the largest share of hazelnut orchards in the area. It was decided that Ferit’s younger brother would manage the bakery in his absence. That day finally came in 1971. Ferit was 44 years old, and he traveled to New York on a tourist visa with ‹hsan’s address in his pocket. Ferit passed through immigration without incident. He found ‹hsan’s home and stayed with him for six months. Ferit worked night and day when he first got to New York. He worked in the kitchen of a Greek diner during the day and in a bar at night. He

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remembers his days starting at 10 a.m. and ending after 1 a.m. Ferit brought his wife to America after he got his green card, which was three years after his initial arrival. (What had cost ‹hsan 1,300 dollars in 1969 cost Ferit 1,900 dollars in 1974.) His seven children stayed in the village with their extended family for another four years. When Ferit had saved enough money to rent a small house, he sent for his children. Ferit’s children all became US citizens. They are all living in New Yuva and Kennedy Kent. Ferit’s only daughter married ‹hsan Ardın’s son and lives in New Jersey. One of his sons married ‹hsan’s daughter, and they live in Kennedy Kent with Ferit’s other children. A couple of his sons run gas stations along I-95. Two of the other sons bought a pizza parlor from a retiring Greek couple, and the others own diners. Ferit Yahyao¤lu stayed in America for a total of 25 years before coming back in 1996. He credits ‹hsan for helping him get there. The most valuable part of his time in America was when his son fell ill and needed a kidney transplant. He believes he would have lost his son if he had fallen ill in the village. He reports that all of his children are healthy and productive. His wife, who travels back and forth with him, was happy to have her family together during those years. Ferit is now retired. When he is not visiting his children and grandchildren in Kennedy Kent, Ferit spends his time in the village helping out at the bakery and drinking tea at Ali Seyahat’s jewelry shop. Ferit shares ‹hsan’s opinion regarding the current generation of migrants and their families. He likens them to welfare mothers, dependent on the support of those who went before them, and expecting to succeed without learning any vocational skills. Ferit’s attitude was perhaps understandable, if harsh. He had been able to use his skills as a baker at his first job in the Greek restaurant in 1971. His knowledge was also valuable to his children when they opened a pizzeria years later. What Ferit has observed is that most of the young men in the village intend to pump gas in America and get rich, and pumping gas does not require any training. The young women, for their part, intend to marry these gas station millionaires. Ali Seyahat Ali Seyahat was the last one of the three village men to come to

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New York. Having seen that it took Ferit nearly two years to leave after ‹hsan, he decided to take advantage of other opportunities while waiting. Ali’s journey to America was quite different from Ferit’s. His experience is more similar to that of the recent migrants who are fighting against stricter exit criteria from Turkey and tighter immigration laws in the USA. In 1971, at the age of 24, Ali Seyahat boarded a bus for Istanbul. From there, he took a train from Sirkeci Station and passed through Greece and Bulgaria on his way to work in a Ford factory in Germany. He worked for one year in Germany and hated it, so he came back to Yuva and tended to his dying hazelnut crops between jobs as a truck driver. There was still no word from ‹hsan or Ferit, and in 1982, at the age of 35, Ali took a construction job in Libya. He lived in barracks for two years with men from all over Turkey, worked fourteen-hour days, and then returned to the village. By this time, it was almost impossible for villagers to get tourist visas to go to America. Immigration laws had gotten stricter, and it was far easier to get into Canada than fly directly to New York. Since Ali’s wife’s uncle was in Canada, he had a “legitimate” reason to present to consular officials. He would still have to bribe the airport police to get out of Turkey without a big black “X” in his passport, so he had to figure the exit costs into the total amount of money he would need for the journey.51 Times had changed. It was no longer possible to leave the village with 250TL and a passport. When ‹hsan called him and told him to fly to Canada, he bought a ticket to fly from Istanbul, through Amsterdam, and into Montreal. He had been instructed to get to Vancouver however he could, and from there he should call Ferit and find out what to do. He took a bus to Vancouver, and from there he called Ferit, who gave him the phone number of some people who were waiting for his call. These were the people who would take him to the U.S/Canadian border, where he would cross on foot. He paid them 500 dollars for this service. When he got into the USA, at the age of 37, he hitchhiked to Seattle, got a taxi to the airport, and bought a ticket to New York City. When Ali got to New York, he called Ferit and ‹hsan. ‹hsan lived closest, so he took a taxi to Long Island. The next day, he began pumping gas at ‹hsan Ardın’s Long Island gas station. Ali worked and slept in ‹hsan’s gas station for several years before he could get

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his green card. There was a small cot in the office. He preferred to stay at the gas station so he didn’t have to pay rent. Ali came in illegally, so it took longer and cost more for the immigration lawyer to help him. In 1992, Ali paid 5,000 dollars in legal fees for his green card. When he got it, at the age of 45, he went back to the village for six months to rest. He returned at the end of 1992 with his children and his wife. They moved to New Jersey, near ‹hsan’s son Semih, and Ali’s son helped Semih Ardin open a diner. When Semih passed away, Ali Seyahat became the owner of the diner. Ali’s daughter, Selma, married one of Ferit’s sons and moved to Kennedy Kent. Selma works in a lens factory during the day and goes to school at night. Ali and his wife Hüznü returned to the village, where Ali opened a jewelry shop in 1996. He is happy to be back in the village and away from the years of backbreaking work in the gas station. Ali went to America after the period of easy access had passed. He went illegally, and he had to wait much longer before he could see his family and bring them over. Conclusion Migration from Yuva to America, a noticeable departure from the general trend of labor migration to Europe, is a product of two important factors. The most crucial factor turned out to be Lefter Cember’s attachment to his natal land. The Rum refugee returned as a wealthy migrant to the land he knew as a small child. In spite of the violent conditions of the Rum departure from this area, Lefter still felt compelled to return to see his village. He was a child of the Black Sea the way ‹hsan Ardın was a child of the Black Sea. This made them hemflehri. Without that serendipitous meeting and subsequent relationship, it is difficult to say whether Turkish Yuva natives would have formed a community in America. The second factor was the closing of the gate into Europe, which happened to coincide with migration from Yuva to the USA. People could no longer count on being recruited to go to work in Germany or Belgium, and so they were considering other alternatives. It was not a question of choosing between legal work in Europe and illegal work in America. After a certain point, both options involved illegal migration. According to villagers in Yuva, it was understood that America was an easier place to hide as an illegal immigrant. It was also understood that if one could actually

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get to America, the economic opportunities would be greater greater than in Europe, and greater than in Istanbul. An interesting development in state-sanctioned labor migration did not attract as many applicants from Yuva. Shortly after Europe closed its doors to Turkish workers, there were opportunities to work for Turkish contracting firms in the Middle East and North Africa, mainly Libya and Saudi Arabia. Ali Seyahat was one of the few from his region to participate in this program. Turks were recruited to work in the Middle East through the early 1990s and in the Newly Independent States of the former Soviet Union into the mid-1990s (Koray 1997).52 Even when presented with the possibility of legal migration and guaranteed employment across the Black Sea, Yuva natives prefer to follow their hemflehri to the USA. The social network of regional compatriots is thought to provide a safety net that counterbalances the risks associated with trying to succeed. Also, as I have previously discussed, the idea of the USA as a desirable place to work is widespread throughout Yuva. By the early 1970s, ‹hsan Ardın had a thriving side business helping people get into America. By the 1980s, this was how ‹hsan was making all of his money. He refused to say how much he charged people for his services. I have heard that in the 1990s, the package deal of fraudulent documents and illegal border crossings often went for thousands of dollars. Unskilled, unemployed villagers scrape together these fees, promising to repay the people who invest in their international search for employment. Others simply wait to be summoned by relatives in America. Still others apply for the visa lottery and hope for the best. ‹hsan, Ferit, and Ali share some characteristics. These three men were well into their adult lives when they went to America. ‹hsan was 34, Ferit 44, and Ali 40. All three were the children of farmers, and none had more than a primary school education. Unlike future cohorts of migrants from Yuva and Papazlar to the USA who migrate when they are much younger, migration did not affect the number of children they had. The wives of all three men were able to join their husbands relatively soon after they left. The case of Ali is different because he entered the country illegally. However, even in his case, he was able to legalize his status and bring his wife and children. All three men had large houses built in the village for their return. Ali and Ferit came back to the village when they retired

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from labor migration. Although ‹hsan owns apartment buildings in Istanbul and lives in one of them, he is still having a house built in the village. He says he is not finished going back and forth to America, and it is easier to leave from Istanbul than from Yuva. It might also be uncomfortable for ‹hsan to move next door to the woman he abandoned so many years ago, his first wife. She still lives in the village and his new house is just next to their old one. Ali, Ferit, and ‹hsan reported coming back to Turkey for similar reasons: I lost my oldest son in New Yuva. He died there during bypass surgery. I stopped traveling so much after my first heart surgery. It would be an awful thing to die there. (‹hsan Ardın) What more is there for me once I am old? I went there to work. I came back when I could not work anymore. I want to spend my last years in Yuva, not in Kennedy Kent. (Ferit Yahyao¤lu) We worked hard in America. It was a good opportunity. America is for working and earning money, but not for living. (Ali Seyahat) In reality, they did not really want to live in America. When the three men talk about their time there, they do not speak of it as having lived in America. ‹hsan still goes back and forth to see his children and run his business, but his life is in Turkey. Even Ferit, who stayed for 25 years, made the observation that there was nothing there for him in his old age. Even though all seven of his children and their children live in America, the life that has meaning for him is in the village. None of the men would be considered Islamist in the religious or political sense. Moreover, none of the three seemed interested in village politics. They agreed that Ahmet had been a lazy mayor. They ridiculed the villagers for taking politics, especially religious politics, so seriously. They were disgusted with the recent popularity of the “fundamentalist” parties in the village. ‹hsan observed that this is what happens to e¤itimsiz (uneducated) people. While it would be easy to think of ‹hsan Ardın as a pioneer

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migrant whose voyage was the catalyst for the creation of a farreaching social network, this view overlooks a crucial aspect of this migration chain and the importance of regional affiliation. ‹hsan was invited to America by a hemflehri, or fellow countryman. This is the term used for people who share a common region of origin. It was of little importance to ‹hsan that Lefter was Rum, not Turkish. He was from Yuva, which made them both Yuval›, regardless of ethnic or religious identity. Lefter was accepted into the Greek community in New York because of his ethnic identity. He extended his assistance to the Turkish migrants due to the regional affiliation shared with them. While he was indeed Greek, he was Greek from the Black Sea—a distinction made by mainland Greeks as well as those from the Pontus. By extension, ‹hsan and Ferit were able to find work and housing through the Greek community. Their bond of regional affiliation with this refugee, who had every reason not to feel a sense of belonging to his natal land, enabled them to establish a presence in America that would pave the way for future migrants from the Black Sea. Yuva district is now home to people who claim ethnic Turkish ancestry. It is difficult to understand how regional affiliation did and still can transcend ethnic boundaries unless one looks into Yuva’s past population, or at other areas of the Black Sea that are still ethnically diverse (Meeker 2002:91). The following quote from a Turkish migrant in Germany is revealing: As one Turkish worker informant from the Black Sea area emphasized about the Kurds: “When the Kurds find a job, they immediately send for their relatives and friends. They don’t leave work for others.” This worker, it turns out, means only certain Kurds, his kind, who are Sunni. He differentiates between helping his fellow countrymen from the Black Sea, whether they are Kurdish, Laz, or Circassian, and the Kurds from the east. He feels he has more in common with the former than with the latter (Gitmez and Wilpert 1987:96). These are relationships that do not register on the national level. They are local allegiances that come from shared community, shared resources, and shared experiences. The story of Lefter Cember and ‹hsan Ardın makes more sense if the bond of regional affiliation is given the appropriate weight.

4. FROM YUVA TO PAPAZLAR: TRANSREGIONAL MIGRATION

While ‹hsan Ardın was working in New York, increasingly referred to by Yuval› migrants as New Yuva, many of his co-villagers were moving to Istanbul to an area called Papazlar. The pattern of transregional migration to Istanbul arose out of economic necessity. Papazlar continues to draw villagers from Yuva in search of employment, but it also serves as an interim destination for those wishing to get to the USA. This chapter examines how migrants from Yuva to Istanbul continue to live in a community with their hemflehri. It describes the circular nature of movement between Yuva, Papazlar, and the USA. It explores the relationship between secular urban natives and rural migrants, in an attempt to understand how migrants alter the cultural landscape of the city. Finally, it reveals how the option of migrating to Istanbul changes the lives of Yuva natives in the city as well as the village. Migration to Papazlar In almost every decade, migration to Istanbul has surpassed migration to other large urban areas in Turkey, even cities that are in closer proximity to the sending villages. For example, between 1970 and 1975, Giresun reported that 63.4 percent of its emigrants went to Istanbul, whereas only 5.1 percent went to Ankara (Doh 1984:51). The Black Sea continued to be the main force of internal migration into the late 1980s and the preferred destination was Istanbul.53 It is helpful to examine the condition of Istanbul as it was when large numbers of people from Yuva started to migrate there in the

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1940s. In the past few decades Istanbul has experienced an explosive rate of growth and overpopulation (Kuban 1996). As of 1960, the inhabited areas under the jurisdiction of the municipality of Istanbul increased four-fold to cover an area of 28,000 hectares. The walled city of Istanbul covers 1,440 hectares. The city population was around 1,000,000 in 1950, 1,800,000 in 1960. It reached 2,274,650 in 1970, around 5,000,000 in 1980, and has more than doubled since. The State Institute of Statistics estimates that in 1990, the city had a population of 7,309,190.54 Today’s estimates are closer to 11,000,00. Eleven percent of rural out-migration in Turkey was absorbed by Istanbul. The number of gecekondus increased from a bare 8,238 in 1950 to 100,000 in 1964. The areas on the west of the city, including Papazlar, became large built-up areas in front of which the historical city was dwarfed (1996:137). Papazlar became an independent district in 1957, with a population of 89,371 (Akçay 1974). It had a population of 165,679 in 1990, and today’s estimates are closer to 225,000.55 Of the migrants from Yuva to Istanbul, most settle in Papazlar. The draw in the 1960s was the abundance of silk, paint, and dye factories. The added advantage of moving to Papazlar today is the transplanted, wellestablished community of Yuva natives. The current population of people from Yuva in Papazlar is said to be 75,000, and the population of people from Giresun in Istanbul is 1.5 million. 56 In the 1960s, squatter settlements of several thousand people were founded mostly in the west of the city. These were the workers seeking jobs in the new industrial areas around the Golden Horn. The immigrants were mostly from distant provinces and from peasant stock. Since the male members of the family used to arrive first, the male population of the city in the 1960s grew rapidly. The newcomers were also young, doing any kind of job available. As Istanbul developed into the nation’s main industrial area, it offered many jobs on its construction sites to unskilled village workers (Kuban 1996:201). Those peasants coming with their families often occupied public land and built their one-room houses, with the common labor of the family members. Since this process had to be very fast, and sometimes at night, their houses were called gecekondu (put up in one night). They were one or two room houses, in the outskirts of the city, carelessly built. In the first period the government saw this as a minimal threat to the city itself, and tried to help internal migrants improve their living quarters.

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With the rapid increase of population came another incentive to encourage new settlements. Political parties found out that these poor, job-seeking rural immigrants were also citizens with votes, and the newcomers found out that they had, from election to election, a formidable weapon, and they could have at least a small house on government land, without paying anything. For a poor Anatolian peasant without land in his own village, the prospect of a house and a better-paid job was an attraction that could not be passed up. Starting from 1949, parliaments passed three amnesty laws which legalized squatter housing, and the number of people who unlawfully occupied government land and built houses on it increased from about 10,000 in 1950 to 600,000 in 1963 (Beeley 1986:165). Settled on the public land, distant from the city-center, they led the way for the colossal urban sprawl of the 1970s. These great patches of suburban settlement with a population ranging from 25,000 to 100,000, were fifteen to forty kilometers away from the center of the city. Some of these reached 250,000 in the late 1970s and half a million in the early 1990s. Even in the city itself, gecekondus were built next to the new apartment houses, even in the most prestigious quarters such as fiiflli and Niflantaflı. In fact, internal migrants filled every square meter of empty land with houses or illegal workshops. A city surrounded and invaded by gecekondus did not correspond to the image of a modern city in the mind of the politicians. The discrepancy between the Hilton Hotel and the poor gecekondus in the valley below, or gecekondu quarters on the slopes of the Bosphorous and luxurious mansions all commanding the same view, was very democratic, closer in spirit to the traditional order, yet aesthetically hideous, and an uncomfortable urban experience. While politicians tacitly encourage villagers to come, build, and vote, they are also the ones sending out building police who, from time to time, demolish the very homes in which their voters live. The huge population increase and the number of jobs created in all sectors were highly compatible between 1950 and 1965. In that period, Istanbul’s economy encouraged the steady flow of new immigrants, but this happy correspondence did not last. In 1980, 20 percent of the working-age population was unemployed. This did not keep people from leaving their rural villages in search of a better life in the city—even if it involved living in a gecekondu. Rural inhabitants gave up the clean air and green spaces of the village

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for precariously constructed shacks on urban government land in hopes of finding economic opportunity. Although the atmosphere in the gecekondu was unsanitary and chaotic, Yuva natives report that the chance to obtain land for free in the city was one they could not afford to pass up. Identity in the City “Memleketiniz?” This was the question I usually had to answer upon someone’s realization that I was not a Turk. The literal translations for memleket are many. It can mean country, and it can also mean home district or native land. The use of this word in conversations between Turks from different regions is revealing. Nationstate logic would dictate that citizenship based on common territory is enough to make to people memleketli, or “fellow countrymen.” This is the case in Turkey in a superficial sense. When a person from Adana meets a person from Trabzon, the inevitable, irresistible question concerns that person’s memleket. It is peripherally interesting to know where someone is living in Istanbul, but the more pressing question concerns “land” of origin. Village people describe themselves as yabanc›, or foreigners in the city. The word yabanc› can refer to foreigners from outside national boundaries or regional boundaries. Village people also see urban Turks as yabanc› when they come to the village. During my time in Yuva, I realized that my designation as yabanc› referred to my status as a stranger to the village and a citizen of another nation. (My status as a non-Muslim was described with another word—gavur, a derogatory word meaning “infidel.”) My assistant Mustafa C. was also yabanc› and he was from Giresun. People referred to us as “yabanc›lar,” or “the outsiders.” There was much to learn from the notion that a man from the city, only thirty minutes away, was more “foreign” than a man from the most remote village on the border of Yuva and fiebinkarahisar. Clearly, physical proximity was not a measure of foreignness. Cultural proximity was more important. If village people feel this way about the people in Giresun, imagine how they feel about people they meet in Istanbul. When Yuvalılar move to Istanbul, they come to the neighborhood colonized by their hemflehriler, or “fellow countrymen.” This is a way of leaving the disappointing economy of the village behind without forfeiting those aspects of village culture that travel well. Consider the following description of urban areas. Delaney

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describes Gökler villagers’ attitudes toward the city of Ankara as suspicious and critical: The village, like a proper woman, is described as kapalı (closed, covered); the town or city is açık (open). The city is bulaflık (tainted, soiled); the village is temiz (clean and pure)... Villagers keep the precedents or traditions; townspeople have forgotten or lost them. Villagers know where they are and who they are; city people lose their way and with it their integrity (1991:207). The village Delaney studied was not a sending community with a large urban presence. Still, the attitudes in Gokler resemble the sentiments expressed so often in Yuva. At the same time, people from Yuva have a dualistic view of the city. There is Istanbul, home to the urban, westernized, secular Turks, and there is Papazlar, the community of their hemflehriler. While Papazlar exists within the city of Istanbul, the people who live there are köylü, or “of the village.” Papazlar is a shantytown community and it will always be clear that its inhabitants arrived too late to be counted as ‹stanbullu. The hostile attitudes of the urban natives are countered by the villagers’ rejection of secular city values. It is for this reason that moving to Papazlar is quite different from moving to the rest of Istanbul, including other neighborhoods that are home to reconstructed villages from different regions. In Papazlar, the food, music, dialect, and people are all familiar. Migrants from Yuva to Papazlar know they can leave their mountain village for a similar one in the city. They can take advantage of being flehirde, (in the city) without being flehirli (of the city). Urban Native Attitudes Toward Rural Migrants It is to the shock and horror of Istanbul natives that these villagers migrate and attempt to reconstruct the village atmosphere in the city. Although rural migrants live in parts of town that city natives do not frequent, the general opinion is that villagers are slowly taking over the city. During my brief stay in Levent, a relatively new upper-middle-class neighborhood on the European side of Istanbul, I had a chance to witness gecekondu construction in action. I was staying in the stylish home of Cemal, an architect, and his wife Gamze, who was a television talk show host. Cemal’s

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daughter Serap was 15 and attending a French parochial school. They lived in a three-story townhouse less than a kilometer from the largest shopping mall in Europe. Gamze and Serap were avid shoppers, and Cemal worked extremely long hours. They had a housekeeper who lived on the Asian side, originally a migrant from Yalova. They had dinner parties on the weekends and all of their friends were wealthy and well-traveled. Gamze would frequently go to New York just to shop. Her dream was to live not in America, but in Manhattan. According to Gamze, Manhattan should be its own country. Cemal and Gamze belonged to the community of Istanbul residents who consider themselves modern, liberal, western, secular Muslims. I never saw or heard Gamze mention praying. She did not cover herself with anything but Prada. Cemal’s daughter attended the same Catholic school he attended as a young boy. The family had no dietary restrictions and did not fast during the holy month of Ramadan. The call to prayer was inaudible from their patio. They were living lives that supported Ataturk’s wish for a modern, westernized Turkey, just a short walk from the largest shopping mall in Europe. Imagine the feelings that swept through the house—and the entire subdivision—when people awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of electric saws and jackhammers. I had a view out my bedroom window of the night construction. There were three men working under a spotlight powered by a noisy generator. Welding sparks were flying off and disappearing into the dark. I could hear Cemal and Gamze talking one floor below me. No one in the house could sleep during construction. In the morning, Cemal and Gamze were furious. They began their usual anti-peasant rhetoric. It wasn’t that they opposed migration. They just opposed the migration of villagers to their beloved corner of the city. Gamze had pointed out on several occasions that the rural migrants were hayvan (animals). During the Istanbul marathon, the lead runner could not find the entrance to the stadium because the path was blocked by spectators trying to catch the eye of the television cameras. As we watched the Nigerian runner miss the entrance, thereby missing the finish line because of the crowd, Gamze jumped up from the couch and exclaimed, “Hayvan, hepsi hayvan!” (Animals, they are all animals!) Most of the spectators

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looked to Gamze like migrant peasants. Perhaps they were just peasants and not migrants. To upper class Istanbul natives, poverty is ugly, no matter where it comes from. The cardboard shack with the tin roof across the way from Cemal and Gamze’s house was quickly transformed into a modest onestory cement home. The inhabitants were a family of seven. They were dark-skinned, and Gamze could not decide whether they were Kurds or Çingene (Gypsies). In either case, it was no longer possible to leave windows open or doors unlocked. Security became a preoccupation for the entire family. It was another example of people equating poverty with crime and danger. The squatters had made it into the neighborhood, but the integration would stop there. Istanbul natives are proud of their city’s imperial multiethnic past. Armenians and Greeks still have neighborhoods in Istanbul. The city has a history of tolerance toward ethnic and religious differences.57 Of course, the present conflict is not so much one of difference as of degree. The vast majority of Istanbul’s inhabitants are Muslim. The recent migrants from the village demonstrate their faith in a way that offends the sensibilities of the secular urban Muslims. Their poverty and their religion remind urban Turks of their agrarian, non-westernized, pre-republican past and of the lives of their fellow countrymen outside the city. The stark contrast in lifestyles reveals that Turkey, like Istanbul, has many faces. Villagers from Yuva are extremely nationalistic. They are quick to point out Giresun’s involvement in the War of Independence (a direct translation of the Turkish name of the Greco-Turkish War), even to the extent of glorifying the violent actions of Topal Osman, a notorious bandit who was hired by the Young Turks to organize raids on Christian villages and neighborhoods throughout Giresun province (Mango 1999:213). The former mayor of Yuva, who was in office for thirteen years, was a staunch supporter and loyal member of ANAP, the slightly right-of-center Motherland Party run by Mesut Yilmaz, the Prime Minister at that time. People in the village live according to their social obligations, their relationships within the community, and also their faith. While their votes went to ANAP, most of Yuva’s inhabitants are practicing Muslims. In a community of practicing Muslims, observing dietary restrictions, adopting modest attire, daily prayer, and fasting during the holy month of Ramadan are not considered political acts. It is

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a common belief among secular ethnic Muslims in Istanbul that migrants turn to religion to compensate for their marginalized status in the new urban environment. The city, they often say, will be changed forever by politically conservative internal migrants who harbor secret ambitions of seeing religious rule instituted in Turkey. The separation between government and religious institutions, enacted by Ataturk in the early years of the new Turkish Republic and aggressively supported by the Turkish military, is still seen as a vulnerable arrangement in need of protection and defense. Secular ethnic Muslims, a minority in Turkey, categorically dismiss their rural co-nationals as uneducated and unappreciative of the country’s progress. In this contentious atmosphere, religious and traditional practices become politicized. A simple headscarf becomes a complex multivocal symbol, and wearing it a political act.58 The villagers of Yuva do not turn to religion when they reach the city. They do, however, learn that their way of living in accordance with their beliefs carries political clout in the city. The Islamist party offers assistance to rural migrants in shantytown neighborhoods. It is an offer that does not offend the sensibilities of Muslims who wear their faith on the outside for all to see.59 The men and women already pray daily. The women already cover themselves in the presence of “foreigners.” They are already devout Muslims who make the pilgrimage when they can and give money to less fortunate villagers. To receive attention, money, food and land in exchange for votes does not require crossing an ideological boundary and compromising their religious beliefs. Papazlar Papazlar is located on one of the European sides of Istanbul, which face each other across a narrow inlet of the Bosphorous. Although both sides are part of the European continent, the Golden Horn, where Papazlar is located, is not considered the western side. The part of Istanbul that represents the West is the European side that is home to Taksim, Pera, and Galata, the areas colonized by Italians from Genoa in the 1300s, and the new home of Jews from Spain a century later. These were the most popular neighborhoods for nonMuslim minorities during Ottoman times. The Golden Horn attracts many tourists because of the covered bazaar, the Egyptian bazaar, the Blue Mosque, and the Hagia Sofia.

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It is also where the neighborhoods Fatih and Eyüp are located, both known as Islamist enclaves.60 The Golden Horn suffered greatly as a result of the population pressure of the 1950s, and the bay between the two European sides became polluted and smelly. There has been a recent campaign to fight the pollution of the Bosphorous, specifically around the Golden Horn. There is a tram system running through the Golden Horn. It leaves the first station in Eminönü full of tourists en route to the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sofia. The visitors speak to one another in the languages of old Pera and Galata—Spanish, Italian, French, and English. Three stops later, the European tourists leave the tram in Sultanahmet. As the tram continues west, it carries workers, students, refugees, prostitutes, and illegal immigrants. One hears conversations in Arabic, Farsi, Kurdish, Turkmen, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Russian, and Ukranian as the tram enters Aksaray. These are the new languages of Istanbul. Many foreigners exit the tram in Aksaray to go to the large bazaar and sell their wares. As the tram nears the station in Papazlar, close to the end of the line, the passengers are predominantly Turkish. Papazlar is one of the oldest gecekondu areas in Istanbul. Many of the original makeshift shacks have been gradually transformed into two-story buildings that, from outside appearances, could pass for industrial space. The buildings are gray and brown, stained from years of pollution and smoke from lignite—soft, brown coal— used for heating in most of the buildings. The three coffeehouses in this neighborhood of Papazlar are in “transitional” buildings that are somewhere between gecekondu and renovation. There is an open market one block away from Gül Sitesi every Thursday. It is held on a street of transitional two-story apartment buildings - no longer mud and cardboard shacks with tin roofs, but nothing like Gül Sitesi. There is a baklavacı (baklava maker) in Papazlar who is from Rize. He is considered a hemflehri since Rize is a Black Sea coastal town. So is the owner of Karadeniz Taksi, also located in Papazlar. This taxi firm employs many Yuva natives. There are still many factories in Papazlar. The factories were there before the homes. Employees walk a few blocks to their jobs in the paint, leather, tire, and clothing manufacturing plants. The stores in the area reflect the types of goods produced in the factories. Kazakh and Turkmen immigrants have several stores in Papazlar selling leather goods. It

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is generally known around Istanbul that Papazlar is a good place to buy inexpensive leather. While people seem to know this, it is rare to see Turks from the other side shopping in Papazlar. It is thought of as a dangerous area. Vedat K., a Yuva native, has a pharmacy on the main street in Papazlar, the only commercial street in the neighborhood. His business neighbors a jewelry shop and a fabric shop. Within the same block, there is a wedding dress shop and a furniture store. Both are owned by men from Giresun. The metal wares shop is the busiest on the street. The owners are from Yuva. All of the shops in Papazlar are located on the street level of two- and three-story buildings that are residential above the ground floor. The one restaurant, Karadeniz Lokantası (Black Sea Restaurant), is also located on the street level of a residential building. The Yuvalılar Derne¤i (Yuva Hometown Association) is on the ground floor of a building that faces the Papazlar tram station and adjacent factories. The remaining streets in Papazlar are residential, separated by the tram tracks from the factories. The main commercial road in Papazlar is paved, and the residential side streets are full of old potholes. The mosques in Papazlar, four altogether, are spread throughout the residential areas. There is garbage everywhere and stray animals seem to be taking over. For someone accustomed to the usual street scenes on the European side of Istanbul, two things are conspicuously absent in Papazlar: beggars and street children. My participants informed me that people do not go hungry in the village, and Papazlar is like the village. I also suspected that beggars and street children are more successful in areas of high tourist traffic. Yuva Natives in Papazlar People have been moving to Istanbul from Giresun province in an organized fashion for more than fifty years. In the 1960s, Giresun had only a limited number of schools in the city center and only one or two for the entire school-aged population of the remaining thirteen sub-districts (including Yuva). Some of the earliest migrants were young children, sent by their parents to attend boarding school in Istanbul. Halis was one of these young student migrants. I met Halis for the first time at the dernek, through an introduction from Hikmet K., current president of the Yuvalılar Derne¤i. He described the anticipation and excitement he felt about moving to Istanbul as a young boy:

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We used to look at pictures of Istanbul in the village. It was a beautiful city in the pictures... full of large mosques, the summer homes on the Bosphorous, tree-lined streets, and men and women in elegant western clothing. All of the people looked so wealthy. I was excited when my family told me I would be moving to such a beautiful place. It felt like an adventure. I felt like I was moving to another country. When Halis arrived in Papazlar, he was shocked to find his covillagers living in squalor. He didn’t know until later that Papazlar was a gecekondu area. Indeed, Papazlar is one of the oldest shantytowns in Istanbul. In the 1950s, this quarter that is home to most of the migrants from Yuva had mud streets and homes made of tin roofing, walls constructed out of cardboard, mud, and straw, and no sewage or plumbing. The only difference between the city and the village was the chance to find work, or attend school. The streets were filled with garbage. The land in Papazlar was slowly taken over by people from the interior who were familiar with the laws regarding “night building.” The first phase of building in Papazlar happened between sunset and sunrise, so that the land could not be taken from the new inhabitants. As people started to make a living, they replaced the cardboard and mud with wooden walls. After the city passed amnesty laws and the migrants were able to obtain the land at no cost, they built large concrete buildings, one floor at a time. Halis came to Papazlar as a young boy to attend the next level of school. He stayed in a dormitory in Istanbul, but there were covillagers to look after him. (Many of the villagers had come without their families to work in the paint, dye, and leather factories around Papazlar.) When he finished school, he went back to Giresun to work as a teacher in Yuva district. Halis taught in many of the 31 villages of Yuva. He was there to witness the opening and subsequent closing of schools throughout the district due to migration. According to Halis, entire villages of Yuva had been abandoned during the period of migration to Europe. The unused farmland was covered in secondary growth. Halis witnessed the collective decline in children’s desires to get an education in the village: The schools in the village closed because the parents left and

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took the children with them. Also, rich gas station attendants come back and brag about how much money they make, when everyone remembers that they can’t write. Children hear this and they get bored with school. They want the adventure and money that the older men in the village have. Halis made the observation that individual migrants may benefit from working in America, but the village suffers. Migrants do not invest in improvements to village conditions, only in their personal property. They are living proof that it is possible to achieve economic success without an education, and this sends the wrong message to the children of Yuva. Halis returned to the city when the schools were shut down in the village. He taught at the elementary school in Papazlar until his retirement. Even though he is retired and receives a pension from the state, he works part-time in a clothing factory owned by a hemflehri. The other members of his family had already established their urban residences in Gül Sitesi, an impressive modern apartment complex that rose from the muddy streets of Papazlar in the early 1990s. Families of Gül Sitesi Gül Sitesi is in the middle of Papazlar district. The clean, white cluster of buildings opens onto a courtyard with a small flower garden and a playground. There is a bekçi, or watchman, in a booth and he announces the arrival of visitors through an intercom system that is wired into each home throughout the complex. Visitors pass through a gate and leave the rest of Papazlar behind when they come to Gül Sitesi. I conducted a good portion of my research in Papazlar in one apartment complex that is home to Yuva natives. The apartment complex contained fifty units. The inhabitants were either migrants, relatives of migrants, or spouses of migrants from Pancar village in Yuva district. Ferhat Bey came to Istanbul in 1975 as a young boy after his widowed father died in Yuva. He was 13 when he arrived and he stayed with his aunt and uncle, who now live in Gül Sitesi. (Gül Sitesi is relatively new. Prior to the construction of Gül Sitesi, there were shacks on the property. Many of the apartment dwellers lived on the land in shacks before they relocated temporarily during the

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construction of the current building.) Ferhat went to college and law school in Istanbul. He practices law in Papazlar, specializing in divorces and visa applications. Having the power to perform divorces and draw up passport applications makes Ferhat indispensable in his community. Ferhat met his wife, Nurdan, through an introduction from a friend. They are close in age and, by Yuva’s standards, they married late (she was 20, he was 22). Ferhat is thought to be unusual for having married a woman from Eastern Turkey. Nurdan doesn’t really fit in with the other women in the building. They have developed a certain ease of interaction that comes from years of familiarity, but they consider her to be very different for a number of reasons. To begin with, Nurdan was working as a nurse in the leper hospital when she met Ferhat, and she continued her work after they married. She was not plucked from their village—or any village—for marriage as a teenager, so she came into the Yuva community from a different background. Her work and school experience also seem to distance her intellectually from the other women in the building. Not only is she a wage earner, she is also educated. Finally, she never familiarized herself with the regional delicacies of the Black Sea such as lahana çorbası and hamsi and relies on recipes from Eastern Turkey. She continues to listen to music and prepare food from that region. Perhaps Nurdan opened up to me because she also felt like an outsider. I met all of the Yuva people in Papazlar by passing out my cell phone number to taxicab drivers, and through introductions from Nurdan and her husband Ferhat. Ferhat had been the president of the Yuvalılar Derne¤i for years, and Nurdan was a co-villager by marriage. I met the women in their homes during the day through introductions from Nurdan, and the men at the dernek in the evenings with Ferhat. I came to Papazlar at a good time to observe dernek activity in full force. Fall of 1998 was an electric time in the village and in Istanbul because of the pending national elections. Men were at the dernek night after night trying to network and promote their political causes. After the elections in the spring, the household members’ routines reverted back to normal, with women home during the day and men arriving after work for dinner. Men reported going to the dernek either for less time every evening, or fewer evenings per week. During the day in Papazlar, I went from home to home until I

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met every woman and retired man in Gül Sitesi. The complex consisted of five buildings surrounding a courtyard. Each building had five floors, with two apartments per level. Seven different extended families from the village occupied a total of 48 apartments. (Two homes belonged to the superintendent and his brother.) Gül Sitesi has a remarkably close population. It is often the case in these apartment buildings that they will be occupied by hemflehri, but Gül Sitesi is occupied by several extended families from one village. It is an extreme example of group migration, and therefore an interesting one. Many of the families share similar migratory patterns between Pancar village in Yuva, Papazlar, and either New Yuva or Kennedy Kent. Following is a typical description of two extended families and their movement between three places. The first of these families is the Ilıca family. The Ilıca family’s presence in Gül Sitesi is significant. The parents have an apartment in Gül Sitesi, where they spend the winter months. During milder weather, they live in their renovated village home in Yuva. Melih, their youngest son, has a green card and lives part of the year in Papazlar driving a cab, and the other part of the year in Kennedy Kent working at a friend’s gas station. His wife Zahide is from Malatya, and they met in New Yuva. She is an American citizen. They have three children who will grow up in Turkey, although they were born in America. Melih and his wife decided that raising them in Turkey in a more traditional environment would be a better idea. Zahide worked in a jewelry factory in the USA, but Melih forbids her to work in Papazlar. Melih’s brother Osman also has an apartment in Papazlar and employment in both Papazlar and Kennedy Kent. But Osman goes to Kennedy Kent to work at his friend’s gas station just around the time that Melih comes back to Papazlar. It is as if they are sharing one job. Osman has an American girlfriend whom he stays with in Kennedy Kent. Before he met her, he was staying with friends. He does not have his own apartment in Kennedy Kent. Özlem Ilıca, older sister of Melih and Osman, is married to a migrant who is working in Kennedy Kent. He got a green card through the green card lottery, but he missed the deadline for applying for his wife to come. He comes home a couple of times a year when airfare is low. Özlem doesn’t work. She is in a state of suspended animation. She would like to have children, but her husband is home so rarely that they haven’t been able to conceive. She lives in Gül Sitesi, her husband lives with

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other migrants in an apartment in Kennedy Kent, and when he comes home he visits her in Papazlar. They return to Yuva if it is summer and if he has time. Aylin is the sister of Özlem’s husband. She also has an apartment in Gül Sitesi. Her husband Kemal works in Kennedy Kent with Özlem’s husband. They have had one child and she is pregnant with another. Ayse Ilıca, the eldest sister, lives in Papazlar, in Gül Sitesi, with her husband who is also from Yuva. Neither of them has migrated. They return to the village for bayram (holidays) and to harvest hazelnuts and corn. Mustafa Ilıca works in a factory in Papazlar. He came to Papazlar when he was 17. He is the oldest son. He knew his wife from Yuva and their parents arranged the marriage. Mustafa has an apartment in Gül Sitesi where he lives with his wife. His wife still spends summers as well as harvest times in the village. Four of Mustafa’s children moved to Izmit. His daughter Elif stayedin Papazlar and married one of the brothers of Ayse’s husband. He is working in the USA. His other brother Erol has an apartment in Gül Sitesi and sometimes works in the USA. The second family is the Kerimo¤lu family. Selim Kerimo¤lu was the first migrant worker in his family. He spent fifteen years working in Germany when he was younger. Selim Kerimo¤lu moved to Gül Sitesi to escape the winters in the village and to be closer to the kids. His wife recently passed away. Mustafa Kerimo¤lu was the first one from his family to move into Gül Sitesi. Mustafa got his green card two years ago and left from Papazlar for the USA. He comes home for holidays and hazelnut harvest. His sister Tülin and her husband Levent have an apartment in Gül Sitesi, but Levent is in the USA illegally and can’t come home. Tülin doesn’t work. She and the children stay in Gül Sitesi during the year and return to the village with Selim for the summer. Esra Kerimo¤lu and her husband Emre also have an apartment in Gül Sitesi, but Emre is in the USA working with Levent. They, like Tülin’s family, spend the harsh months in Papazlar and return to the village for the summer months. Fatih Kerimo¤lu circulates between his wife and children in Gül Sitesi and the USA. He is a limo driver and gas station attendant in the USA, and a taxicab driver in Papazlar. He goes back to the village annually to check on the hazelnuts. The population of Gül Sitesi is unusual. While hemflehri can be dominant in a particular apartment building, it is not so common to see an entire complex occupied in this fashion. Nurdan took me

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Overview of Families in Gül Sitesi

Elmal›

Kurt

Il›ca

Bݍak

Sombul

fieker

K’o¤lu

Number of family members

13+

21

23

19

17

24

14

# of generations in Papazlar

3

3

3

2

2

3

3

40

10

17

9

25

20

19

Work

Education

Work

Orphaned in village

Work

Work

Work

0

0

1

1

0

0

0

1

0

0

1

0

0

0

# of women who migrated for work or ed. # of women married to migrants in US

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

3

0

3

4

3

2

2

# of summer villagers

8

14

12

8

11

10

8

Circular migrants to US from Papazlar

2 s. males 2 married

1 couple

1 couple 1 s. male 3 married

1 couple

2 couple 4 children

1 couple 1 s. male 2 married

4 maried males

0

0

0

2

1

0

0

Migrants to other cities in Turkey

3+

0

4

0

2

0

0

Migrants to Europe

0

1 former 0 current

0

0

1 former 0 current

1 former 0 current

Family

First migrant’s age at migration Reason for first migration to Papazlar # of marriages to non-Yuva natives # of women who work outside home

Circular migrants to US from Yuva

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to the buildings in Papazlar inhabited by other migrants from Yuva and I was able to see how migrants usually attempted to settle in buildings occupied by regional compatriots. It is also possible to find Yuva natives living in other areas of Istanbul, but the majority live in Papazlar. Analysis The nature of movement between Papazlar and Yuva becomes clear upon examining how extended families move to the city. The following section offers some observations about the experiences of transregional migrants, their connections to Yuva, and the impetus to migrate. Women seem to maintain a closer relationship to the village and its land after migration. Because husbands often work overseas or in factories and cannot take time off from work to go harvest hazelnuts, corn, beets, and other village staples, these responsibilities are left to the women. Women go to the village more often than the men and they stay for longer periods of time. They usually travel with their children and their retired parents or in-laws, and stay for the summer. They often said that the village is a better place for children to spend the summer because it is not as hot, dirty, or dangerous as Istanbul. The women who can’t go back during the summer are the ones who are also working outside the home. There were a few women in Gül Sitesi who supplemented the husband’s income or made up for income from negligent migrant husbands by working in factories. There were only five such cases of women from Yuva working in factories. Two worked at a paint factory owned by a hemflehri from another district, and three worked at the clothing factory owned by a man from Yuva. Sometimes the children from these families accompanied other relatives to the village for the summer months. The retired generation maintains its social network by living in Istanbul during the winter months and the village during the summer. In other buildings in Papazlar, I noticed similar patterns of retired people spending summers in the village and winters in Istanbul apartments. The common justification for this pattern is that winters in the village are harsh. In the past, people used to gather around the hearth or stove and keep company during the winters. Now, members of the younger generation are in the city. During the winter, the house is empty. So is the one next door.

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Also, the roads are often blocked due to mudslides during winter months. Getting down into the center of town in the valley to socialize isn’t always possible. Migration to Papazlar from Yuva is often started by the adult children in the family. Now that the family land in the village has been divided further between more generations, making it impossible for a family to support itself through farming, the younger people leave to look for work. Most of the migrants are young men, and they often end up working in factories, shops, driving taxicabs, or driving trucks. (I met only a couple of migrants from the village who are business owners.) The parents of these children often move to the city once the younger generation has established a residence. It is common for the adult children to move their parents to the city once they get older. As we can see from Gül Sitesi, parents continue to live in close proximity to their children—next door, upstairs, usually in the same block if not in the same building. Movement from Papazlar to the USA is common. Few males from Yuva migrate to Papazlar from the village and establish a residence there if they intend to continue on to the USA at a later time. If they come to the city to earn money for papers, they stay with relatives. This is not uncommon. However, most of the men in Papazlar have applied for the visa lottery—even the ones who own businesses and are thought of as financially secure. A green card is never a bad thing to have. In the case of financially successful Yuva natives in Istanbul, it sometimes appears that the opportunity to leave Turkey triggers the desire to leave, not the other way around. For the purposes of winning the visa lottery, even people who do not move to Papazlar sometimes report that they have. A sure way to get disqualified from the lottery is to list Yuva as one’s place of residence. People from Yuva are known for leaving the country, often illegally, and not returning. Many villagers will list a relative’s home in Papazlar as their place of residence because the consulates are not aware that there is a large concentration of migrants from Yuva living there Women benefit from rural-urban migration. Women who move to Papazlar find that their lives have a completely different rhythm. People may have a small terrace garden, but there is nothing comparable to the large patches of farmland in the village, which receive constant attention from village women. The move to an urban environment changes a woman’s daily activities significant-

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ly. Her responsibilities include food preparation, cleaning, childcare, and, when she is resting, handicrafts. All of the chores associated with planting, harvesting, and taking care of livestock disappear. Village women living in the city begin their day with morning prayers and preparing breakfast for the family. School-aged children are dressed, fed, and sent out the door to school, and younger children stay home. When everyone is gone except the woman and her youngest children, she may call on a female neighbor or have a female neighbor over to visit. No men come to the house during the day. Boys up to the age of approximately 14 are permissible as visitors if they are either related by blood, marriage, or belong to a neighbor. Still, this is rare. Women spend their days visiting one another, cooking, cleaning, and taking care of children. They feel relieved that they don’t have agricultural chores anymore. At the same time, they are not expected to “replace” their agricultural productivity with some other form of work. Agricultural chores were a part of life in the village, but not in Istanbul. The men sometimes kid the women about their easy lives in the city. Women still make handicrafts, and there is a weekly bazaar in Papazlar. In Istanbul, the handicrafts are more of a commodity, as there are women who need them for a trousseau who may not be from a region where lace handicrafts are made. Women do not report any significant income from selling handicrafts, however. They do sometimes make food and sell it at the bazaar. It elevates a woman’s status if she can say her husband earns enough money (see White 1994). When women are speaking about the changes in their daily activities, they are happy to be living in Istanbul. It is also obvious that they enjoy an elevated status back in the village by being successful in Istanbul. They have moved from the village on the Black Sea to its second home in Istanbul, so they move into a pre-established social network. They do not spend a lot of time feeling lonely or wishing for the companionship of their village neighbors. Their village neighbors are also there, or they are in America. They do, however, believe that the city is dirty. Papazlar is one of the oldest gecekondu areas in Istanbul. Eventually, as the inhabitants made money, the gecekondus were torn down and legitimate buildings were constructed. It is still obvious why this area had such a draw for rural migrants. There are hundreds of old factory buildings, now vacant, where the first rural-urban migrants worked in Istanbul.

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Women moving to the city from the village are concerned with the unsanitary conditions. They also worry that the city is not a good place to raise children. The village is cleaner and the people are familiar. The larger city of Istanbul is unknown territory, even for a member of an established social network like the Yuva network. Migrants appreciate the more modern amenities, and the access their children have to education, but the city is dirty and Papazlar is thought of as a necessary alternative to living in the village while their husbands work in the city. The theory of cumulative causation proposes that each act of migration increases the likelihood of subsequent acts of migration by altering the social context in which migration decisions are made (Massey 1990). “The distribution of land, income, human capital, culture, the organization of agriculture and the social meaning of work are all affected by migration in this cumulative fashion” (Massey et al. 1993). While economic pressure was the initial catalyst for migration from Yuva to Papazlar, relative deprivation sustains this pattern. Migration from Yuva now perpetuates migration from Yuva. Due to decades of internal migration, there is now an established network of Yuva natives in Istanbul, where “everyone else” is living, profiting, succeeding. The draw of the city is often irresistible to underemployed villagers who see others reap the benefits of the urban economy. As land becomes available in the village, to buy or to rent, and young men choose to migrate even when offered the possibility of living off of the land, other motives for migrating become clear. It is not that people absolutely cannot live off of the land. It is that farming is risky, difficult work. There are droughts and diseases among crops. Hazelnuts bring in less money each year, requiring farmers to maximize their annual yield. This requires more (wo)man power. If there are enough villagers present during harvest periods to help gather the village crops, people can live off of the land. However, they see how their migrant co-villagers live better from factory jobs and driving taxicabs. In the village, farming and animal husbandry were the mainstays of the economy. Now they are activities for villagers who have not yet been able to migrate.

5. MAINTAINING REGIONAL TIES IN THE CITY

In a city as large as Istanbul, how do Yuva natives maintain a distinct sense of community with their co-villagers? Several institutions are in place that reinforce regional ties and encourage villagers in Istanbul to stay connected to Yuva. This chapter explains the role of the dernek in migrant communities, focusing on migrants’ participation in the activities of the Yuvalılar Derne¤i. It also compares the dernek to the Papazlar drugstore, an informal meeting place, also for Yuva men. While there is no public meeting place for Yuva women to gather and meet in Istanbul, some attend religious meetings, where they connect with hemflehri women who share similar political views. Finally, the dernek magazine, Yuva’nin Sesi, circulated in Yuva, Istanbul and the US communities, keeps migrants in all of the Yuval› communities abreast of newsworthy events concerning their co-villagers. It ends with a discussion of the layers of affiliation and multiple aspects of identity that come into play when migrants are attempting to reinforce relationships of reciprocity and obligation, and maximize their economic potential outside the village. Reinforcing Regional Identity in the City Three resources for networking—the dernek, the informal meeting places, Yuva’nin Sesi—reinforce the interaction of people from the villages of Yuva district. The dernek is not unique to Turkish culture.61 Barkan et al. describe hometown associations as “communities of memory which reaffirm people’s sense of place and attachment to their hometowns or origin” (1991: 460). People from dis-

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tant cities usually form this type of association based on region or sometimes village of origin for the purposes of networking and having a formal institution which represents the interests of the migrant community. In Turkey, the dernek can also be an association of people who support a common sport or people who work in the same profession. These types of clubs come under less government scrutiny than associations for people from a common region, since geographical region in Turkey often implies a certain ethnic identity. Organizations that cause people to come together and acknowledge a common identity other than national identity could potentially instill in its members a sentiment that might undermine national solidarity. During times of civil unrest, the government has banned organizations that might lead to a separatist movement within Turkey. The most recent ban on derneks based on regional affiliation was lifted in 1990, and regional hometown associations then sprung up all over Istanbul. According to a May 1999 article in the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet, there are 865 derneks in the Kadikoy district of Istanbul alone, 201 of which are hometown associations (social - 156; professional - 147; educational - 110; sports - 69; religion - 64; Culture-arts - 35; alumni - 33; neighborhood - 26; retirees - 24; health - 20).62 As of the year 2000, there were 19 hometown associations for Giresun in Istanbul, 17 hometown associations for sub-districts of Giresun, and 16 hometown associations for actual villages within the district of Giresun. There is one dernek for the people of Yuva in Istanbul. The derneks for Giresun, its sub-districts, and its villages are all part of a larger organization called the Karadeniz Vakfı (Black Sea Foundation). Hometown associations of people from all over the Black Sea region belonged to this umbrella organization. The Black Sea Foundation is located in ‹stinye, a coastal district of Istanbul on the northern end of the European side of the Bosphorous. It is not in a neighborhood associated with Black Sea migrants. Rather, the founders chose a location where they could build a large sports complex. The main focus of the Black Sea Foundation is sports. Foundation members work to organize basketball and soccer matches between teams of school-aged children sponsored by hometown associations of people from different cities on the Black Sea. Basketball and soccer teams from Samsun, Sinop, Trabzon, Giresun, and Zonguldak play one another in annual tournaments. In the event of natural disaster, such as flood or earthquake, the

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Black Sea Foundation calls upon its member organizations to raise money for the victims. When the earthquake hit Gebze in 1999, all members of the Black Sea Foundation contributed care packages and money to send to the survivors. Gebze is not a Black Sea town by virtue of its location, but it was home to many labor migrant families from the Black Sea. This gesture was yet another example of the strength of regional ties among Black Sea Turks. The dernek formalizes the informal decisions made in the coffeehouses and, in the case of the Yuva community, the drugstore. It also plays a major role as a more formal point of contact between political representatives and the male residents of the area. The dernek theoretically represents the entire community since membership is open to everyone, including outsiders.63 Decisions concerning the community as a whole are not taken by the entire membership but only by a handful of leaders. The other residents accept the decisions as best suited to the interests of the entire settlement. The idea that a leader personifies the settlement is an obvious by-product of the communal solidarity prevailing there. The dernek is an interest-oriented organization. It bridges forms of association rooted in the family, kinship, and village, and those based on interest, class, or occupation in the city. All decisions concerning the community or regional compatriots as a whole are formalized in the dernek and enforced through it in the entire settlement. In other words, the dernek creates a degree of formal integration in the settlement, establishes working relations with the city and the government as a whole, and defends the interests of the residents before official organizations. Indeed, the dernek acts on behalf of village interests and needs when the economy permits. There were several occasions when dernek meetings ended with a collection of funds that would be allocated for repairs in the village, food for poor families in the village, or tuition for students from the village who were in college in another city. The dernek is the link between the village, its migrants, and the host community. Through the dernek, the village enjoys a share of the migrant’s earning. It is a form of remittance that is at once anonymous and familiar. The leaders of the dernek are engaged in establishing order in the neighborhood or in conducting relations with the people beyond the social network of regional kin. They are formally elected on the basis of their achievements inside and outside the neigh-

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borhood, either in dealings with the government or in some private business. The first migrants to move to the neighborhood, who usually belong to this group, enjoy a certain prestige and often become the spokesmen for the settlement. These founder-leaders possess firsthand knowledge of all matters concerning the neighborhood, including the ability to communicate and plan common action with the leaders of other neighborhoods. At times they engage in citywide political activities among co-villagers. They strive to preserve peace and order, to prevent crime, prostitution, and other undesired acts in the neighborhood, which could undermine internal solidarity and might prompt the intervention of municipal and government authorities. These leaders bargain with the political parties, the police, and other outside agencies on behalf of the settlement, which effectively helps integrate the community. These leaders seldom come from established village families; they are, in other words, “self-made men,” who often have a vested interest in the neighborhood; some own small businesses, such as a grocery store or coffeehouse. The dernek leaders enjoy considerable prestige among residents and relatives coming from the same village since their achievements symbolize the potential achievements of all people from the same village. Observations of the Dernek The leader of the Giresunlular Derne¤i in Kad›köy is a doctor from Giresun merkez with an established practice. His family has been in Istanbul for two generations. He went to college in Istanbul and medical school in Ankara. His wife is from Giresun merkez as well, although they met in Istanbul. He has been the dernek leader for five years. The activities of the dernek most commonly include dinners for members. The members are exclusively male. Four times a year, the members bring their wives to the dinners. This seems to be acceptable with the wives as well as the husbands. The Giresunlular Derne¤i in Kad›köy is a model dernek. There are many activities happening through this particular dernek. One of the most popular causes championed by it is the support of Giresun Spor, the regional soccer team. Members collect money to support the team and attend games. One event associated with Giresun Spor caused some splintering within the dernek. The team coach decided to pray with the team members on the field before the beginning of the soccer game.

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Dernek members interpreted his actions as a show of support for the Islamist party, and several of them suggested pulling money from the soccer fund and boycotting the game until the coach was fired. This issue was unresolved by the end of the season. Those who felt strongly about it boycotted the games and did not donate any money to the soccer fund. Other causes taken up by the Giresunlular Derne¤i include providing scholarship money for college-bound students, and money to feed poor families in Giresun and surrounding villages. They also hosted fast-breaking dinners during Ramadan for members, especially members who couldn’t afford food. The Giresunlular Derne¤i had members from most of the sub-districts of Giresun. Yuvalılar Derne¤i The Yuvalılar Derne¤i is located in Papazlar. There is only one Yuvalılar Derne¤i in all of Istanbul, and Yuva natives from all over the city go there.64 One of the previous dernek leaders, Hikmet, lived outside of Papazlar. Hikmet and his wife and two sons had moved from Papazlar to Alibeyköy because it was cleaner and safer. When Hikmet moved, Ferhat took over as head of the dernek. Ferhat and Hikmet were both members of the now nonextant Fazilet Partisi (Virtue Party), as was Melih, who, at the time of this writing, had most recently take over leadership of the dernek. It is interesting to note that the mayor of Papazlar and the mayor of Istanbul at the time were both from Black Sea families, and members of the Virtue Party. The activities of the Yuvalılar Derne¤i are similar to those of the larger Giresunlular Derne¤i. It supports the Yuva soccer team, collects money for students and poor families in Istanbul and in Yuva, and hosts an iftar (fast-breaking meal during the holy month of Ramadan) for its members and their families. The interior of the dernek resembles that of the one in Kadikoy and the one in Kennedy Kent. There are numerous tables with ashtrays. The calendar on the wall has pictures of Giresun/Yuva, and there is a poster of Giresun Spor. In the Yuvalılar Derne¤i, there is also a map of the USA with pins stuck into the cities where Yuva natives live in America. There is a small television mounted to the wall on the first floor so men can watch sports or play cards. The upstairs room has more tables and no television. There are always men at the dernek. Mornings host the retired crowd, complete with prayer

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beads, newspapers, tea, and cigarettes. It is always possible to get tea or coffee at the dernek. There is usually a young boy making tea and coffee. The dernek has one restroom and it is for men. Women never go to the dernek. They express no interest in going, although they were quite interested to hear what men talk about when they are there. Unlike the Giresunlular Derne¤i, the Yuvalılar Derne¤i is an alcohol-free establishment. An evening at the dernek usually involves cards, tea, cigarettes, and politics. Men from the same village come together to talk about which political party will best serve the needs of the community in Papazlar as well as in Yuva. The hot topic in the fall of 1998 was the mayoral race in the village. The incumbent mayor was deemed incompetent by the people participating in the conversation. The only thing he did for Yuva during his time as mayor, it was said, was to have a paved road built from the center of Yuva to his village. He had never been to the USA; therefore, it was felt that he had no true vision of what needed to happen next in the village. The competition was a man named fiükrü. He had been working in Kennedy Kent for eleven years, and he decided to come back and work for his people at the local level. I had numerous conversations with fiükrü, and part of the reason he returned was to escape the backbreaking daily routine of the migrant worker. He had his green card, he had made his money, now it was time to relax and help his co-villagers. Aside from long discussions about the upcoming elections, men spoke almost exclusively about relatives in the USA, getting to the USA, and available jobs in Papazlar. Unlike the atmosphere of the Giresunlular Derne¤i, there were no fish and raki dinners and no white-collar professionals in three-piece suits. Clearly, all but a small minority of the members were laborers. On my first evening at the dernek, the discussion revolved around the mayoral election. The election in Papazlar was not of particular interest to the men at this time. They were focused on the mayoral election in Yuva. All of the men had cell phones, and they often received calls from co-villagers. It was not always obvious that they were talking to co-villagers calling from America until they hung up. They answered the phone casually and proceeded in a familiar style, as if they spoke with these people daily. Sometimes that was really the case.

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Informal Meeting Places There are other gathering places for men in Papazlar. The coffeehouse is one of them. Coffeehouses do not have members—only regulars. The regulars are usually local to a certain neighborhood. The activities in coffeehouses are virtually the same as dernek activities. Indeed, sometimes it is only possible to distinguish between them by their names. The drugstore in Papazlar, owned by the Kurt family, is also a popular meeting place. V. Kurt is the pharmacist, and he always has a full shop. The drugstore has a small area with chairs in front of the counter where people sit and discuss the news. The regulars at the drugstore are mostly from Yuva, with a few exceptions of people from other sub-districts of Giresun. They come in after work and V. orders tea for everyone. There is a pot-bellied stove on the left side of the shop. The seat closest to the heat is reserved for V.’s father. On my initial evening visit to the drugstore, I noticed that the political discussions were different. The topic of most interest to the regulars was the situation developing between Turkey and Italy regarding Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the Kurdish Workers’ Party. They were outraged that Italy would interfere, and couldn’t understand why any government would want to protect the man responsible for so many deaths all over Turkey. They were curious to know how I felt about the situation, especially in light of my “obvious” ethnic ties to Italy. It was difficult to convince them that I was second generation American and felt no sense of loyalty to Italy. American Turks, after all, return frequently and stay involved and informed about Turkish politics. Over the course of the year, it became clear that the drugstore is the informal dernek for people with secular political beliefs. V. and his circle were traditional in the sense that they were loyal to their village customs. However, they were not willing to pledge their allegiance to Fazilet or any other party that had a religious platform. They were the migrants of the 1960s, not the migrants of the 1980s. They believed in Ataturk’s vision of a secular nation. Yuva Magazine The Yuva ve Köyleri Kültür ve Yardımlaflma Derne¤i (The Cultural and Assistance Association of Yuva and Its Villages) was established in 1990, and the Yuva’nın Sesi (Voice of Yuva) magazine first

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came out in the fall of 1994. The aim of the magazine is to disseminate information about the villagers of Yuva, wherever they currently live, and the activities of the Yuvalılar Derne¤i. The first issue has a cover page with the current name of Yuva and its former name in smaller font, in parentheses. The magazine is published quarterly. The sections in the magazine have remained consistent throughout its publication history, with the exception of two items that will be discussed shortly. The people who write for the Yuva magazine are Yuva natives still living in the villages of Yuva, in Istanbul, and more recently, in the United States. The magazine typically begins by introducing new members of the hometown association to its readers, stating their current place of residence, occupation, and natal village. The early issues devoted a lot of space to explaining the value of the dernek and the importance of becoming a member. In one earlier issue, an Istanbul resident wrote about the state of hometown associations in the city. As of 1994, there were approximately a hundred. hometown associations for the various sub-districts of Giresun.65 According to the author, they varied in size, location, and productivity. The first goal of the dernek, he stated, should be to serve the natal villages of its members. He sharply criticized the associations that had card playing as their primary activity. The first issue’s feature article is written by a young college student, originally from Yuva, who went to Alaska to study marine life preservation.66 One day, when he was walking through the hotel lobby on the way to his room, he overheard someone speaking a Black Sea dialect of Turkish. He followed the voice to find a man from Yuva talking on the payphone to his family back home. The voice belonged to Abdullah Abi, köy adamı (villager), and the article goes on to tell his story. Abdullah decided one day when he was working in the village that he would go to America. He bought a ticket to Canada, got a passport and some pocket money, and promptly left the village. According to the story, the Canadian immigration officials detained Abdullah until an acquaintance came to bail him out a few days later. He was allowed to leave under the condition that he return to Turkey within the week. He decided to ignore the demands of Canadian immigration officials, and he paid someone to take him to a location where he could cross the border. They went by car after sundown and dropped Abdullah off at the appropriate spot. The article does not specify where he entered

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the USA, but he eventually made his way to Alaska to answer an advertisement for employment cleaning up an oil spill off the coast. He ended up working in a spaghetti restaurant, and it was at this point that the student from Yuva met him in Alaska. Abdullah Abi’s story bears significant resemblance to the stories of other migrants from Yuva. Abdullah’s rationale for leaving the village is that he is tired of being underemployed. He is assuming, based on what he has heard, that the nature of work in America will be different. The article reveals certain details about Abdullah’s passage that show up in other migrants’ accounts. One has to be familiar with the general pattern of migration to understand that this article is written in a kind of shorthand. He flew to an unnamed city in Canada, where he had acquaintances, and they were able to get him out of INS custody when he got caught. The story does not specify exactly why he was detained by immigration officials (referred to by everyone as “polis”). Judging from the other stories I have heard, I believe it is safe to assume that Abdullah was traveling with fraudulent documents. The story continues with Abdullah’s “escape” from immigration custody, another common experience for men who migrated in the early 1980s. He goes to an unnamed hotel, where he meets some people who will drive him to the border. This is written in a way that would suggest his meeting with these people was coincidental. In reality, he probably went to the hotel and waited for a border taxicab. He paid them a small deposit for their services, and the undisclosed balance was to be paid after Abdullah had found work. As is common with other migrants, Abdullah was under some pressure from the border taxicab people to pay what he owed them, and according to the article, this is why he went to Alaska to work on the oil spill. Wherever he originally worked in the USA, he was not able to earn enough money to pay for his entry into the country. The article alludes to the fact that Abdullah’s first job in America was at a restaurant, and that the owner had lived for some time in Alaska. The owner helped Abdullah make plans to go. The author of the article mentions visiting a restaurant “in one of the northern states” where people from Yuva go to work. The owner of the restaurant asked the author if Yuva was larger than Istanbul, because he kept seeing Turkish people wearing Yuva-Turkey t-shirts. These, of course, are the t-shirts passed out by the dernek. The author goes on to explain that while

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Istanbul is a bigger city, the people of Yuva are “bigger” (mightier) and braver because they risk everything to come to America and end up successful. The author ends the article by wishing strength and stamina to the people of Yuva living in Istanbul and America. I have heard from several migrants of immigration officers asking if Yuva is the largest city in Turkey, or if Yuva is larger than Istanbul. It seems that this exchange between the author and the restaurant owner has been lifted from its original context and superimposed onto other migration narratives. In the most recent issue or Yuva’nın Sesi, there is a letter from Orhan Bayram, a Yuva native who has been living in New York for over ten years. He owns a gas station on Long Island and his children are in college. He writes to his co-villagers to warn them that although the rewards for coming are many, the costs are indeed high. He cautions villagers against believing all of the fantastic tales of immediate wealth and an easy life. There is money to be made in the USA, but only through years of fourteen-hour workdays and very little time for family. He asks people to think hard before making the decision to leave Turkey. The recent issues of Yuva’nın Sesi include advertisements for Turkish-owned businesses in the USA, mostly diners and gas stations, and for immigration and divorce lawyers. It also contains the usual advertisements for businesses and services run by villagers in Papazlar. V. Kurt’s pharmacy has an ad in every issue. I could not find exact figures on the magazine’s circulation, but copies are sent to the dernek in Kennedy Kent. People in the village as well as people in Papazlar contribute to the magazine and read it. It is a way for villagers, no matter where they are, to learn news about their fellow countrymen. The section Alamuk contains yöresel sözler (local words), and in one particular issue, gives the names of the months that are unique to Yuva: Zemheri, Karakıfl, Abrul, Kiraz, Assus, and Koç are not found in standard Turkish calendars. The people of the city of Giresun, 41 kilometers away, were not familiar with these or other village words, including the word “alamuk.” The author urged villagers in other communities to keep these words alive for the next generation of Yuva natives. In the early issues of the Yuva magazine, the “news” section was limited to news within Turkey. Most of the neighborhood information focused on Yuva itself and accounts of life in Papazlar for Yuva

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natives. Occasional references were made to other communities in Ankara, Bursa, and cities in Germany. There was an interview with the governor of Yuva entitled, “Göçün Sebebi Tamamen Ekonomik” (Economic Conditions are Sole Motivation for Migration). The more recent issues of Yuva’nın Sesi reveal the shift in the migrant communities from marginalized individuals to empowered party members. There is much more written about village values and the importance of having a voice in Yuva’s political affairs. Ferhat Bıçak’s column in the April 2000 issue urges people to contribute to the welfare of the village. Hikmet Kaflık’s column and Orhan Bayram’s message from overseas both introduce and congratulate the new mayor of Yuva who is returning to his natal land after working in Kennedy Kent for many years. They urge him to emulate the values of the people he represents. There are essays about the importance of being a good Muslim. In subtle and obvious ways, Yuva’nın Sesi is becoming a more Islamist publication. There are still local recipes and descriptions of the villages in the many seasons, but it contains much more life instruction than it did previously. Yuva’nın Sesi is a medium of communication for Yuva villagers throughout the world. It shares the experiences of individual migrants, gives news about current crop prices and the physical conditions of the villages, and advertises the services offered by villagers in different cities. It also reveals the political changes that are taking place in the community. The new president of the Yuvalılar Derne¤i in Papazlar was at the time of this writing a member of Virtue Party, as were most of the current contributors. The dernek, the drugstore, and the coffeehouse are all places where men come together to help themselves and each other in a foreign environment. The coffeehouse and drugstore function similarly to the dernek, with less of an intense activist agenda. Anyone from Yuva can come into the dernek and receive the assistance of his co-villagers in finding work, finding housing, and learning about the city. It is an institution that reinforces loyalty to one’s memleket and regional identity. Derneks exist all over Istanbul and all over Europe for migrants from various regions of Turkey (Gitmez and Wilpert 1987; Soysal 1994). It is interesting to note that whether migrants move internally or internationally, they still decide to network based on regional as opposed to national affiliation. Having nationality in common is not always a strong enough

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bond, even in the most foreign of environments. The Yuvalı Turks in America travel further to get to their own regional dernek rather than frequenting the one open to “all Turks.” They understand that any dernek or organization called Türk Derne¤i (Turkish Association) must be run by Kemalists and wealthy urbanites. At worst, it would be run by some fascist organization that ascribes to Pan-Turkism. The magazine connects villagers in a different way. The magazine brings news of the village to the migrants and news of the migrants to the village in a more removed form. It is considered an honor to contribute to the magazine and a privilege to be mentioned. The magazine is regarded as a formal, official, and indelible account of the villagers’ activities. Of the networking strategies mentioned above, only the magazine is open to women. The remainder of women’s connection with the migrants outside their neighborhood comes through information they receive from their spouses or relationships with other women in other communities. Women have their own method of forging and maintaining relationships with other women, but none of these are institutionalized. The only exception is the Saturday prayer group attended by some of the women from Yuva. Saturday Religious Meetings for Women Zuhal, Hikmet’s wife, belongs to a group of women who meet on Saturdays for religious instruction. I attended a Saturday morning women’s service in the basement of Zuhal’s building. The women in attendance were either from Zuhal’s apartment complex or were related in some way to a resident. There was no other way to find out about the Saturday meetings besides word of mouth, since meetings of this kind are banned in Turkey. According to Mustafa, my contact at the mayor’s office in Giresun, Turkish law bans separate religious meetings for women since they have the right to go to the mosque. In essence, all Turks should have access to their place of worship, regardless of gender. Mustafa reported that his contacts in the Istanbul police had broken up such meetings in the past. My secular urban study participants told me that the police frequently raided religious sect meetings. The sects are perceived as potential hotbeds of separatist politics, not just gatherings for religious worship. Of course, Zuhal and Hikmet saw this as a form of religious oppression, as did Zahide and her husband.

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The Saturday prayer meeting started at 10:00. All of the women gathered in the basement of Zuhal’s apartment building and removed their shoes. With headscarves and overcoats in place, they filed into the meeting room and sat on the floor with their young children by their sides. There were approximately fifty women in the basement. The imam was positioned in a corner on the floor behind a bed sheet curtain hanging from a short wire that attached to the ceiling. He screamed into a microphone, seemingly unaware that it functioned to carry even the smallest traces of noise all the way to the other side of the room. The sound was deafening. The imam went back and forth between reading passages of the Kur’an in Arabic and preaching to the women in Turkish. His topic that morning concerned the “good wife.” He urged the women in the basement to follow their husbands and submit to their will. He warned them against the evils of raising faithless children. He reminded them that children are a blessing, particularly male children. Clearly, the message was that women should have as many children as their husbands desired. The Saturday prayer meeting ended with a recitation from the Kur’an. The women sat on the floor and looked toward the sheet, or read from the Kur’an. They did not have facilities for washing their feet and hands before coming into the morning meeting. In many ways, this prayer meeting differed significantly from men’s experiences at the mosque. The fluorescent lighting and the paneled walls of the basement could not compare to the splendid, tiled stone walls and candlelit open spaces of the mosque. To be sure, men do not go to the mosque to pray with babies crying at their sides. The Saturday meetings were organized by the husbands of the women in attendance, in cooperation with an imam from the local mosque. The husbands were acquainted either through working at Eti, the food company that employed Hikmet, membership in the same political party, common hometown, or some combination thereof. The meetings were the only form of institutionalized gathering outside the home available to women from Yuva. Indeed, Yuva women were newcomers to the meetings and were in the minority. They heard about the gathering from Zuhal, who was trying to recruit as many hemflehri women as she could. The Saturday meetings reveal another dimension in the concentric spheres of

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affiliation that operate in Turkish culture, and specifically in migrant communities. Similar to the population of Zuhal’s apartment building in Alibeyköyü, the people who knew each other through the Saturday meetings were not only regional compatriots, but also political compatriots. While Zahide and Nurdan were also Islamist party supporters, they did not attend the Saturday meetings. They did not disapprove of the meetings, but they did not feel compelled to attend: If women feel like it does them some good to attend, they should. I don’t need to go. (Zahide) The meeting in Alibeyköyü is not really for educated women. (Nurdan) Aside from any apprehension they might feel from attending a meeting that could be subjected to a raid, Nurdan and Zahide, both educated women, distinguished themselves from the other conservative religious women on the basis of education. Nurdan is a nurse, and Zahide attended some college in America before she met her husband. They think of themselves as köylü, in the sense of non-western and non-urban, but educated nonetheless. They can learn about Islam through reading. They are confident in their interpretations. Zuhal, on the other hand, has a seventh-grade education. She is confident about her abilities as a mother and wife, but defers to the imam and her husband on issues relating to religion and religious interpretation. When Nurdan and Zahide talked to me about converting to Islam, they did not suggest a visit to the mosque or attendance at the Saturday meeting. They gave me a reading list. Concentric Spheres of Affiliation Anthropologists of Turkish culture have observed that relationships are commonly built on principles of reciprocity and obligation (Magnarella 1974; Mandel 1990; White 1994). As Delaney describes in her study of rural Turkey, it is possible to view these relationships as concentric spheres of affiliation that involve different aspects of a person’s identity (1991). The earliest bonds of reciprocity and obligation develop between members of the same aile (family). Moving outward from aile, one’s identity within a given community is based on akrabalık (kinship). This includes close rel-

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atives as well as distant kin. The next level of affiliation and identity has to do with membership in a köy (village). (This can be broken down into mahalles [neighborhoods], in some cases.) The next concentric sphere of affiliation for Yuva natives pertains to district of origin. It is the name of the district that serves as the elliptical term for the village. People from Yuva refer to Yuva as home, not Pancar or Elma Belen or Sinanlı, the villages of their birth. The dernek, in theory, is for all Yuva natives. All Yuva natives have the shared experience of being from a rural district, not an urban one. It is this recognition of their common rural mountain origins that distinguishes Yuva natives from natives of coastal or urban districts within Giresun province. District affiliation appears to be based on environmentally grounded criteria of cultural proximity, not administrative boundaries. Similarly, Yuva natives’ avoidance of invoking Giresun provincial affiliation has much to do with the fact that the city of Giresun supports a different political party. In other words, in spite of the administrative affiliation of Yuva and Giresun, there are environmental and political reasons for making a distinction between being associated with the province or the district. Moving outward from district affiliation is regional affiliation. Whether people are from the mountains or from the coast, they are Karadenizli. In other words, they belong to the Black Sea. They are Karadenizli whether they are Turk, Kurd, Laz, Circassian, or Rum. The strength of this regional bond is not called into action until regional compatriots are in a situation where they can choose between different bonds of reciprocity and obligation that call upon various aspects of an individual’s identity. Faced with the choice between asking fellow Kurds from a different region of Turkey for assistance, or asking Turks from one’s own region, Yucel points out that the Gastarbeiter from the Black Sea will rely upon bonds of regional affiliation instead of what may seem like the preferred choice of interacting with members of one’s own ethnic group (1987). This tendency reveals an additional aspect of identity among Turks that stands out more in migrant communities.67 It becomes difficult to determine exactly where the bonds of political orientation fit within the scheme of concentric spheres of identity and affiliation. Political affiliation seems to color all relationships in Turkey, and it is impossible to mention political orien-

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tation without thinking of religious conservatism. Islam’s presence in Turkish political life predates the foundation of the new republic. Of course, when one speaks of Islam in Turkey, it is with the understanding that the vast majority of Turks are Muslim. The conflict has to do with differing opinions concerning the proper role of religion in the political life of the nation. The connection between regional identity and political affiliation among migrant communities was forged, in part, by the relationship between hometown association representatives and politicians. Regional affiliation and political orientation became intertwined when political parties started using the derneks as campaign headquarters. This type of collaboration, similar to the formation of the dernek itself, has been illegal at times. Violence and the threat of political instability have often been the causes of military intervention and severe restrictions on Turkish citizens’ rights to participate in politically oriented organizations: As important as the violence, including bitter clashes between right and left and the assassinations of public figures, was the increasing politicization of labor unions and other associations. Even the bureaucracy, including the police, became politicized and divided and Islamic forces became noticeably more strident. In 1961 it had been expected that administrative, legal, social, and economic structures would develop an independence that would modify political strife, not that they would be so ineffective as to become politicized themselves. In 1980, the military intervened again but this time with a very heavy hand (Dodd 1996:133). The military appointed the National Consultative Assembly to draw up a new constitution in 1982. The new constitution “...imposed restrictions on all rights, including freedom of expression, if their exercise adversely affected economic life, security, public order and morality, and the integrity of the state. Nor should they encourage crime, revolt, or rebellion” (Dodd 1996:134). Hometown associations were banned under the new constitution, and political parties were not allowed to corrupt or finance the activities of various types of organizations. By 1990, the restriction on associations was lifted, resulting in the type of politicized hometown organizations and labor associations

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that existed before the coup of 1980. Yuva hometown association leaders understood that if they could promise politicians votes from the dernek members, the politicians could help their hemflehri in the city and back in the village. Many people left the dernek if they did not agree with the political orientation of the association leader. Still others would join in an attempt to secure some type of financial assistance for their families in Papazlar and in Yuva, even if they did not agree with the political agenda of the organization. Indeed, it is possible—and necessary—to distinguish between votes and votes of confidence. As of this writing, there is only one hometown association in Istanbul specifically for people from Yuva, and one in Kennedy Kent. If Yuva natives do not want to join the Yuvalılar Derne¤i, their options are to join associations that represent a larger geographical area. For example, there are several hometown associations in Istanbul that represent Giresun as a province, as well as one in New York and several in Europe. I did not meet any people from Papazlar who were non-members of the Yuvalılar Derne¤i and who reported membership in any of the Giresunlular Dernekleri. No one from the Giresunlular Derne¤i reported knowing any Yuva natives who were members, although technically this could have happened. People from Yuva are also people from Giresun. The question is how people rank regional/geographical identity and religious/political identity. The fact a man from Yuva is poor, uneducated, and comes from an agrarian background may be cancelled out by the fact that he does not want to vote for the Virtue Party or the Nationalists. The members of the Giresunlular Derne¤i may look past his humble lifestyle and try to welcome him into the association in hopes of having him convert others to their political party. Each aspect of identity and affiliation implies another relationship of reciprocity and obligation. Co-villagers supply each other’s families with brides and grooms, farming assistance, and welfare for the needy. Hemflehri in the city assist one another in searches for housing and employment. In fact, hemflehri in foreign countries assist one another in the same way. Migrants understand that hemflehrilik, or the relationship between fellow countrymen, implies a certain degree of mutual obligation and assistance. The relationship between regional compatriots who share political orientation is even stronger because it is reinforced at many levels of

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affiliation—village, region, political (and hence religious). Migrants avail themselves of this system of mutual obligation because they know it is in place. Even if a man does not like the person with whom he is interacting, he knows they share an understanding of the way things work. ‹hsan Ardın, for example, thought of his co-villagers as uneducated and slightly crude. They considered him to be a selfish man. Still, they worked with each other. ‹hsan got his fee, and the villagers got their papers. They didn’t have to like each other. It was sufficient that they have access to each other through their relationships in the community of Yuva natives. This is especially important when considering the degree to which Virtue Party membership had spread throughout the community of Yuva natives in Papazlar. After spending eleven months talking with men and women during pre- and post-election angst, it was rare indeed to hear someone admit to voting for the Virtue Party because they were good Muslims or holy men. People were happy to vote for the Virtue Party because of what the party promised to do for the village and for the shantytown. The Virtue Party presented migrants with an opportunity to add yet another concentric sphere of affiliation and mutual obligation. Although it is a relationship of access (to resources and upward mobility) based on political affiliation, it is also a commitment that reinforces each individual’s ties with his urban neighborhood and his home district. The dernek represents the hometown and its population in the city. Its members are working to achieve benefits for their village community, their urban migrant community, and for themselves as migrant individuals in an urban environment. The hemflehri cast their votes as a group, and their neighborhood sees the benefits. Yuva natives who vote for other parties are seen as foolish. No other party promised the kind of assistance that the Virtue Party offered. A vote for another party was therefore seen by most dernek members as a vote against the community. Conclusion Yuva natives draw on different aspects of their identity in order to maximize their chances for success in migrant communities. They do this in the village as well. However, certain aspects of identity don’t come into play until one is out of the village and in an atmosphere that accentuates differences between Turks. In the village,

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the most important aspect of one’s identity is familial affiliation. Villagers rely on the help of their kin for financial assistance, help with agricultural chores, and negotiating matters of marriage. In a large city like Istanbul, the kinship group is not always enough of a support system. People rely as well on their relationships with covillagers who are not related. For transregional migrants in Papazlar, bonds of regional affiliation are particularly important, as are relationships formed with people who share political orientation. The strongest bonds of reciprocity are formed between migrants from the same region who also share the same political beliefs.

Woman picking beet greens, Yuva

6. NAMING, CLAIMING, AND GETTING TO KENNEDY KENT

How the Turks Discovered America A popular off color Laz joke in Turkey about how Temel and Dursun conquered the Indians and named many cities in America, translated from Turkish: Temel and Dursun were traveling through pioneer country in America when they came across a band of savage Indians. Temel turned to Dursun and said, “Do something before they kill us!” Dursun pulled out his saz, a long-necked stringed instrument used in Turkish folk music, and began to play. The Indians calmed down, and the place was dubbed Tek Saz (lit. one single saz - Texas). Temel and Dursun kept traveling until they encountered another savage clan. Temel was so afraid that he started passing gas. This made the Indians laugh, and they let Temel and Dursun live. The place was named Laz ve Gaz (lit. Laz and Gas - Las Vegas) in honor of the two funny Laz. The final leg of their trip brought them face to face with another hostile crowd. Dursun played his saz, but it didn’t work. Temel tried passing gas to humor them, and they grew even more restless. Finally Temel went behind Dursun with the saz and told him to hold still. What he did made Dursun shriek in a way that humored the Indians. They decided to let the two men live, and the place was called Arkan Saz (lit. Saz up your ass - Arkansas). In addition to humorous accounts of how Turks named American

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places, there is also Brent Kennedy’s study of the Melungeons of Appalachia and their Turkish roots. His study claims that in 1566, Ottoman Turkish galley slaves, upon being liberated from one of Francis Drake’s ships, settled in Appalachia, intermarried with the native people, and influenced local culture to the extent that several American states adopted Turkish names. While many of Kennedy’s linguistic findings are clearly farfetched, the interesting point is that his study is very widely known in Turkey. Kennedy’s visits to Izmir and beyond were the object of much media attention. While conducting research in Brooklyn, NY, for a different study in 1996, people in Brooklyn told me that Elvis Presley and Abraham Lincoln were part Turkish (Melungeon), and they were basing their claims on Kennedy’s book. Whether Kennedy is right or not, the Turks I met were eager to assume he was. Many people I interviewed knew of this study, and were confident that their ancestors had contributed not only to the early population of pioneer settlers in America, but also to American culture and the English language itself, in the form of place names. Naming is a subject with which most Turks identify rather quickly. It was only a few generations ago in 1934 that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk—an adopted surname meaning “father of the Turks”—gave all citizens of the new Turkish Republic the option of inventing a surname or being given one by the state (Kinross 1989). (The surname was also quite useful as a way of keeping track of people for the purposes of taxation.) Some people chose surnames based on place of origin, occupation, and father’s first name.68 This was one of Ataturk’s many attempts to westernize Turkey. Other actions throughout Anatolia’s history reveal various attempts to Turkify Asia Minor. Greek, Roman, and Armenian place names have gradually been erased and replaced with Turkish names: Constantinople officially became Istanbul, Smyrna was changed to ‹zmir, and Kerasounta Giresun, all in the 1920s surrounding the Greco-Turkish War.69 Co-villagers of migrants to New York punned the name New Yuva, and it persists as an old punch line in conversations about friends and relatives in the USA. Those whose friends and relatives settled in Connecticut stumbled across the name Kennedy Kent while attempting to pronounce the name of their co-villagers’ new home state. This new pronunciation made it back to the village and stuck, as villagers understood it as the town (“kent”) near the air-

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port (“Kennedy”). People seem to be having more fun with the idea of staking a claim in the classic new colony, in the USA, than punning nicknames for Papazlar. While the neighborhoods in Kennedy Kent may be the American social equivalent of a gecekondu, no one has explained this to the Turks who live there. They assign great prestige to having made it to the USA, and calling it New Yuva is a way of owning the success. “Making it” to Papazlar doesn’t inspire the same amount of awe in the village. After all, many villages and towns that fell on hard times had already established a community in Istanbul. Settling in Papazlar was not a remarkable thing to do. On the contrary, it was the nation’s standard response to rural economic hardship and the only option short of leaving the country. New Yuva New Yuva refers to different places. The original migrants used it to refer to a community on Long Island where ‹hsan Ardın had his job in an envelope factory. Later, it came to include other cities in New York, and some villagers use it to refer to neighborhoods in New Jersey. ‹hsan Ardın was brought to New Yuva by Lefter Cember, where Pontic Greeks had already established a community as refugees years earlier. ‹hsan lived in an apartment building whose superintendent was a Pontic Greek friend of Lefter Cember. One of his first jobs in America was in a Greek restaurant, and then later in a Greek bar. ‹hsan spent his free time socializing with Greeks from the Pontus, even after he found other Turks in the city. He explained to me that he and Lefter had been as close as relatives, and Lefter’s friends were his friends. When Pontic Greek business owners began to sell their businesses and retire, ‹hsan alerted his co-villagers, one by one, and they came to take advantage of a new opportunity in a new community of Yuva. ‹hsan Ardın’s nephew was one of the first relatives to come to New Yuva. He bought an old gas station from a Pontic Greek couple with all of his hazelnut harvest money and investments from co-villagers. Melih Ardin eventually brought his wife and they both obtained green cards. Melih worked in the gas station and Lale traveled back and forth between America and Yuva. Since they had no children, they were able to offer assistance to other villagers hoping to come to America. Melih hired three of his co-villagers who had invested in his gas station venture.

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Whenever Lefter heard that friends of his were selling their businesses, he would tell ‹hsan and ‹hsan would pass the word along to co-villagers. This worked well for ‹hsan, who had started charging people for this information and for assistance getting to America. Within a 15 year period, ‹hsan had assisted thousands of his regional compatriots in getting to New Yuva. My first visit to the community of Yuva natives in the USA was to the Brooklyn community of New Yuva, in the spring of 1999. I returned to the USA for two weeks to visit the migrants in their homes and places of work in New York. In order to facilitate introductions, I brought pictures of migrants’ relatives in Turkey. I went with addresses, photos, and the assurance from my participants in Turkey that they would call ahead for me and announce my arrival. I had to go first to Melih Ardin’s gas station. I had met Melih during my time in the village, and his wife Lale had promised to introduce me to her co-villagers in the neighborhood. Melih Ardin was happy to see me. He greeted me and ushered me into the office of his gas station. “Nereden nereye...” (lit. From where to where, implying that it was incredible for him to have made it all the way to America, and it was odd to see me here after seeing me in the village.) Nereden nereye, indeed. His gas station looked as if it had been blasted out of Yuva, only to land in New York. The calendar on the wall had the days of the week in Turkish and a picture of the Yuva soccer team. Melih had flags of Giresun Spor hanging around the room, a small picture of Ataturk, and a nazar boncu¤u (symbol of protection from the evil eye) nailed above the entrance to the garage. In a less discreet spot, on the wall to the left of the cash register, there was a decorative metal wall hanging with the phrase “Bismillahirrahmanirrahim,” the customary phrase uttered before one begins any kind of task. The radio was playing local pop music, but there were cassette tapes of Hüseyin B›çak and Ismail Türüt scattered on the desk. These two Black Sea artists are popular among overseas hemflehri. Melih and I had tea. He asked me about my trip home and how my partner and stepson were doing without me. I brought pictures of Billy and Patrick to show him and others who would inevitably ask about my family. I showed Melih the other pictures I had taken in Istanbul and in the village. He knew whose relatives were in New Yuva and which ones were working in Kennedy Kent. Between him and Lale, he said, we could find all of them.

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It was odd to watch Melih in his role as a gas station owner. His English was poor and restricted to gas station vocabulary, and he spoke with an exaggerated New York accent. Turks in the community said Melih spoke English. Learning exactly what that meant was educational for me. I remembered meeting his father Ilhan Ardin in the village. Ilhan Ardin was also a gas station owner in New Yuva, and the uncle of Nadia, the mayor’s second wife. Nadia told me that Ilhan spoke English. Ilhan, like his son, spoke gas station English and knew every form of profanity that existed in the English language. He knew the pejorative terms for Blacks and Latinos, and he knew what men called women when they were interested in them (“baby,” “honey”) or angry with them (“f###ing b!tch”). Melih had been in America for years. He came after his father got his green card. He worked in his father’s gas station and saved and collected enough money to buy his own. He repaid his debt to his investors by hiring the Yuva natives who invested in his business. The original investors had moved on to other businesses. Melih was working with two other men from Yuva. One was sharing an apartment with several other migrants. The other man was a new arrival, there illegally, and he chose to sleep at the gas station on a cot in the office in order to avoid paying rent at this early point in his career as a gas station attendant. Both men had wives in Turkey. Having co-villagers working at the gas station relieved some of Melih’s stress. He had hired people who were accountable to him and to the community they shared. This form of social control would, in theory, prevent the workers from trying to take advantage of Melih by stealing from him or alerting the authorities to his practice of hiring spontaneous migrants. The gas station was a refuge from Turkey’s disappointing economy, and the three men worked to make it a success. They all seemed to take comfort in the fact that they were from the same patch of grass back home and they could communicate easily. There was more operating here than mere language. They had a shared understanding of the circumstances they were struggling to overcome as rural mountain Black Sea peasants, citizens of an underdeveloped region of a developing country. My initial observation in New Yuva was that gas station and diner owners employed identical hiring practices. Whenever possible,

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they would hire co-villagers and regional compatriots, then Turks from other areas. The community in Sunnyside, Queens, knew of the “Laz” gas station owners. It was in Sunnyside two years earlier that I first heard mention of them. Nereden nereye. After I had tea with Melih, he called Lale and told her that Fikret, the overnight gas station attendant, would be driving me to their apartment. I climbed in the passenger seat of the 1987 Honda Accord and buckled up. The car had a nazar hanging from the rearview mirror and an “Allah korusun” (God protect us) bumper sticker. Kemençe music was blaring from the tape deck. We arrived at Melih and Lale’s apartment within five minutes of leaving the gas station. After the initial commotion of greeting and meeting new women, I saw that Lale had prepared a feast of turnip green soup, cornbread, börek, and fried anchovies. Fikret went back to the gas station and I stayed with Lale and her neighbors. We looked over the pictures and planned our time. During that initial meal, I learned that I was the first American the women had seen in a Turkish home. When Turkish men married American women, they did not become part of the daytime community, since most American wives worked. The language barrier was obviously an obstacle as well. During my week in New Yuva, I met approximately twenty migrant households. This is only a very small percentage of the Turkish households in that community. Since many of the community members were illegal migrants, they were somewhat reluctant to talk with me. I personally delivered most of the pictures of relatives in Turkey and gave the others to friends to pass on. People were excited to see their parents, spouses, siblings, and children. When I found “Larry” Elevli, he was getting in his limousine to retrieve a passenger from the airport. Melih introduced me to him. After making small talk about the small size of the world, I produced a picture of the daughter he had not seen since her birth thirteen years prior. She wanted him to have the photo, I explained, so he would remember to write her. Larry seemed not to care. He took the picture and thanked me. When I asked him about his new life in America, he spoke of his new wife, his children with her, his thriving limousine business. Larry had no interest in going back to Turkey. He barely kept in touch with the Turks in New Yuva, preferring the company of his Dominican wife’s friends.

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I found that Larry Elevli was the exception in New Yuva. When I delivered pictures to men who were unable to go home, they usually cried when they saw their wives and children. Some of the migrants in New Yuva had been away from Turkey for as long as six years. Others who came to America through the visa lottery, or had legalized their presence in the USA, were not as emotional as the men who felt they had no control over when they could return to see their families. The community of New Yuva started in the apartment building in Brooklyn where ‹hsan Ardın previously lived. Similar to Gül Sitesi, families from Yuva slowly took over the building. Twelve of the households I visited were in one apartment building, and the others were close by. The inhabitants of the building were always waiting to hear news from the superintendent (originally Rum, now Turkish) about vacant apartments. While it wasn’t as easy to simply move to America upon hearing of a vacancy, Yuva natives reported always finding people from their district to fill the vacancies. Sometimes families came, but more often the apartments were filled by four or five migrant men trying to save money on rent. Kennedy Kent The community in Kennedy Kent also has its roots in the relationship between ‹hsan Ardın and Lefter Cember. By the time Ferit Yahyao¤lu had saved enough money to buy his own business, Lefter’s friends in Connecticut were ready to sell their diner just off of I-95, near Bridgeport. Ferit traveled with ‹hsan and Lefter to Kennedy Kent to see the business. He decided to purchase it if he could first work there and learn the business. It was this opportunity that led to the Turkish community in Kennedy Kent. One by one, ‹hsan and Ferit began bringing co-villagers over, first to work in Ferit’s diner and eventually to buy small businesses from retiring Pontic Greek entrepreneurs. One of Ferit’s sons bought a pizzeria. Another one bought a highway diner. Another man from Yuva came and purchased a mechanic’s shop from a retiring Pontic Greek man. He brought his brother, his brother-in-law, and his nephew to work in his new business. It is important to understand the small window of opportunity for Pontic Turks and Greeks to interact as regional compatriots. Many of the Rum refugees were still alive when ‹hsan Ardın met up with Lefter Cember. That generation of Pontic Greeks identified strong-

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ly with their Pontic, as opposed to mainland, identity. (After all, mainland Greeks considered them to be a different type of Greek— less sophisticated, less polished.) Pontic Greeks spoke Turkish in addition to Greek, and ‹hsan’s generation knew a bit of Greek. They are regional compatriots from a different era. It is important to emphasize the cohesiveness of the community that existed for centuries before that violently divisive period that tainted the birth of modern Turkey. Lefter and most of his age cohort from the Pontus have passed away. Their children still reside in the original Pontic Greek communities on Long Island and Norwalk, Connecticut. The Pontic Greek refugee community gave birth to the Black Sea Turkish migrant community. During perhaps the only remaining opportunity, they were reunited through Lefter and ‹hsan and the people who followed to buy businesses from the retiring refugees. The children of the refugees and the migrants see each other as cousins from an earlier period in history—quite different from the close relationship between Lefter and ‹hsan. This is probably due to the fact that ‹hsan’s generation was the last generation to have direct contact with the Rum inhabitants of Yuva. Similar to Themia Halo’s daughter, the children and grandchildren of Pontic Greek refugees are ambivalent about their parent’s relationships with Turks. They certainly remember their parents talking about yayla season and the beautiful mountains, their beautiful mountains. It is still hard for the second generation to grasp the distinction made by their parents between protective Turkish co-villagers and Turkish mercenary bandits. It requires fewer cognitive steps to despise an entire category of people (Turk) than to further divide them into subcategories of good co-villagers and evil mercenaries. Pontic Greeks and Black Sea Turks patronize each other’s businesses, but I was unable to locate any mixed marriages or children of mixed ancestry in Kennedy Kent.70 While religion is an obvious dividing factor for the Turks and the Rum, there are also other issues that influence this pattern. Turks and Rum alike are generally endogamous. When there is marriage across ethnic boundaries, it is typically the male who marries outside the group, not the female. Since most of the Turkish women in America come as brides, there is little opportunity for the Rum of Kennedy Kent to marry Black Sea Turkish women. ‹hsan spoke of an era when young lovers would stage a kız kaçırma (kidnapping) in order to

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marry someone from the other ethnic group. However, the time has passed when Rum and Turkish families knew one another from long days spent together in the village fields: When k›z kaç›rma happened in the village, it was between a boy and a girl whose families knew each other. A lot of times it happened because the family could not afford a proper wedding, or the families would not have approved. Maybe he was not wealthy enough. Maybe she was too young. Anyway, it doesn’t happen here. We know them and they know us, but not like before (‹hsan Ardın). Issues of class and socioeconomic status also cast the newly arrived Turk in an unfavorable light relative to the more established Rum:71 Who wants to marry a penniless migrant? The children of the Rum refugees went to college, and so did their children. They became educated. Their parents did not come to America for money; they came to stay alive. The Turks do not come here with the idea of staying. They want to make their money and go back to Yuva. We cannot go back there to live. We had to make this our home. (Sotiros Iannakis) ‹hsan Ardın had heard of intermarriage in his parent’s generation. He suggested that the transient nature of the Turks and the age of the remaining Rum made intermarriage unlikely. After the initial flight of the Rum refugees from the Black Sea, there were no subsequent large waves of incomers to the community in Norwalk. The children of the Rum refugees are another matter. They do not have a direct tie to the land like their parents did, and so they are different. Nevertheless, the Black Sea communities in New Yuva and Kennedy Kent resemble, to a certain degree, neighboring Turkish and Rum villages in Yuva. They live side-by-side, engaged in a different type of trade, with the older generations coming together once a year in Turkey on the high mountain pastures of their ancestors. After visiting New Yuva, I returned to my home in Rhode Island and waited for a phone call from Ferhat, the lawyer from Papazlar. Ferhat took me by surprise when he called the next evening and

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told me he was in Newark, Delaware, visiting friends. He gave me the phone number of Melih Ilıca in Kennedy Kent and told me to call him for directions. He would meet me there the next day. I called Melih Ilıca, whom I had met in Papazlar, and got directions from Rhode Island to Kennedy Kent. I had to call again when I took the exit off of I-95 to clarify the directions. Here we were in America, talking to each other via cell phone. Melih was coaching me on how to get from Rhode Island to Alpha Delta Pizza. When I pulled into a gas station just off the exit to ask for directions, I didn’t realize I had already made it to Kennedy Kent. Dursun Çakır came out of the gas station while I was on the phone with Melih. Upon hearing our conversation, it was only natural for him to ask me in Turkish how much gas I wanted. For a moment I forgot where I was. Melih figured out where I was and told me to stay put. After some confusion, Dursun and I went inside his gas station. There was no hot plate for boiling water for tea, but otherwise Dursun’s station resembled Melih’s station in New Yuva. Dursun had been in Kennedy Kent for twenty years. He started off working in his gas station as a mechanic’s assistant to the Rum owner who was also from the Giresun area. Dursun was from Sinanlı village. His wife was in Turkey visiting relatives at the time of my visit. Two of his children were attending the local community college, and his oldest son worked at the gas station with him. Dursun made his annual trip back to Yuva in August, during the homecoming festival. Melih Ilıca and Ferhat Bey arrived while we were talking. It was strange for all of us to meet in Kennedy Kent. I left my car at Dursun’s gas station and went to Alpha Delta Pizza with Ferhat and Melih. Alpha Delta Pizza, originally a Greek-owned business, now belongs to Gökhan and his brother ‹lyas. They are from Yuva. They would not discuss the details of their initial journey to Kennedy Kent, which led me to believe that they got there by paying ‹hsan Ardın for his services. They have not been back to Turkey since they arrived in 1996. Business has been too demanding for them to leave. “Eniflte nasil?” Ferhat seemed to take pleasure in asking the same question in America that he had asked in Turkey. The men in the community referred to my partner as eniflte, meaning sister’s husband. When they asked how he was, I brought out pictures of him

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and my stepson to share with the table. We talked over pizza about the concert that was to take place at the dernek in Kennedy Kent. As it turned out, Yılmaz Turan, a famous entertainer from Giresun, was coming to perform at a benefit concert to raise money for the mosque and Islamic center being built in Kennedy Kent. Ferhat came to America to represent the dernek in Papazlar. Unlike Melih, he had not established a residence in America. He once explained to me that there was too much work to be done in Turkey to leave just for money. Of course, Ferhat was not a landless unemployed peasant. He was an attorney with plenty of business right in Papazlar. We went to the dernek after lunch. With the exception of the unmarked entrance, it was similar to the one in Papazlar. There was a small bar area with soft drinks and Turkish cookies manufactured by Eti, and there were Giresun Spor flags tacked to the walls. Pictures of Yuva and Turkish musicians from the Black Sea were posted next to a Yuva calendar with daily prayer times. The large round tables could comfortably seat six. The dirty ashtrays and the burn marks in the green tablecloths bore evidence of Turkey’s love affair with tobacco products. The room was smoky and stuffy. There were two men playing darts when we came in. The dernek was otherwise empty. When we sat down at a table, Ferhat, Melih, and Gökhan began talking about politics, as if merely being in the dernek forced them to slip into that frame of mind. The topic of conversation was the election in Yuva. fiükrü K., the current mayor’s challenger, had worked in Kennedy Kent for over ten years. They discussed how he would improve the quality of life in the village. The interesting point is that the men involved in the conversation were transregional, if not transnational, migrants who returned to the village a couple of times each year. Why should Gökhan care what happens in the village if he is living in Kennedy Kent and business is good? Why should Melih Ilıca care, when he can travel easily between Papazlar and Kennedy Kent? Why should Ferhat care? He came to Papazlar as a child after his parents died. People do care, even if they only see the village once annually. The dernek discussions of politics that week revolved around installing someone effective in the position of village mayor. Migrants may not live in the village now, but they intend to retire to the village, just as Ferit Amca and Ali Amca had done. They all

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wanted to build a house like Ferit Amca had done. Some had already started. It made sense, then, that they would be interested in managing what happened in the village in their absence. Even Ferhat, who had lived most of his life in Papazlar, was building a house in the village. After visiting the dernek, we took Gokhan back to Alpha Delta Pizza and went in search of a bookstore. Ferhat wanted to find some computer programs for his wife Nurdan that would help her with her English. We found some programs that looked suitable, but Ferhat did not know what type of computer Nurdan used. He called her from Melih’s US cell phone. (Migrants commonly had a US cell phone and a Turkish cell phone. Cell phone service in Turkey is quite inexpensive, but the chip that enables users to call from the USA using the Turkish number is not. Migrants work around this by having a separate cell phone to use in the USA.) I spoke with Nurdan and she was happy to hear that I had found Ferhat and Melih. After discussing the computer programs and answering questions about “eniflte,” I asked her if she wanted anything else from America. I told her I would see her the following week, right after Ferhat got home. We left the bookstore and went to Melih’s apartment. Melih was subletting his apartment to Selma’s sister and brother-in-law since he and Selma had moved back to Turkey. Zahide was also at the apartment. She came to America with Melih to visit her sister and brother-in-law. Although they made the decision to return to Turkey to raise their children, Zahide and Melih are nostalgic about their time in America. Zahide was two years old when her father left their southeastern hometown of Malatya to come to America. Nine years later, she followed her father with her mother and older siblings. Her mother was unable to convince the children that they should respect and obey their father, and the children ended up returning to Malatya alone to live with their grandparents. Zahide explained that her parents did not want them to grow up as defiant and rebellious children. Before her grandfather passed away, he begged Zahide’s father to bring the children back to America. In 1989, at the age of 18, Zahide returned to Queens to be with her parents. Zahide’s parents had divorced while their children were in the village. Her father first married a Colombian woman, then a Malaysian. Her mother was working as a housekeeper in Queens

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when Zahide arrived. Zahide’s father had taken all of the money they saved from Zahide’s mother and bought a house. He lived there with his third wife. Zahide and her sisters lived with their mother. They all worked in Queens doing odd jobs to support the household—babysitting, housekeeping, and janitorial work. Zahide met Melih on the train one day when she was on her way to English class. He was in Queens to go to the Turkish grocery store. He had been living in Kennedy Kent for ten years running a diner that he had purchased from an old Rum couple. Melih says he fell in love with Zahide as soon as he saw her. He could tell she was not from the Black Sea, but he did not care. He followed Zahide to school and persuaded her to meet him on the weekend for tea. Zahide was pregnant when she and Melih married in Kennedy Kent. (There was only one wedding, in America. This had something to do with the fact that Zahide was pregnant. The other issue was her lack of family in Malatya. Her parents and siblings were in America.) She had planned to attend college once her English was good enough, but Melih insisted that she would not work outside the home as his wife. She abandoned her college plans and is now considering having her fourth child. Melih’s mother insists on having a grandson. They have had “only” girls so far. Melih and Zahide feel that they experienced a type of freedom not found in Turkish society during their time living in America. One aspect of this freedom is that Melih and Zahide both might have been killed before they were able to marry if she had been single and pregnant in the village. They both expressed their admiration for the American tendency to respect the choices of fellow countrymen, especially concerning matters of religion. Melih and Zahide are considered fundamentalists by secular urban Turks. Melih was a member of the Virtue Party and Zahide was also politically active at the time. Zahide explained her refusal to retain Turkish citizenship in the following way: When I came to live with my parents, I became a US citizen. I had the right to dual citizenship when I became an adult, but when I went to take my passport photo, the memur (civil clerk) asked me to remove my headscarf. I refused, and he would not take my picture. I decided that I could live in Turkey as an American if I ever went back, and that is what I

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am doing. It is a protest against this religious discrimination that we experience in Turkey, even though it is a Muslim country. In the USA, Melih and Zahide survived a premarital pregnancy without harsh retribution from disapproving relatives, and they experienced the freedom to live openly as Muslims: No one harasses me about my headscarf in Kennedy Kent. No one even asks about my religion. People don’t care if I am Muslim or Hindu. It is a matter of privacy in America. (Zahide) Zahide’s comments on this topic are not unusual. As religious dress becomes increasingly politicized in Turkey, and the government continues to insist on the separation of religious practice from public life, in this case, the wearing of the headscarf, increasing numbers of Islamist Turks report feeling the same sense of freedom in the USA. The Turkish government’s position on religious dress is unique in the Muslim world and, as a result, conservative Turkish migrants probably have a different experience with freedom of religious expression in the USA than immigrants from other Muslim countries. Having said that, Zahide qualifies her admiration for American society: There is too much sex on television. People divorce all the time. There is a high crime rate, especially in their neighborhood in Kennedy Kent. Americans have taken this idea of freedom a bit too far. They have lost themselves. In listening to her speak about Americans in third person plural, it is clear that she is drawing a line between her way of being American and the way other Americans are American. In this way, America begins to resemble Turkey. Citizenship is one thing, cultural membership is quite another. Despite their admiration for many features of American society, Melih and Zahide decided to move back to Turkey for their children. They have an apartment in Gül Sitesi and their retirement plans are undecided at this point. Zahide would like to return to Malatya in her old age. Melih is more inclined to move the family

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to the Black Sea Mountains of his youth. If Zahide retires to the Black Sea, she will not be alone. Her sister also married someone from Yuva in Kennedy Kent. Melih and Zahide introduced me to the other Yuva natives who were available during my week in Kennedy Kent. The community was centered around a small, red brick apartment complex in an ethnically diverse, high-crime neighborhood. During that week, I met most of Ferit Yahyao¤lu’s children, and Ali Seyahat’s daughter. Melih took me to the diner he used to own. When he relocated to Papazlar, he sold the business to a young Greek couple from the neighboring town—relatives of the original owners. Conclusion During my time in Kennedy Kent and New Yuva, I did not meet any Turks who were not from the Black Sea. Most were from Yuva. The mayor of Yuva estimated that there were 5 thousand Yuva natives in the USA. Clearly, a more thorough investigation of the US communities is needed here. However, the bulk of my research focuses on the process of getting to the USA as opposed to actually living in the USA, and I was happy to be able to make some preliminary observations during limited time in the US communities of Yuva natives. These communities formed as a result of a hemflehri relationship between ‹hsan Ardın and Lefter Cember, and between the older migrants and the neighboring communities of Rum refugees in New Yuva and in Kennedy Kent. The idea that Rum and Turkish inhabitants of the Giresun area share a bond of regional affiliation was predominant among older generation of Rum refugees and Turkish migrants. The younger generations do not share the memories of their elders, yet they continue to interact for the purposes of trade. Most of the Turkish migrants in these two communities live part of the year in the USA and part of the year in Turkey once they become legal residents. The migrants who live in the USA for the entire year report traveling to Turkey once or twice annually, usually for the homecoming festival in August, Kurban Bayramı (festival marking the return of villagers from the pilgrimage to Mecca), fieker Bayramı (festival marking the end of Ramadan), or some other time to visit relatives and one’s property. The easiest time to see both relatives and property is in the summer, when most of the

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women, children, and retirees spend some months in the village. Their visits often coincide with the end of the hazelnut harvest so that they can take their crops to market. Migrants maintain their ties with their hemflehri through frequent telephone calls, remittances, gift packages, and internet e-mail accounts. There is a cyber café in Papazlar and one in Kennedy Kent, and the mayor’s office in Yuva recently acquired a computer with internet hookup. As computers become more accessible to migrants and their co-villagers, communication will probably be more frequent due to the affordability of communicating by e-mail. The women in New Yuva and Kennedy Kent seemed less traumatized by migration than Turkish women living in Sunnyside, Queens (see DiCarlo 1998). My initial explanation is that while the community in Sunnyside is home to a diverse Turkish population, formed primarily as a result of merchant marines jumping ship and swimming ashore, secondary migration of Turks in Germany, or people from all over Turkey winning the visa lottery, Yuva natives have established largely homogeneous Black Sea (Yuva) communities. This is the subject of much ridicule among the Turks in Queens and Manhattan. One begins to understand how Turks in other communities would dismiss them all as “Laz.” If Yuva migrants are not related by blood or marriage, they are at least from the same district of Turkey. They are not forced to rely on other Turks who lived very different lives in Turkey, or who do not share a common goal of improving the quality of life in Yuva. Women in Kennedy Kent and New Yuva, in all likelihood, have close relatives somewhere in the neighborhood if not in the same building. This facilitates the transition to a new environment, especially when women are moving from the village directly to Kennedy Kent. Yuva natives in the USA are taking part in the same discussions as the migrants in Papazlar and the villagers on the Black Sea.72 The dominant themes running through the entire social field include the power of the Virtue Party, improvements in the village, the possibility of getting to New Yuva or Kennedy Kent and making money, and the possibility of going back to the mountains on the Black Sea for a visit. The entire social field is held somewhat captive by the precarious situation of the illegal migrants in the USA. The entire community is able to prosper as long as they can depend on remittances from workers in the USA, many of whom face the risk of deportation on a daily basis.

7. HOMECOMING

The preceding chapters have explored how people leave Yuva. This chapter focuses on how people come back. Summer in Yuva is a season of festivals, harvests, weddings, and reunions. Migrants, changed by the experience of having left, come back to a home district that has also been changed as a result of transregional and transnational migration. Returning to Yuva There is evidence of change in every aspect of migrants’ journey home. To begin with, the migrants themselves are different. People leave Yuva as common villagers in search of work. They return as examples of success, products of the urban economy. Those who move to Istanbul return in a different phase of their lives. The males leave as young unemployed teenagers and return as married adult men who can support their families. The young girls who went with them are now thought of as lucky. These are the women who speak of having escaped the demanding fields and orchards.73 The children will grow up in a different environment. Their relationship to the village will not be as strong as that of their parents’ generation. The village is also a different place. In the 1970s, villagers looked to the mountainside facing theirs to see rows of hazelnut trees, fields of beet greens, stalks of corn, and modest one-story cement or wooden homes with zinc roofs between large patches of forest that were only visible when the trees had lost their leaves. Now it is possible to see the homes even in summer, when dense vegetation used to hide the tallest structures on the other side of the val-

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ley. Migrants have constructed three and four story homes that peek out from the forest. When passing through Yuva valley, villagers are quick to point to the mountain homes of the migrants they know and reveal who owns the home, where they live now and what they do. Village occupancy varies greatly throughout the year as a result of migration. Only twenty homes were consistently occupied through the winter months. The remaining 223 were closed up like seasonal beach houses. Over the course of the summer of 1999, 226 homes were occupied for different periods of time. The remaining 17 were considered abandoned.74 No one had visited the abandoned homes in the past five years. These homes included some of the older, original homes as well as the newly constructed homes.75 Almost forty years ago, people were sending their children to Istanbul because there were no schools in Yuva district. Since that time, schools have opened in the village—one of the first was in the village of Pancar—and subsequently closed down as a result of migration. In terms of access to education, the village has come full circle. One change, however, is that children now believe education is unimportant. Learning academic skills becomes a low priority when illiterate relatives can go to America and make money. Even the school in the merkez, which services many villages, does not report perfect attendance. Arif Hoca has been teaching around Giresun for thirty years. He had this to say about education in Yuva: It is not unusual for village schools to close. Either the children don’t attend because they think they don’t need to, or entire families move away and there is no one left in the village. The school in Oruçbey closed right after it opened because of migration to Belgium. There was just no one left. Hikmet Kaflık, a native of Yuva who moved to Istanbul as a boy, explained how the division of labor in the village has been affected by migration: When I was young, my grandparents worked the fields together. Everyone in the village did everything together. We would all pick corn together and then shuck it at the end of the day by the light of a lantern. The next day, we would go

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out and do the same thing, until all of the corn had been picked. Now the women work the fields because the men have to earn money. As regional stereotypes go, Black Sea women are known in Turkey for being the hardest working women in the country. Some attribute this to male labor migration, others to the laziness of Black Sea men. The general opinion of the male villagers in this study was that men participate in chores requiring more strength, and women do the rest. For example, picking hazelnuts does not require strength. The trees are not very tall and the hazelnuts are easy to pull off the branches. Harvesting corn is also women’s work. Planting seed, however, requires some physical strength. Men are in charge of boring the holes for planting seed. They also make the baskets used in agricultural chores. The logic of men handling chores that require physical strength breaks down when one observes women wielding axes and chopping wood for the fire. Hikmet’s comment reveals that migration has changed the distribution of agricultural labor in Yuva. I asked Zuhal, Hikmet’s wife, what she thought of his statement and the general male consensus that men handle the chores that require more physical strength: We chop wood, we cook, we harvest, we sell our crops at the market, we clean, we give birth, and we take care of them! What is left? I asked Zuhal about making baskets and planting seeds: Correct, you are right. But what does that have to do with strength? Men make the baskets because the women don’t know how. They have to earn money and we are here taking care of the home. Zuhal is only in the village taking care of the home for part of the year. She and her husband live in Istanbul. When Hikmet comes back to the village, he oversees the harvesting of hazelnuts but does not participate. He works in the office of the Eti food company in Istanbul and cannot spend more than two weeks in the village. Zuhal is there for the summer with her sons, and Hikmet comes at the beginning of July to take his hazelnuts to sell.

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When migrants come back to the village, they represent change as well as observe it. Villagers are always curious to hear about life in Istanbul and the Yuva natives who haven’t come home. Summertime is a time to network. It is a time when aspiring migrants can offer their assistance to the villagers who live in Papazlar and America. They offer assistance and expect assistance in return. They volunteer to maintain a migrant’s land, knowing that the migrant will be obligated to help them leave the village. They offer their sons and daughters as prospective brides and grooms to migrants and their children, knowing that their children will benefit from a new economic context as a result of migrants’ preferences for marrying hemflehri. Summer in the Village Some migrants return for the festivities at Karaovacık, the plateau, and then return to Istanbul. Others cannot leave their jobs in the city. The yayla used to be a summer residence for transhumant shepherds. Now it is a place where migrants and villagers meet for a few days to rekindle their relationships and share some food and clean air. The village used to be full of inhabitants from all age groups in every season. Now it is virtually abandoned in the winter months, and home to retirees, women, and children in the summer months. Yuva natives who live in Papazlar sometimes describe their relationship to the village in a way that reflects the traditions of the past instead of their present life circumstances. The Ilıca family’s return to Yuva typifies the experience of migrants returning to the village. The young Ilıca girls play with other children in the village, as they do during all of their summers in Yuva. Zahide does not particularly enjoy spending summers in Yuva. It still seems foreign to her and she would rather stay in Papazlar. Still, Papazlar is thought to be dirtier in the summer, and Melih wants his daughters to know the Karadeniz. Zahide looked forward to the time when her sister would be able to spend summers in the village with her. Her sister is married to a man from Yuva and they are living in Melih and Zahide’s apartment in Kennedy Kent. They are not yet in a position to send her sister home to Turkey for the summer. Zahide and her girls stay with Melih’s parents, who have a newly renovated house next to Melih’s older brother, Mustafa. Mustafa does not leave his factory job for the entire summer, but he man-

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ages to come back and visit his wife and his other relatives during the time they spend in the village. Zahide spends her days in the village taking care of Melih’s parents, harvesting corn, and picking hazelnuts. As the wife of the youngest son, this responsibility falls to her when she is around. Özlem Ilıca spends only a few summer days with Zahide at the Ilıca home in the village before she is expected to go and take care of her husband’s parents in Günece, the village on the mountainside facing Pancar. Her in-laws never left the village. Özlem’s husband should be returning to Turkey from Kennedy Kent, but she is not sure if he will travel all the way to Yuva. He may only come as far as Papazlar, depending on how long he plans to stay. Özlem is anxious to know whether she will see her husband during the summer. Özlem and Zahide have been in the village since the beginning of May. The local holiday known as Hıdrellez, celebrated on the sixth of May, marks the end of the winter season.76 Retirees generally return to the village around the time of Hıdrellez. If they arrive in time, they participate in the celebration. Ferit Yahyao¤lu explained Hıdrellez in the following way: Hıdrellez was an important day when I was growing up. We used to get up early in the morning, before sunrise. We would take five or six kernels of corn, or beans, and throw them on the ground, telling Hıdrellez dede that we were throwing them into the mouths of the deformed birds and frogs. This kept our babies and animals from being born with deformities... No one worked on Hıdrellez. People played the kemençe and we danced outside. In those days, you could hear people across the valley playing their songs. Neighbors with animals would bring milk and cheese to the other homes. We still celebrate Hıdrellez, but there are fewer people now. When I asked Ferit about observing Hıdrellez in Kennedy Kent, he explained that Hıdrellez happened in Yuva, not in Kennedy Kent. Obviously, the local rituals associated with Hıdrellez did not travel well. There were several of these. Another local observance is known elliptically as the May Seventh (Mayıs Yedisi). Ferit was explaining the May seventh festival to me: “How do people celebrate May Seventh?”

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“You will see. It’s coming in a week or so.” “But it’s May tenth.” “May Seventh will be on May twentieth.” As it turned out, May Seventh was actually Greek May Seventh, which was May twentieth on the Turkish calendar.77 Greek May Seventh was a day for people from all around Giresun to meet at the mouth of the Aksu River to splash themselves with water from the Black Sea, in hopes of washing their troubles away. More than 10 thousand people watched as seven couples each threw a single stone into the Black Sea in the direction of Giresun Adası, formerly Aretias, the fabled island home of the Amazons. The stones represent the couples’ wishes to have children. After the seven couples finished, people climbed into small boats and traveled toward Aretias. While some people circled the island and threw stones into the water, other boats stopped on the island, including mine. I noticed that the boats stopping at the island were primarily full of young women. Once we were on the island, the muhtar from one of the villages produced three large hoops made of the wood from the hazelnut tree. All of the single women, the widowed women, and the women who had not had children were instructed to pass through the hoop by dropping it over their heads and stepping out of it once it reached the ground. This ritual was performed with much giggling on the part of the youngest girls. The widowed and childless women, the category into which I was put, were a more somber group. This ritual was supposed to ensure that childless women would become pregnant, widowed women would be taken in by new husbands, and that young single girls would find suitable mates. I traveled to Aretias that day with Nurdan, Ferhat’s wife. She was not from Yuva; she was from Sivas, a town in eastern Turkey. Nurdan watched as the muhtar handed me the hoop. She was pregnant with her third child that summer. She whispered to me as I took the hoop, “Olmaz öyle.” (“It doesn’t work like that.”) She was making fun of this local ritual that seemed so foreign to her. Sivas was land locked, mostly Kurdish, and they had their own local rituals. I did hear about Greek May Seventh in Istanbul. When people talked of coming home for special holidays, this was one of them. Since the mouth of the Aksu River was central to the celebration, it made sense that people would not try to celebrate the holiday in the city.78

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Hazelnut Harvesting Migrants speak of summer in the village as a time of relaxation, a time to slow down and breathe clean air. In reality, the village is much busier in the summer than in winter. When women return to the village for the summer, they are returning to harvest crops and take care of their parents and in-laws. The women who have the opportunity to relax are the ones whose parents and in-laws have passed away. Still, these women come out and help the others pick corn and hazelnuts. I did not see women sitting and visiting during the harvest time. Women visited while they worked. Zahide wakes with the morning ezan, says her prayers, and then makes tea. Her in-laws say their morning prayers and return to bed. It is summer and the children do not have to get ready for school. She lets them sleep. Zahide is in the kitchen beginning to make yufka (filo dough) for börek when I wake up. While she is mixing the dough, I pour myself some tea and sit down to help. By this time, the women are used to my pitching in. The first time I tried to roll out yufka, it was a disaster. That was in November. I have had many opportunities since then to practice. “Ö¤rendin.” Zahide complimented my progress. Although she did not say so, I imagined that I reminded her of herself when she was first learning to make Black Sea food. Yufka can be found in the cuisine of many regions of Turkey, but ›s›rgan (stinging nettle) puree and cornbread are unique to the Black Sea region, as are the many dishes prepared with anchovies. I was relieved that this woman from Malatya hated hamsi (anchovy) as much as I did. As I rolled out the yufka, Zahide put the flat sheets into boiling water for a few second to cook them. She layered a dish with yufka and a cheese called köy peyniri (village cheese, homemade). We talked about what we would do during the day. It was hazelnut season. We would spend a few hours this afternoon picking hazelnuts from the trees on the Ilıca property. As we ate a breakfast of bread, cheese, olives, jam, and turnip green soup, the girls and their grandparents entered the kitchen. Zahide stopped eating to serve them. The girls are not old enough to help in the fields. They are young enough to be allowed to play in the village while Zahide is working.79 After she dressed the girls, cleaned up after breakfast, and tended to her in-laws, we prepared to pick hazelnuts. The girls walked down to the area next to the abandoned schoolhouse to see who was outside.

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Zahide takes a large basket and straps it to her back with a leather belt that fastens around her waist and shoulders. She is wearing a blouse, a thin sweater, and flalvar, the baggy pants that resemble a long skirt with leg holes. Her head is covered with a simple white scarf. Zahide also wore her pefltemal, the red, black and white striped scarf worn by women from this region. Instead of wearing it on her head, Zahide has it tied around her waist as an apron. As we are walking over to the hazelnut grove, Özlem comes around the corner with her basket. She took the dolmufl (lit. “stuffed full”; the name used for the public transportation minibuses that operate in Turkey) from Günece. She came with us to the hazelnut grove and picked while she and Zahide talked. We started harvesting hazelnuts after the mid-morning prayer and stopped for lunch around the time of the afternoon prayer. If Zahide’s routine was typical of the village woman’s routine during hazelnut harvest, all of the women who were harvesting went home to feed their families as Zahide did. After lunch, Zahide returned to the hazelnut grove along with the other women and continued their work until the next ezan. The harvesting ended for the day, and the women returned to their homes to prepare dinner for their families. Summer is the most labor-intensive season in the village. Corn and hazelnuts are ready for harvesting at approximately the same time. The month of June, known as Haziran in most parts of Turkey, is known as Kiraz in the areas around Giresun. Kiraz (cherry) is followed by Orak, the month of the sickle. Cherries are no longer a major crop for Giresun province, but there are plenty of crops left to harvest. Summer days are filled with hours of corn and hazelnut harvesting, all performed manually because of the steep terrain. The fields and groves are full of women who work together on each plot of land until all of the crops in the village have been harvested. Women are obligated to work the land of their husband’s family. In reality, they work the land all over the village, with the other village women. Wedding Season Summer is also the most desirable time for a wedding. Only the poorest people get married in the winter, when they will have fewer guests to feed. Eighty of the migrants in my study were married, and all of them had village weddings except the two men who

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married women from other regions. This is related to the tradition of bringing the bride from her house to the groom’s house—originally on horseback, more recently in the back seat of a car. Nurdan and Zahide did not have homes in the village or families there. Zahide and Melih married in Kennedy Kent, and Nurdan and Ferhat had their wedding in Istanbul. It is common for Yuva natives living elsewhere to have two weddings. In Istanbul, weddings are usually followed with the bride being taken to the wedding salon—a large parlor rented out for wedding celebrations. This is different from the village wedding, where the bride is taken from her parents’ home to the home of her new husband’s family. In Istanbul, the singing, dancing, and eating take place away from people’s homes. This is probably because the cramped quarters in a high-rise and the scarce garden space cannot accommodate a large number of people. Even in the village, the dancing, singing, and eating take place just outside the bride’s new home, not inside. The wedding salon is a way to compensate for the lack of large, green fields. Migrants who had many relatives still living in the village would also have celebrations there. The largest weddings were those of overseas migrants returning to the village to get married. All through the summer months, convoys followed the cars that carried brides to their new homes. Families danced and sang into the night, until rounds of gunfire shot into the sky brought the festivities to an end. While visiting Ahmet Yanbul’s sister one summer day, I met Kelim and Alla, two return migrants from France. Kelim and Alla were from Kızılelma, a village further inland from Izzet. Ahmet’s sister knew them through her husband, who was also from Kizilelma.80 Kelim and Alla were in love and wanted to marry. Theirs is an unusual story. They returned to the village to wed without the blessing of their fathers. They joked about the irony of running away to the village to get married. Kelim and Alla were born on neighboring plots of land. Their fathers both worked in an automobile factory in France and lived in the same apartment building. When Kelim, his mother, and his siblings followed his father to France, there was no longer anyone who could work the land in the village. Kelim’s father made a deal with Alla’s uncle, Nazım, that he could work the land and pay a percentage of the profits from

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the hazelnut crop as rent. Nazım also took care of Alla’s house when she and her mother were in France. According to Kelim, his father heard that uncle Nazım was making good money from the hazelnuts. Nazım was not giving Kelim’s father a fair share of the percentage. He asked the muhtar to help straighten matters out, but Nazım insisted his profits were modest. Alla’s father claimed he did not know about Nazım’s profits and could not help without insulting his wife’s brother. Kelim’s father suspected that Alla’s father was getting a percentage from Nazım, and accused him of this. From that point on, Alla’s father and Kelim’s father were küs—they were no longer speaking. If both men were living in the village under these circumstances, it would complicate, if not ruin, the couple’s wedding plans. Fortunately, the fathers were away. Their mothers were both in Kızılelma for the summer and would be responsible for working out the details of marriage. Everyone in the family agreed that this marriage could work in spite of the fathers and their küs status. The Return of Migrant Workers Migrant men began to show up in the village when it was time to take the harvested hazelnuts to town to sell. This year’s harvest was a disappointment. To survive off of hazelnut farming and support a household, a farmer’s trees must produce 250 kilograms per dekar of land (.247 acres). This is based on the average holding of ten dekars per household.81 This year’s average yield per dekar was seventy kilograms. The men were used to hearing the disappointing news. This is why they left the village to begin with. If a family owns enough land, the yield will be high enough overall.82 The smaller the holding, the more important it is to produce the maximum amount possible. This was not easy to do from a distance. Hazelnut groves require pruning and fertilizing at different times of the year. Those that did not receive proper care produced less of a crop. Still, many of the migrant families kept their small plots of land and worked them when they could. Others rented their land to non-migrant villagers and took a percentage of the profits as rent. This practice is common in other Mediterranean countries as well. Douglass observed changes in land ownership in rural southern Italy as farmers became labor migrants. He writes, “Ultimately they simply sold the parcels to their former workers and sharecropping tenants” (1983:191). Migrants from Yuva typically rent out

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their land, but some ultimately sell. At the coffeehouse, there was talk of planting different crops in the future. I was sitting in the coffeehouse with Hilal, a deportee from Baltimore; Husseyin Y., a migrant from Istanbul who returned to sell his hazelnuts; Ferit Yahyao¤lu, a retiree from Kennedy Kent; and S. K., the new mayor, who had stopped by on his rounds through the merkez. The four men are discussing an article written in Yuva’nın Sesi by Yuva’s Minister of Agriculture, Ahmet Elevli. Hazelnuts are no longer the district’s first choice for cash crops. Elevli is encouraging farmers to plant kiwi and raspberries. According to the Ministry’s report, one dekar of kiwi yields the profits of 20 dekars of hazelnuts. A dekar of raspberries yields the same profits as 10 dekars of hazelnuts. The Ministry’s report concludes that the farmers of Yuva will be able to make money off of their small plots of land and support their families without having to migrate if they will grow different crops. On that day in July, S. K. was talking to his hemflehri regarding this issue. Sami Kurt (no relation to the pharmacist Vedat Kurt) entered the coffeehouse while the men were talking. Sami is a migrant from Yuva who lives in New Yuva. He went to America in the 1980s and began working for another Yuva native in a jewelry store that the latter was running with an elderly Rum man from the Giresun area. The owner’s children were attending college and were not interested in the jewelry business. When he began to get older, he hired an apprentice whom he met through ‹hsan Ardın. Sami’s supervisor was this apprentice, and they eventually became co-owners when the original owner wanted to retire. Sami paid ‹hsan a substantial amount of money for papers and connections. It appears to have been a wise investment. When Sami entered the coffeehouse, the men rose to greet him. “Hos geldin, sayin kuyumcumuz!” (“Welcome, our respected jeweler!”) The men offered him a chair at the table. Having returned at the end of the harvest, he inquired about the year’s crops. The conversation about hazelnuts quickly turned to the jewelry business as local non-migrants approached the table to pay their respects to Sami. “Evin olmufl mu?” People were curious to know whether construction had been completed on his new home in the village. Sami came back to the village to inspect the progress on his new home and to attend the festivities at Karaovacık, the plateau used by Yuva district. Sami was not from my village of inquiry. He was

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from Dartepe, another village that has a high rate of internal and international labor migration. Dartepe typically sends migrants to a town in Pennsylvania, which has an aging Pontic Greek population (Halo 2000). Sami’s house in Dartepe stood out as testimony to the bounty of life in America. His was the only three-story home in the village and the only one of the cement homes that was not painted white. Sami’s house was light blue. When Sami arrived at his house, he found that the exterior was complete and the inside still required some work. Dartepe was on the way to Karaovacık. Sami’s house was impossible to miss because of its color and height. I stopped in Dartepe to honor Sami’s lunch invitation from the day in the coffeehouse. We walked around the small village that felt like a ghost town even in the summer. Still, villagers would stop and ask Sami how business was going and whether he had any room at the jewelry shop for a young son or nephew. Some men reminded him that their daughters were old enough to marry his sons. Everyone complimented him on his new house. They sent regards to his children, who had stayed in New Yuva. Dartepe sat on a mountain plateau. When we were walking through the village, we came to a point where the houses stopped abruptly. Sami was ready to turn around and go back, evident from his slight nod and the word “‹flte,” (in this context, “There you have it.”) uttered as a conclusion to our walking tour. Where the houses stopped, the land kept going. There were no hazelnut groves or fields of beet greens. In a district where every dekar counts, empty land did not make sense. I asked Sami if the empty area was someone’s fallow land, reasoning that it might belong to a migrant who left and never returned. “That was the Rum quarter,” he said casually. The Return of Rum Refugees The village of Dartepe reveals what many Rum refugees find when return to their natal villages along the Black Sea. And they do return. Lefter Cember’s pilgrimage to Yuva and subsequent invitation to the hemflehri who helped him find his village spawned a migration pattern that continues today. Tamama/Raife’s reunion with her sister was made possible after a member of her adopted family encountered a Rum refugee from Tirebolu who was in Turkey on a pilgrimage to the Black Sea. It was common in the

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1980s, when more of the Rum refugees were alive, to see Greek tour buses full of former Pontians traveling through areas such as Trabzon, Espiye, and Giresun in search of their natal villages (Andreadis 1993:91). When Themia/Sano Halo attempted to find her natal village in 1989, she found a different Pontus from the one of her youth. People no longer called her natal region “Pontus.” It was “Karadeniz” now. Along the Karadeniz, Trapezus became Trabzon, Rhizaeum became Rize, and Giresun has changed progressively from Kerasus. Names reflecting undesirable events or elements were altered to reflect new pride in the Turkish Republic. In an earlier period, probably contemporaneous with the population transfers between Turkey, Greece, and Bulgaria, villages everywhere were renamed if their original names contained any reference to churches or “foreign” inhabitants. Churches conjured up images not only of religion, but also of Rum and ethnic diversity. Unbeknownst to many of the villagers, the names were changed on official maps. Villagers in Yuva continued to refer to Gebekilise as Gebekilise, and not as Ça¤layan, its present-day name. There were even signs still posted that pointed the way to a place that should have ceased to exist in 1925. The church in Gebekilise was a shell of its former self. Other churches in Yuva had been converted to mosques many years before. The Rum inhabitants were gone. The sign for Gebekilise stood as a fading reminder of the region’s multiethnic past. The map of Giresun is spotted with symbols for churches that no longer exist as churches. The older inhabitants know that there used to be churches, but it is only a matter of time before that knowledge is buried. The poignant account of Sano Themia Halo’s return to her natal (Greek) village in the Black Sea Mountains contains references to this reinvention of place names (Halo 2000). After searching unsuccessfully for decades on Turkish maps for Iondone, she decides to make a pilgrimage back to the Black Sea in hopes of finding her natal village. While staying overnight in Aybasti she met another Pontic Greek from the USA who was also searching for his natal village. He pulled a Greek map out of his satchel and together they looked for Iondone: He opened it wide and spread it out on the table to give us all a better chance to look. Then he leaned over it and adjust-

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ed his eyeglasses. “Here’s Fatsa,” Harry said and fingered a spot on the coast of the Black Sea. He trailed his finger downward. “Go south and look! Here are three crosses. That means they were Greek villages. And one of them is called Ayios Antonios. Saint Anthony. That’s the real name of what you call Iondone...” What we hadn’t been able to find in decades of searching, Harry had found in the blink of an eye. And it was no wonder we had never found it. We had only known the name in dialect. Or maybe Iondone was just the way it was said in the villages when one pronounced it quickly, the only way my mother had ever known it (2000:27). There is no Ayios Antonios on the Turkish maps. There is no Ayios Antonios anywhere anymore, so to find it, one must search for an elderly villager who can point out a place that now only exists in the memory of its former inhabitants. Themia and Harry found an elderly villager on their way to Iondone. He remembered Themia’s family because they were blacksmiths: “Yes,” the man said. “We used to spread manure on their fields, and they made our tools in return. I was 15 when they took them away. I remember” (Halo 2000:313). Themia asked the 87 year-old man to help her find her old house. He agreed with great apprehension, explaining that other Rum had come in the past and had not liked what they found. When they reached Iondone, the elderly villager instructed the dolmufl driver to stop. He pointed to some empty hills behinds a wooden shack and said, “That was the town called Iondone” (2000:314). The wooden shack belonged to a 45 year-old woman who had lived in Themia’s old house as a child. Together, they walked up the hills and stopped at a pile of stones, where the woman told Themia that the stones used to be her house. Some of the villagers had lived in the abandoned houses. This woman told Themia that they had initially rebuilt the homes in different spots, and eventually used the wood from the newly constructed old Rum houses for fire. They relocated the homes, the woman explained, because they were looking for gold. The woman said they bought the houses from the Rum before they left. She told Themia the land

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belonged to her (2000:316). “Can this really be the place?” my mother said. We surveyed the mountains. Except for the pile of stones the woman claimed came from my mother’s home, not even a stone, or a log, or a road, could be seen anywhere. There was no sign that the three Greek villages had ever existed, or that thousands of people ever quietly lived their lives there for perhaps thousands of years (2000:317). Otçugöçü: The Annual Pilgrimage to the Pasture Homecoming festivals have been a popular topic of anthropological inquiry. The documentary Transnational Fiesta (Pelles 1991) provides an account of the annual fiesta to honor Cabanaconde’s matron saint in the highlands of Peru. The year in question marked the first time a migrant family in America hosted the feast in Cabanaconde. The account reveals how transnational migrants return home for the feast, and how they renew their village affiliation by participating in local rituals. It also shows how they bring local traditions to migrants in Washington, D.C. through the hometown association established there. The difference between the Peruvian fiesta and the homecoming celebration in Yuva is that the one in Yuva involves migration even for the villagers. Migrants come from far and near, and they migrate up to the plateau with the otherwise non-migrant villagers. The literal trip to the plateau from the village is a strong affirmation of one’s mountain village identity. Otçugöçü (lit. herbivore migration) is the name of the annual homecoming festival for people native to the region around Giresun, each village or district having its own site for the yearly ritual pilgrimage. yayla göçü, or migration to the plateau, has been a part of Black Sea mountain life for as long as anyone can remember. Historians report that the tradition is centuries old, going back to the time of Turkmen nomads. Karaovacık (lit. small grassy territorial plain) is the name of the plateau pasture claimed by the people of Yuva. The homecoming festival has always taken place in the month of Orak. “July” in Turkish is Temmuz, but in Yuva it is Orak, which translates alternately as “harvest” and as “sickle.” It falls during the time right after the corn and hazelnut harvest when people would

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go up to the plateau and bring their animals to pasture. The tradition used to involve staying up on the plateau for a number of weeks, sleeping in plateau tents and houses and making cheese, grilling meats, playing music, and enjoying the sweet time before the autumn harvest of pancar by relaxing, dancing, and visiting with plateau neighbors. People would leave their village houses on foot or on a donkey and make the long pilgrimage—sometimes taking days—to the yayla. Migration added certain other elements to the annual yayla celebration. It became a homecoming celebration not only of the villagers to their cherished plateaus, but of migrants back to Turkey, to Karadeniz, to Yuva, and to their captive audience. Rather than walking up to the plateau, migrants now cause incredible traffic jams on the narrow, winding mountain roads that are scarcely wide enough to accommodate their new cars. Otçugöçü has become a showcase for success. Some of the migrants have become famous politicians and entertainers in Istanbul, known and admired for their regional patriotism. Others are returning from Europe and America, famous by virtue of their accumulated wealth. Yuva natives return to a different plateau from the one of their youth and the one their ancestors knew. Karaovacık today is a different place. It resembles a camping ground more than a high mountain pasture. There are restrooms, electrical outlets, and a telephone in the small building that was constructed five years ago to accommodate the changing needs of plateau visitors. People come by car and park next to the area where they will set up their tents. They bring small televisions and portable radios. The only thing missing from the world below is cell phone reception. One Yuva native in Papazlar wrote an editorial in Yuva’nın Sesi (April 2000) lamenting the polluted, overcrowded condition of Karaovacık. He compared the village’s plateau to a high mountain pasture he visited above the Black Sea town of Trabzon, where he could not even spot a stray chewing gum wrapper. He urged his hemflehri to travel home often and stay longer so they could take care of their property. While it was not the case in 1999, a small corner of Karaovacık was being used by some of the inhabitants of a neighboring district as a garbage dump in the year 2000. For migrants returning from Istanbul, there is the possibility of traveling to the yayla by bus. This is arranged by the Giresunlular Derne¤i, on behalf of the province, for people returning to differ-

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ent areas of Giresun for Otçugöçü. In 1999, the mayor of Papazlar, himself a native of Giresun, arranged for five buses to leave for Karaovacık and other plateaus from different areas of the city. The buses pick people up at midnight and travel in a convoy with other private cars, arriving around two o’clock p.m. The buses bound for Karaovacık stop approximately 2 kilometers from the plateau, and the people get off and walk the rest of the way. During the journey by bus and continuing on the walk up to the plateau, people are serenaded by musicians playing kemençe, saz, and davulzurna. Some of the participants dress in traditional local costumes. Others wear city clothing. The walk up to the plateau is a crucial time for Yuva natives to see what has happened to their hemflehri. They notice who seems healthy and who looks tired. They look at the young village girls with thoughts of marrying off their sons. They look at growing village boys with thoughts of marrying off their daughters. Being at the yayla göçü implies a certain standard of living. Factory workers and taxicab drivers are not able to take the time off to return to the plateau. All of the hundred migrant men in the households I studied claimed that they were in the habit of returning to the plateau every year for Otçugöçü. During my time on the plateau, however, I only saw 28 of them. It was easy to find out where the others were by asking around. They were working and could not take time off. Although the male migrants weren’t there, many members of their families were. This pilgrimage to the plateau was a unique opportunity to see many of the villagers together in the same area. There was much talk of adventure in other cities and other countries. It was a good chance for me to meet some of the people I had heard about. One of these people was a young man named Hilal. Hilal was on the plateau and looking uncomfortable in his own skin. Mustafa C. introduced me to him as someone who was having a problem with the INS. “Perhaps you can help him, if you don’t mind,” said Mustafa. When I met Hilal one evening on the plateau, we sat down to talk after the music and horon dancing had stopped. Hilal had been a merchant marine. He left his ship in the USA on a 36-hour pass. He overstayed his pass by four years. Hilal went ashore in Baltimore. There, he went to a restaurant known in the village because of the Turks working in the kitchen. He found a job as a dishwasher during the day and worked as a janitor at night. He

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stayed in America without returning to see his young wife in the village because he couldn’t leave without getting caught. There was another former Turkish merchant marine there in Baltimore who had married an American woman. Apparently, this woman made her living by marrying Turkish men for money. Her “husband,” now boyfriend, seemed to accept this scheme, as long as the men didn’t lay a finger on her and paid her when they were supposed to. One unfortunate soul hooked up with the opportunistic woman in an attempt to get a green card, and he couldn’t pay her on time. The Turkish boyfriend, who had since become a citizen, got angry with the worker and made many threats to call the INS and alert them to the situation at the restaurant. He finally called, and there was a raid. Hilal was working that day and got arrested. The INS made him pay 6,000 dollars as a deposit that he could pick up on the other side of the Atlantic, once he was back in Turkey. When I met Hilal, he was still waiting to hear from his attorney regarding the situation with the deposit. He sent proof to the INS that he had indeed returned to Turkey. Hilal wanted me to call his lawyer to find out about the money. We went to the telephone in the small hut on the plateau and I called, using the stack of phone cards Hilal gave me. Hilal, Mustafa, and Hilal’s young wife stood around the telephone waiting for me to speak to the immigration lawyer in Philadelphia. He was obviously used to speaking broken English with Hilal, and he was a bit stunned to be taking a call regarding his client’s money from an American anthropologist on the Black Sea. By the end of my research, I was used to this type of surreal situation. Nereden nereye. Hilal was supposed to be in America, not at the plateau festival. His co-villagers knew of his misfortune. As happy as his young wife was to have him home, she felt badly that he had failed in the eyes of the village. Hilal’s passport bore a large black stamp that identified him as a visa violator. He would have to wait ten years to enter America legally. He would have to wait for 10,000 dollars to enter illegally. Either way, it was a humiliating situation for Hilal. He spoke with return migrants about their success in Kennedy Kent and tried to maintain his composure. Unless he could collect the money for false documents, Hilal’s only alternative was to go to Papazlar and look for work. His wife was not happy about the idea of his going alone. She wanted to go to Istanbul with him, but that would take time. He would have to secure some kind of employ-

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ment before he could afford an apartment for his family. She spoke with the migrants’ wives about life in America. These conversations fed people’s desires not only to leave the village, but to leave the country. These conversations perpetuated the myth that life is easy and upward mobility is guaranteed for those who are able to get to New Yuva. These plateau conversations slowly came to an end as people grew tired. Hikmet put out the fire and we prepared to sleep as other families sat and talked, drank, and played their music until the early hours of the morning. When I returned to Yuva for the plateau festival, my faithful village escort Mustafa was there to accompany me to Karaovacık, even though he was from the city of Giresun and this wasn’t his plateau.83 He called my cell phone and invited himself to take me to Karaovacık. I learned later that he was in a difficult predicament and he wanted my advice. When we talked one morning over breakfast, he had terrible things to report. His turn of luck had everything to do with city politics. When I first went to Giresun in 1998, Melih L. was mayor and a member of ANAP (Motherland Party). After the elections, when the CHP (Republican People’s Party) mayor came in, he kicked out all of the former mayor’s devotees—including Mustafa C. The decision to do this was based on a petty incident. The former mayor’s faithful workers threw him a retirement party. During the party, there was a group photo. The group photo made its way into the hands of the new mayor, and he promptly “relocated” all of the people who attended the party to avoid an insurrection. He brought his own people into the zabıta (municipal police) and city hall. Only one employee from Melih L.’s time was there when I went back in 1999. The city hall journalist was managing the bus terminal. The PR officer was elsewhere. The only person still working in the mayor’s office was the civil clerk who was married to the new mayor’s niece. Mustafa found himself at a desk job in the utilities bureau, and Melih L. went back to running his gas station. Mustafa C. informed me that he was planning to emigrate. He would go to New York in December, and his family would follow as soon as Ayfle’s school let out for the summer. He said the “kara suratlı” (lit. black-faced, referring to his demeanor as well as the dark circles under his eyes) new mayor would not give him his old zabıta job back, and he was fed up with working the humiliating desk job at the utilities company. “There’s no future for us here. We will get nowhere by stay-

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ing.” Where did he think he would get by emigrating and working as a dishwasher in a restaurant? What would his wife do? Mustafa lost considerable status when he was corralled into the desk job, and that was all that seemed to matter. He wasn’t thinking of leaving for financial reasons. He had been humiliated and could not bear the daily reminders of his former status when he saw the new cadre of zabıta patrolling the city. It would be easy, he told me, because he could get to America for free. (He meant “free” in the sense of being able to go without paying for fraudulent documents. Of course, he would have to pay airfare and other expenses related to travel.) With his city job and his wife’s green passport, the passport issued to state employees in Turkey, he would easily be awarded a tourist visa. He would just stay longer than the allotted time. After breakfast, I walked around and looked for familiar faces. I found Hikmet Kaflık and his wife Zuhal sitting with Ferhat and Nurdan. The men came to Karaovacık by bus from Istanbul and would stay for a week. The women came up from the village below, where they had been spending part of the summer with their children. Hikmet, Ferhat, and their families were sitting with Melih and Zahide Ilıca and the new mayor of Yuva. The new mayor was preparing to make a speech about kiwi and raspberries later that afternoon, when the mayor of Papazlar would also be speaking. Not far from Ferhat’s group sat the former mayor, Mehmet Sombul. He and his first wife drove up to the plateau in his Tofafl, while his second wife Nadiye and the children walked up with other relatives. Nadiye sat with her relatives who had returned from New Yuva. Ahmet and his first wife Raife occupied a second patch of grass near his mother and sisters. People tried not to stare. Raife was almost his mother’s age. The older they got, the funnier they looked as a couple. Mehmet never made it out of the village except to go to Ankara on business, Istanbul to see family, or to go whoring. This was his major downfall as mayor when election time rolled around. His challenger was a man by the name of fiükrü K., a return migrant from Kennedy Kent. He spent 12 years in America pumping gas and washing dishes. According to rumor, fiükrü was a man who could get things done. His problem would be to get people to remember him, because he left and didn’t return during his 12 years abroad before he resettled permanently in Turkey. Like many

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repatriates from Germany, he had a stronger sense of civic duty than the average Turk.84 People believed that because he had seen America, he would be able to change the village for the better. The former mayor, during his time in office, built a paved cement road to his natal village. Mehmet’s second wife had many relatives in America. Her sister was there. Her uncle was there. Her uncle’s uncle was ‹hsan Ardın. Part of Mehmet’s appeal was his proximity to migrants and their money. fiükrü, on the other hand, was one of them. Mehmet speculated that fiükrü got his campaign money from the mosque builders in Kennedy Kent.85 (It is true that fiükrü’s friends in America were in the process of building a small Islamic community center next to their new mosque. They would not disclose their financial backers.) Mehmet accused fiükrü of being a closet fundamentalist, or at least of conspiring with them.86 Karaovacık was a place for all of Yuva’s natives, whether they liked each other or not. Some of the participants in the festivities at Karaovacık were experiencing the only form of migration they would know. Others were frequent travelers from cities within and outside of Turkey, returning to their plateau as they had in previous years. Still others were visiting with the memory of Karaovacık when it was part of the Pontus, not the Karadeniz. It seems reasonable that people such as Lefter and Themia would return to their natal villages in search of their old homes. More surprising, however, is the idea of people who were violently expelled from their own homeland returning to Karaovacık to participate in the plateau festivities. I met S.I., a Rum man in Kennedy Kent whose deceased parents had lived in Yuva. He told me the following story about his journey to Karaovacık: We went in [19]92 with one of the elderly men from our parish. He was almost 90 and he wanted to see Yuva before he died. We caught one of those [tour] buses as it passed through Ankara [from Greece] and went to Karaovacık during yayla season. It was the time when everyone went up to the mountaintops for picnics, camping, singing, and dancing. This old man was making a video of his pilgrimage. A particular family on the plateau caught his eye, and he went up to them and started speaking to them in Pontian dialect. They looked around cautiously to see who was listening, and they slowly

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responded in the same dialect.87 What S.I. refers to as the Pontian dialect is Pontic Greek. It was clear from my conversation with Sotiros that the elderly gentleman had found some of his former co-villagers. They were cautious about speaking Greek with him because they were still living in the area, possibly as “Turks.” S.I. and other members of his community believe there to be more Rum families who never left the Pontus, or returned to their memleket from other areas within Turkey after the violence stopped, when it was safe. The Rum villagers and their elderly co-villager from America were at Karaovacık celebrating the plateau and what it had meant to them over the decades, regardless of whose empire laid claim to it. This was their plateau as much as it was anyone else’s. Conclusion As I have explained, migrants return most frequently in the summer because of the hazelnut harvest. The typical pattern reveals older, retired migrants returning with their gelin (brides) and torun (grandchildren) at the time of Hıdrellez.88 The gelin is responsible for looking after her in-laws during the summer, just as she does in the city during the rest of the year. The women who have migrated and are able to return come to the village and work together with the non-migrant village women to harvest the hazelnuts and corn. Employed migrant men who are able to return come to the village to sell the hazelnuts at the end of the harvest, which falls in the middle of July. Migrant men in the city typically spoke of returning to the city for holidays and harvests. In reality, when migrant males had to choose between harvests and holidays as a time for returning, they chose harvests. The festivities at Karaovacık coincided with the end of the harvest, so there were more migrants attending this celebration than there were at Greek May seventh or Hıdrellez. Nevertheless, it appears that migrant males reported traveling to the village more frequently than they actually did. This expression of intention as opposed to practice could be a function of people remembering and articulating what was once a typical pattern of return, or what the ideal pattern of return would be. Two important changes brought about as a result of migration are evident during the summer months. The first one pertains to social relationships throughout Yuva district. Summertime in Yuva is a

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time when the shape of a new village is revealed. While Kennedy Kent and New Yuva were founded by migrants from the village of Pancar, there are also migrants from other villages within Yuva. Due to the geographical features of Yuva district, namely the steep terrain, which resulted in scattered settlements, people from different villages may never know each other. Migration has changed this. ‹hsan Ardın sells his services to any hemflehri who can pay the fee. Men who may never have met in Yuva share tables at the coffeehouse in the merkez as co-villagers in a different sense. They are co-villagers of Kennedy Kent. This creates new relationships between inhabitants of previously unacquainted villages. It throws Yuva natives together in a pattern that represents where they went as much as where they came from. These new relationships allow inhabitants of previously unconnected villages to develop relationships through marriage, thereby increasing district-wide exposure to migration and the community of Yuva natives in America. The second change affects the nature of the annual plateau celebration. The festivities at Karaovacık have changed as a result of migration. New money in the village brought cars to the plateau for the first time, and in them were people who now lived on an urban schedule. What was once a modest month-long period of relaxation after the harvest must now be condensed into two or three days of high intensity networking to accommodate the schedules of villagers who now live in Papazlar and the USA. And of course, the focus has changed from Yuva natives relaxing in the mountain air, to Yuva natives parading their wealth. Local family musicians are upstaged by hemflehri who have become transnational success stories, famous entertainers, or influential politicians. Otçugöçü is still a time for hemflehri from other places, and other places in time, to come together on their beloved plateau. While the differences between migrants and locals are observed and noted by all, it is the attachment and connection to the land that unites the people who share that relationship. These relationships transcend boundaries of ethnicity, religion, and language. Karaovacık reveals the extent to which this is true.

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Migration from Yuva has taken many forms. The current chain migration from Yuva to the USA has its origins in the population transfer at the beginning of the Turkish Republic. Labor migration to Kennedy Kent was occurring contemporaneously with internal labor migration to Istanbul. As ‹hsan Ardın was beginning to help co-villagers migrate to the USA in the 1970s, Europe was closing its doors to potential Gastarbeiter. From that time, both Papazlar and Yuva became sending communities for migrants to Kennedy Kent. An additional draw was the visa lottery program of the 1990s. The news from transmigrant communities now travels more quickly and reaches more people in sending communities than it did in the past. Transmigrants can easily maintain contact with covillagers in different locations, as well as access news and other forms of media and entertainment that keep them connected to their communities of origin: “... The communications revolution of our time has profoundly affected the subjective experience of migration. The Moroccan construction worker in Amsterdam can every night listen to Rabat’s broadcasting services and has no difficulty in buying pirated cassettes of his country’s favorite singers. The illegal alien, Yakuza-sponsored Thai bartender in a Tokyo suburb shows his Thai comrades karaoke videotapes just made in Bangkok. The Filipina maid in Hong Kong phones her sister in Manila and sends money electronically to her mother in Cebu. The successful Indian student in Vancouver can keep in daily touch with her former Delhi classmates by electronic mail” (Anderson 1994:322).

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The above quote describes the current reality for transnational migrants around the world. It is possible to maintain a presence in, or at least a connection to, more than one place at a time. As Tsuda points out in his study of Brazilian Japanese migrants in Japan, social relationships that are carried out in noncontiguous space are just as “real” and significant as those relationships that involve faceto-face interaction (2003:223). The experience of the transregional migrant can also be described in terms of this figurative collapsing of distance. In some ways, Yuva natives in Papazlar are just as far away from their village as their hemflehri in Kennedy Kent. It takes longer to drive to Yuva from Istanbul than it takes to fly from Istanbul to Kennedy Kent.89 Yuva natives in Papazlar avail themselves of the same forms of communication to maintain their ties with co-villagers in both the village and the US community. What emerges from this study is a picture of hemflehri who are connected across regional and national boundaries through their common attachment to their land and their Black Sea identity. Migrants in Papazlar and in Kennedy Kent alike are living outside their region of origin. Black Sea identity is equally significant in Istanbul and in the USA in terms of determining access to social networks and, consequently, access to resources. Population loss in Yuva has happened for several reasons. Refugees from Yuva in the 1920s were forced out by the violence that resulted from a larger national political agenda. Migrants from Yuva today feel compelled to leave Yuva due to the growing economic hardship experienced by hazelnut farmers. This economic hardship is not as one-dimensional as it first appears. Stark and Taylor (1989) describe the relative deprivation felt by those people in the village who have seen others migrate and prosper while their own economic status stays the same. This relative sense of deprivation has given rise to the notion that to migrate is the only true way to be a powerful man. Migration itself becomes a form of social capital, through which one is able to access other resources and change one’s position in society. Similarly, as Massey points out, migration networks are a form of social capital (1987). To participate in these networks, ultimately to migrate or to help others migrate, is to bind others in relationships of mutual obligation that will allow a person to access additional resources and improve his or her standing in the community.

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Migration from Yuva has produced enough network connections to be self-perpetuating. Hugo argues that the risk of failure and expenditure of effort in migrating decreases as more people migrate and a social structure grows to support the new migrants (1981). The risk of failure decreases as size of the network increases, resulting in more people migrating. This is certainly true of migrants from Yuva to Istanbul and, to a certain extent, to the USA. One major difference is that the literal cost of migrating to the USA has increased dramatically as opportunistic individuals have learned to prey on desperate underemployed farmers with exorbitant fees for fraudulent documents. In other ways, the cost has decreased. More people are now living in the USA, and so more people are available for support. As time passes, cumulative causation theory predicts that people from a broader segment of the sending society will participate in migration. Identity It is important to see how regional Black Sea identity is consistent with a nationwide pattern of Turkish (in the national sense) regional identity that transcends ethnic boundaries. As Yucel (1987) and Gitmez and Wilpert (1987) have demonstrated, multiethnic social networks based on regional affiliation exist in Germany. However, those networks often include Sunni Turks and Sunni Kurds, or occasionally, Alevi Muslims and Sunni Muslims. Another example is the lack of affinity between Black Sea migrants to Istanbul and the urban Rum who live there. Yuva’s ethnically diverse past does not make Yuva natives more open to ethnic minorities from the rest of Turkey. Their relationship with the Rum was specifically with the Rum of the Black Sea. Since many of the Christian refugees who escaped from Turkey ultimately settled in the USA, perhaps the opportunity to observe relationships of regional affiliation that transcend larger religious boundaries has not presented itself until now. The formation of neighboring Turkish and Rum communities in the USA started with a chance meeting of a man who embodied part of Yuva’s ethnic past and three young Turkish men who represented Yuva’s population at that time. Still, their common origin, despite religious differences, was enough of a common bond to gain the young men access to the Pontian social network in America. Yuva natives in Papazlar do not have a direct connection to Black

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Sea Rum refugees. However, the relationships that affect the migrants in Kennedy Kent and New Yuva also shape the migration possibilities of Papazlar residents. Yuva, Papazlar, and the US communities of Yuva natives are connected in the same way as Rouse’s migrant Mexican communitiy in California: “Today, it is the circuit as a whole rather than any one locale that constitutes the principal setting in relation to which Aguilillans orchestrate their lives. Those living in Aguililla, for example, are as much affected by the events in Redwood City as by developments in the municipio itself, and the same is true in reverse. Consequently, people monitor what is happening in the other parts of the circuit as closely as they monitor what is going on immediately around them. Indeed, it is only by recognizing the transnational framework within which Aguilillans are operating that we can properly appreciate the logic of their actions” (1991:14). Personal stories of success and failure are relayed between the Yuva and the USA; news of births, deaths, and marriages travels quickly throughout the transmigrant network; overseas migrants and their co-villagers in Papazlar alike work to improve living conditions in Yuva district; and transmigrants throughout the social field share resources in the form of remittances from Istanbul and the USA, and assistance with agricultural chores in Yuva when transmigrants are absent.90 Yuva natives throughout the social field identify themselves unanimously as Karadenizli regardless of their ethnic and religious differences. They also express similar sentiments of attachment to their land of origin. However, forced migration has resulted in a refugee’s connection to the land that differs greatly from that of the labor migrants. Rum refugees can no longer claim ownership of land in the village. They were stripped of their property rights during the population transfer. Those who went to Greece were “compensated” with the land of former Muslim inhabitants who were sent to Turkey during the population transfer. The Muslims were settled on former Rum property, although most of the resettling occurred around Cappadocia, in the interior of Anatolia. Those who migrated to countries other than Greece were never compensated for their losses. The Rum of Kennedy Kent return at least

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once in their lives to the land they knew as children. While they are attached to Yuva and consider it their past home, they do not have an ongoing connection to the actual land. Their connection is to memories and to people, and primarily the people who live in Kennedy Kent. Another difference between the internal and transnational migrant communities is the particular aspect of their collective identity that allowed each community to prosper. While the international migrants initially emphasized their common Black Sea roots with Rum refugees, the internal migrants use their ethno-religious identity to facilitate their access to urban resources. Clearly, this larger community of Yuva natives exhibits an instrumental use of ethnicity. Cohen observed similar identity construction among Hausa migrants in Yoruba towns (1969). He concluded, “...there are reasons for a group asserting and maintaining an ethnic identity and these reasons are economic and political rather than psychological” (Banks 1966:33). Indeed, in both cases, Yuva natives have moved into social contexts that force them to define themselves, similar again to Aguilillans living in Redwood City: Rouse’s Aguilillans moved from a world in which identity was not a central concern into one in which they were pressed with increasing force to adopt understandings of personhood and collectivity that privileged notions of autonomous selfpossession and a formal equivalence between the members of a group (Rouse 1995:370). When put in a situation of having to define one’s ethnic identity, both Cohen (1969) and Barth (1969) argue that individuals and groups will identify in ways that work to their benefit. Yuva natives demonstrate that their complex Black Sea identity is flexible and open to multiple interpretations. Relationship to the Village It is possible to note differences between the communities in Papazlar and Kennedy Kent and New Yuva in terms of their relationships to the home village. Again, similar to Rouse’s Aguilillans and Pelles’ Peruvian highlanders (1993), regional identity persists for transregional and transnational migrants alike. Rouse writes, “Although transnational migration has brought distant worlds into

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immediate juxtaposition, their proximity has produced neither homogenization nor synthesis” (1991:14). However, the differences between the internal and international transmigrant communities become clearer when one looks beyond issues of identity. The most obvious difference results from proximity to the village. Internal migrants can leave for Istanbul with little more than money for a bus ticket. They simply go, stay with a relative while they are finding work, and eventually establish a residence. They do not have to call on villagers to pool resources to pay for fraudulent documents. The village’s investment in an internal migrant is smaller, and they can expect more modest returns, as well. While internal migration is easier and less expensive, inhabitants of Papazlar cannot always find enough work or enough income to be able to help other villagers. They earn more than they would in the village, but sometimes less than what they may need in the city, and certainly less than their hemflehri in America. Legal international migrants and internal migrants exhibit similar patterns of return to the village. When given the option of categorizing their returns as “harvest” returns, “holiday” returns, “frequent” returns, or some combination of the three, legal international migrants reported returning at least once a year, and sending family members back for longer holidays during the summer. Internal migrants reported returning more frequently. However, both internal and legal international migrants returned on average once or twice per year. The most common time to return was at the end of hazelnut harvest and the beginning of the yayla festival. In reality, internal migrants often held jobs that prevented them from traveling to the village more often. Undocumented migrants to the USA typically experience the longest period of absence from the village. Migrants report that it usually takes seven years to complete the process of legalizing one’s status, during which it is impossible to leave the USA. Since the overwhelming majority of migrants to America travel alone, leaving wives and children behind, this results in a seven year separation not only from the village, but also from family. This is not to say that migrants do not maintain communication and interaction with their families in Turkey. Cell phones, internet accounts, reports from other migrants, gifts, and remittances all play a role in reinforcing the ties between migrants, their families and their village.

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Families and Migration The wives and children of labor migrants maintained the most consistent relationship to the village, regardless of their status as internal or international migrants. Women and children would return to the village during the summer without their husbands. The responsibility of looking after the land and assessing the progress on construction of new homes during that time fell on the women.91 This had everything to do with the labor migrant’s job and his not being able to take much time off. This was not a time women necessarily looked forward to, especially after living in the city and not having had agricultural obligations. Delaney identifies gurbet, defined as an exile from the heavenly home, the beloved village, or one’s birth family, as a feeling experienced by labor migrants, young boys during military service, and women after marriage. She provides an example of a song sung at weddings: “It has been six years since I left my village The bitter words of my father have become honey to me The thorns of my village have become roses to me I miss my village, both my mother and father, I miss my village. If my father had a horse, he would mount it and come to me If my mother had a boat she would sail to me If my siblings knew the way they would come to me” (Delaney 1991:117) Village women who migrate to the city or abroad do not express feelings of sadness or regret when they talk about the village. They express allegiance to the village, but life in Istanbul is clearly easier. There are no fields to work and no wood to chop. Women have modern amenities in their city homes and they consider this a significant improvement from living in the village. Migrants from Papazlar to America also express satisfaction with their modern surroundings. As discussed in an earlier chapter, this positive experience has a lot to do with the fact that there are already many hemflehri living in Kennedy Kent and New Yuva. Female migrants from Yuva move into a preexisting social network when they move to the USA.92 The children who accompany their parents overseas find that they are in similar company when they reach Kennedy Kent and New Yuva. The local public schools have students from the

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Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Haiti, Mexico, and other countries. It is not uncommon for students to leave the country for the summer and accompany their migrant parents to their respective countries of origin. The children of Yuva natives find that they are on a similar schedule to that of their classmates. They are from a similar peasant, agrarian background. Since they often land in ESL classes, they do not have many interactions with children who are native-born and year-round members of the community. Likewise, the children of internal migrants to Papazlar are living in an area that is home to many rural-urban migrants. Nurdan described the plight of some less fortunate Papazlar children who were not from Yuva: They sell used wares, chestnuts, simit (sesame rings), anything to earn money for their families. They even beg on the street at the age of eight or nine. These are the sixth and seventh children of migrants from the east. Their mothers do not know any better. Our children are lucky. Children from Yuva do not work for pay and they do not beg. They return to the village in the summer either with their parents or other relatives. The difference is that in Istanbul, being of rural peasant stock carries with it some stigma. The younger children do not articulate this attitude, but the teenage male children of migrants expressed boredom with the village. Having tapped into locally constructed notions of status and prestige, they wanted to stay in the big, busy city for the summer. The girls are not given the option of staying in the city and do not have the freedom to socialize outside the home, so their attitudes are understandably different. Finally, non-migrant children from Yuva exhibit different attitudes about education than children who accompany their parents overseas. Their attitudes and subsequent dropout rates mirror those of young Tongan islanders (Small 1997) and Dominicans (2001) who idealize the lives of their migrant co-villagers. Turkish children who remain in the village have dreams of moving to Kennedy Kent, where they will make good money pumping gas. They do not see the connection between education and well-being, especially when illiterate village men can earn good money in America. The children in Kennedy Kent, however, attend school regularly. They are

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able to see beyond the mythical homecoming of the “wealthy” migrant. They see how hard their fathers work to earn money, and their parents encourage them to pursue career options other than pumping gas. Migration and Religious Expression Chapter five briefly examined religious identity among Yuva natives, and the fact that migrants to Istanbul gain access to resources by emphasizing their conservative religious identity. It is crucial to understand that Yuva is a conservative religious province—not in the sense of Islamist, but certainly not secular like the native populations of larger cities. In short, Yuva natives in the village do not experience pressure to engage in activities that demonstrate their faith. While the same can be said of individual Yuva natives living in Papazlar, it is not true for the collective community of Yuva natives living in a city that desperately clings to its secular reputation. Religion has become a political marker in Istanbul, and conservative Muslims are engaged in a tug of war with secular urban natives over the right to live different interpretations of Muslim-ness. Religious identity is more problematic in Istanbul than it is in the USA. Yuva natives experienced the religious freedom of the village only after reaching Kennedy Kent. Many people expressed surprise at the apparent lack of focus on religious identity in Kennedy Kent, compared with the hyperfocused proclamations of fearful politicians in Turkey. Yuva natives found it distasteful that one small headscarf in parliament could stir up such a fuss.93 Migration and Employment Finally, it is useful to examine the differences in employment in the urban internal and transnational communities. In both cases, migrants often move without the guarantee of employment upon reaching the new community. Few Yuva natives in Istanbul own their own businesses, which would be a way for members of the community to offer one another employment. Unemployment in the entire country is still high; higher still is the rate of underemployment (Doh 1984). Many people receive wages that do not allow them to support a nuclear family. Men in Papazlar usually work in factories or as taxicab drivers. The hours are long and the pay is low, but men generally fare bet-

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ter in Istanbul than in the village. If a man leaves the village and searches unsuccessfully for work in the city, he can always return to the village easily. It is easier logistically than psychologically. Returning to the village without having worked for some years is an admission of inadequacy. Women who leave the village usually do so as daughters or wives. Although in some rare cases women do work for pay outside the village, this is not the expected role for the wives of Black Sea males. When women return to the village, they return as they left—as wives or as daughters. The status of the family, the level of respect commanded by the family in the village, depends on the man’s role as a worker and provider, and the woman’s role as the keeper of traditions in a foreign environment. Although families do not often resettle in the village after they leave for Istanbul, women continue to return annually with their children to their mountain homes. As long as the family has land in the village, this is an inescapable aspect of the Black Sea wife’s yearly cycle of movement. Therefore, it would be a mistake to say that women leave and never go back. If anything, they are more closely tied to the village than the men. Moving to the USA requires a greater investment of time and money, and the risks are greater. There is no comparison in this respect to the ease with which people migrate internally. Once a man has managed to enter the USA, the rewards are greater than those reaped by internal migrants to Papazlar. Many of the migrants in Kennedy Kent and New Yuva are moving in the direction of owning their own gas station or diner. For those newly arrived migrants, it is easy to find kitchen work, gas station work, or factory work through others in the Black Sea community. Even after living expenses are considered, men generally report greater financial in Kennedy Kent than in Papazlar. Both communities represent a dramatic change and a substantial improvement from the farming income of the village. Directions for Further Research The previous pages describe some of the differences between migrants’ lives in Istanbul and in the US communities. To a certain extent, these different environments call on their respective inhabitants to emphasize different aspects of their identity. To be sure, people who have no knowledge of Turkish regional differences

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would not know to refer to these particular Turks as Black Sea Turks. As they often do in conversations in their own country, Turks start with the most general category of identity “Turk” for the purpose of giving the listener a reference point, and proceed to more specific descriptions (“from Istanbul,” “from Konya,” etc.) when realizing that the listener possesses knowledge of these categories. I would argue strongly that while members of an overseas host society may refer to all Turks simply as Turks, this is not the case within Turkish communities. Whether these Black Sea Turks will eventually self-identify as “Turks” depends not only on the perception of the receiving community, whether in Istanbul or the USA, but on what happens within the Yuva transmigrant community itself. If, for example, the community in Kennedy Kent depletes its supply of village brides, and men begin to marry Turks from other regions, or even non-Turks, this could affect the tendency of future generations to identify so strongly as Black Sea natives. The potential for this to happen in Papazlar may also exist, as people from different regional backgrounds form relationships based on similar political beliefs. Political orientation is one of a few factors that can easily cut across regional affiliations. Religious orientation, which is often strongly tied to political orientation, can have the same crosscutting effect. As Yuva natives widen their social networks to include new relationships that reflect new common ties, perhaps there will be more opportunities to form allegiances based on other types of commonalities. The effects these relationships will have on the importance of regional identity among transmigrant Yuva natives remains to be seen.

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NOTES

1 Glick Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton define “social field” as an unbounded terrain of interlocking egocentric networks, the analysis of which focuses on human interaction and situations of personal social relationships. (Hirschman et al. 1999: 97). 2 It is also worth noting the recent formation of the Turkish nation-state in 1923, relative to the beginning of widespread labor migration from Turkey, only forty years later. In other nations, as well, emigration began before the notion of a national identity really took hold. Levitt cites Cinel’s example that at the time of Italian unification, not long before large-scale emigration from Italy started, “fewer than 5 percent of Italians spoke Italian or knew the word Italy” (2001: 25). 3 Migration studies are still somewhat compartmentalized at the analytical and disciplinary levels (Hirschman et al. 1999). This compartmentalization surfaces in different ways: scholars tend to treat political migrants differently from economic migrants; there is a categorical separation of internal and international migration due to a nation-state bias; and ideological boundaries frame research in a limiting way (Portes 1999). A more historically informed, comparative and interdisciplinary perspective will contribute considerably to a wider lens through which we can understand the complex nature of current migration trends (Massey 1999). 4 See Douglas (1983) and Kertzer (1980) for descriptions of rural-urban tension in Italy, and Sutton (1983) for migrant social networks in Greece. 5 “Rum” is the term used in Turkey for Anatolian Greeks. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Pancar is a pseudonym of the main sending village in the sub-district of Yuva. 9 Papazlar is the pseudonym of the Istanbul neighborhood of Yuva natives. 10 With the exception of the deceased Lefter Cember, all of the names

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12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27

28 29

MIGRATING TO AMERICA used here are pseudonyms, at the request of the people who participated in this study. Of course, it was easier for me to meet women than it would have been for a male anthropologist. Given the ease with which I gained access to the males in the community, I have a hard time saying with any certainty that women were easier to meet than men. In fact, it may have been more difficult to meet women due to their tendency to be at home. In retrospect, it seems that this account is an enhanced version of Hilal’s experience in America, which is discussed in chapter seven. People seem to have assigned more legal power to the American woman involved than she actually had. See Quataert (2005) for a discussion of inter-communal relations at the end of the empire. The Alevi are a Muslim minority in Turkey. For a detailed account of Turkey’s linguistic diversity, see B. Grimes’ Ethnologue: Languages of the World (1996). This opinion is confirmed in other studies of the Black Sea Turks (Meeker 1970, 2002; Beller-Hahn and Hahn, 2001). Michael Meeker reports that Turkish navy officials could determine which conscripted men were from the Black Sea based on their (mis)pronunciation of “f›nd›k” as “finduk” (1970:4). Metin And, A History of Theatre and Popular Entertainment in Turkey. Ankara: Forum Yay›nlar›, 1963-64. 46-47. Temel has become a synonym of “Laz” as a result of Laz jokes. See TEMEL in the “Glossary of Turkish Terms and Folk Elements,” www.mfa.gov.tr/grupc/cj/cja/85.htm. See Giresun Sosyal ve Ekonomik Sorunlar›, 1998. See Meeker (1970: 4). Crystal 1987: 305. Grimes 1992: 795. I would add that this tradition of obsession with female purity exists in many areas of Turkey and the larger areas of the Near East and the Mediterranean. If this custom originated in the Caucasus, it has traveled far beyond the Black Sea region! Meeker 1970: 19. Ibid.: 19-20. How this area became predominantly Turkish and Muslim is not entirely clear. Many Rum residents of Giresun left during the population exchange, but many probably converted to Islam. This area was home to many crypto-Christians who were urged to practice Christianity openly, per the Tanzimat, in 1857. More research is needed on this subject. Freely 1996: 214. It is interesting to me that although Black Sea Turks resent being judged by a regional stereotype, they do not hesitate to categorize all foreign women working in their region as Russian prostitutes! I was informed that yaylas are owned by some and rented by others. In the case of yayla rental, it is possible that a family would rent in a

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different location from year to year. 30 If there is no preexisting structure, the families all have the necessary supplies for constructing tents of various shapes and sizes. 31 This term refers to Turkish migrants in America. It is not the same term used for citizens of the USA, Amerikal›lar. It is a play on the term Almanc›lar, which refers to Turks in Germany—again, different from the word used to refer to ethnic Germans, Almanlar. The terms are comparable in pejorative meaning to the term Dominicanyork, which is used by Dominicans as a descriptor for penniless villagers who return from the USA with cars and jewelry (Levitt 2001: 94). 32 It is necessary to make a distinction between this particular chain of migrants and other Turkish communities in the USA. There is a large population of upper middle class Turks living in Manhattan, Boston, and other large urban areas. While most migrants from Yuva have settled in traditional immigrant neighborhoods, not all Turks are limited to this choice, nor do they all choose to live in the same neighborhood. 33 Small made a similar observation regarding migrants from Tonga to the USA (1997). 34 Turks are eligible to apply to the US Green Card Lottery. This program allows 50,000 immigrants from eligible countries whose populations are underrepresented in the USA to win a green card through a lottery system. 35 Tripolitanian, First Balkan War, Second Balkan War, World War I, and the War of Independence (McCarthy 1983: 140n.) 36 He compares this population exchange with the voluntary population exchange between Greece and Bulgaria. See Ladas, Stephen P. 1932. 37 The stereotype continues today, as the song “Ofli ile Bayburtlu” by Ismail Türüt illustrates. 38 Of approximately 460,000 ethnic Muslims who were forced to “repatriate,” only 626 were settled in Giresun (Ladas 1932: 711). The data do not reveal their exact area of resettlement, so it is difficult to say whether any made it to Yuva. Residents of Giresun proper were able to identify a few families of people who had come from Greece during the population exchange. 39 The term Rum is used for Greeks from Anatolia. It also translates as “Roman” and “Byzantine.” 40 For corroborating accounts of Rum refugees now living in Greece, see Yalcin (1998). 41 The title Not Even My Name (Halo 2000) refers to the fact that Themia Halo is forced to renounce her own name in exchange for the name “Sano” because it is easier for the Arab family to pronounce. 42 This village was most probably Sahin Yuva. Locals often talked about Sahin Yuva as a former Greek village. 43 See Öztürkmen (2003) for similar accounts from the Black Sea town of Tirebolu. 44 Giresun ‹l Y›ll›¤› 1967: 103. 45 In 1935, Giresun had 121,960 residents between the ages of 0-14. In

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52 53 54 55 56

57

58 59 60 61

62

MIGRATING TO AMERICA 1945, the number was 125,532. At the end of the famine period, the number had almost decreased to the 1935 level, with 121,977. Ibid.: 208. I learned the details of Lefter’s return to Giresun from ‹hsan Ardın. It was common for former Pontians living in Greece to make pilgrimages to their natal villages by bus from Greece. Lefter made this trip alone from New York. Pontic Greeks from the area still call Giresun, Kerasunta. Ali Ifl›k, an acquaintance from the village of Hisarc›k, came to New York with ‹hsan’s help and eventually bought a diner in Pennsylvania. Most of Hisarc›k migrated to Levittown, PA, through ‹hsan and Ali. Migrants reported having to bribe airport officials on their way out of the country. If they did not offer money, they risked not being allowed to leave, being harassed upon return, or not being allowed to leave on subsequent trips. Officials knew who had not paid bribe money by comments written in the migrant’s passport. I found this to be an ironic development, considering the labor migration of the Rum residents of Yuva in the late 1800s to Georgia. 1990 genel nüfus say›m›: daimi ikametgaha göre iç göçün sosyal ve ekonomik nitelikleri. Ankara: Devlet Istatistik Enstitusu www.die.gov.tr/ENGLISH/ISTATIS/ESG/34ISTANB/NUFU.S.3.HTM www.die.gov.tr/ENGLISH/ISTATIS/34ISTANB/NUFU.S.1.HTM When these figures are compared to the current population of Yuva, an estimated 26,000, and the current population of Giresun, an estimated 499,000, the epidemic nature of out migration from Giresun province is revealed. Istanbul was home to Jewish and Christian minorities even when Izmir/Smyrna was being torched by Turkish nationalists. During the most recent population transfers, urban Rum and Armenians actually stayed in Istanbul. The Turkish government feared that their departure would paralyze the economy of Istanbul. See White 2002 for a discussion of Islamist politics in contemporary Turkey. This is a stereotype common among Alevi (Shiite) Muslims regarding Sunni Muslims. When various secular political parties decided to offer rural migrants an alternative to the services provided by the Virtue Party, they established their main office in Eyüp. See Rex at al. (1987) for a detailed exploration of immigrant associations in Europe and Sutton (1983) for a description of Greek hometown association. Mexican hometown associations often represent home regions (Orozco and Lapointe 2004; Velasco Ortiz 2005), while some African hometown associations are specific to villages (Little 1965; Banton 1956; Ottenberg 1955). While many national governments such as Mexico, the Philippines, and Nigeria endorse and support diaspora hometown associations, others, such as Haiti, operate independent of government support (Pierre-Louis 2006). “Kad›köy’de 865 dernek var.” Hurriyet, 13 May 1999: 1, 11.

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63 Although this is the official attitude, I did not encounter anyone in my dernek visits who wasn’t a member of the Yuva community. 64 As I will discuss in a later chapter, there is also one in Kennedy Kent. 65 Cicek, N. “Giresun Dernekleri ve Onemi” Yuva’nin Sesi 1994: (3) 7. 66 Ustun, C. “Bir Yabanc› Gözüyle Amerika Maceram›z.” Yuva’nin Sesi 1994: (3) 15. 67 It is important to consider that the ethnic diversity of the Black Sea includes mostly Sunni Muslims. With the exception of the Rum inhabitants, most of the groups—Laz, Circassian, Turk, and even Kurd, are Muslim. Even the Kurds are often Sunni, as opposed to Alevi, Muslim. 68 It has been confusing at times to understand how two village families with the surname Türk could be unrelated, and how to village families with very different surnames could be the offspring of male siblings. I became accustomed to asking whether the siblings in question randomly chose, or were assigned, differing surnames. 69 A Turkish Law enacted in the 1960s gave the government permission to changes the names of non-Turkish villages into Turkish ones. Villagers typically continue to use the old place names, for example, in Kurdish regions, where the ethnicity of the inhabitants remains the same. In areas that experienced forced migration, such as the Black Sea, the old Greek name often dies. The Kurdish village of Arslankafl› in Elaz›¤ recently won court permission to use its original name, Niflkufla¤›. 70 I met several young immigrants in Queens who had Rum mothers and Turkish fathers, but not of Black Sea origin. These marriages took place in Turkey, and the children were born in Turkey. 71 Jusdanis writes, “Although the Greeks, like all immigrants, initially occupied the lower social stratum, finding work as street vendors, or in restaurants, mines, railroads, and mills, they did not develop a perceptible working-class consciousness” (1991: 215). He explains that the Greeks entered the middle class relatively quickly, starting around 1910. 72 Benedict Anderson (1994) refers to political participation from afar as long-distance nationalism. He cites the example of Indians living in America and Britain raising money to support the destruction of a mosque in India. There is much evidence to indicate that the same phenomenon occurs among Mexican migrants to the Los Angeles, (Orozco and Lapointe 2004), Tongans in suburban California (Small 1997), Dominicans in Boston (Levitt 2001), and Haitians in New York (Pierre-Louis 2006), among others. 73 The women who return to Yuva in the summer do work the fields, unless they have been rented to someone else. I describe this later in the chapter. 74 The muhtar (village headman) of Pancar assisted me in recording the comings and goings of villagers. I was not in the village year round and it would have been impossible to get this information without help from people in the village. 75 In the case of abandoned new construction, this is comparable to what

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77

78

79

80

81 82

83 84 85 86

87 88

MIGRATING TO AMERICA Grasmuck and Pessar (1991) found in Dominican sending communities, where migrants would have houses built and then not be able to afford to live in them. May sixth is the fortieth day after the spring equinox and is commonly thought to be the beginning of summer. My urban Turkish friends were vaguely familiar with the term, but not with any holiday or traditions associated with the day. It is still called “May Seventh” by the older generations, but the name of the holiday was changed to “Aksu Celebration” and then to “International Black Sea Aksu Festival.” The latest change reflects the province’s interest in attracting tourists. The first name change undoubtedly marks an effort to move away from holidays that are associated with the Greek calendar. There are many rivers running through Giresun province that empty out into the Black Sea. The river that runs through Yuva is one of them. Still, people gather at the mouth of the Aksu to celebrate this day. No one could tell me why. My guess is that it has to do with its close proximity to Aretias. Girls are allowed to move around freely until they begin to show signs of developing physically, or until they begin to menstruate. That marks the beginning of their “training” period. They stay close to their mothers and learn how to cook, clean, and work the fields. Delaney (1991) observed a similar pattern during her fieldwork in Central Anatolia. Ahmet’s sister and her husband were divorced. She left him, she explained, because of his ruh hastas›, which translates literally as “soul sickness” but probably refers to psychological problems. Other people in the village said he was “unbalanced.” Her husband’s village is a sending community for migrants who go to France. These are the figures I learned in conversations with the mayor of Giresun and the mayors of Yuva. The only people who seemed to fit into the category of having enough land (barring natural disaster such as drought or crop disease) were the Kahyao¤lu family and a couple of return migrants from Germany who lived in other villages. People living within Giresun city limits went to a different plateau called Kumbet. People commonly say that the Almanc›lar know how to organize and fight for what they want, in contrast to the Turks who have never left the country and behave as though they are powerless. See Anderson (1994) for a discussion of political figures running for office from abroad. I found that to be a strange choice of accusation, because many of my conversations with Mehmet were about being Muslim and becoming Muslim. Again, there is a difference between being a believer and believing in a theocratic state. Conversation with S.I., March 1999. Gelin means bride and refers to the son’s wife. It is both a term of reference and a term of address. Torun means grandchild.

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89 Although it is possible to take a plane to Trabzon and be picked up and taken to the village, people do not fly home. Even the mayor drives back and forth to Ankara for meetings. 90 Compare this to assistance with agricultural chores, sharing news, and the sending home of remittances described at length in Grasmuck and Pessar (1991) as well as Small (1997) and Levitt (2001). 91 This contrasts greatly with the division of labor in Dominican families in which men migrate and women stay behind (Grasmuck and Pessar 1991). Since Dominican women are not typically responsible for agricultural chores, the sight of them working the fields implies a drop in status rather than increased status due to the husband’s migration. Turkish women in Yuva typically participate in agricultural chores, and continue to do so without a perceived loss of status when husbands are absent. 92 This is quite different from the settlement pattern of Turks in Queens. The women there, all from different parts of Turkey, report feeling homesick and alienated due to their separation from their home communities. I attribute this difference to the fact that they have not moved into a community of co-villagers or regional compatriots. See DiCarlo: 1998. 93 Merve Kavakç› was the fundamentalist senator who wore a headscarf to Parliament shortly after her election. She was eventually asked to step down because she held dual citizenship in Turkey and the USA. Yuva natives in the USA point out that she moved back to the USA after this incident, “where she is free to cover her head without being harassed.”

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INDEX

absentee villagers 42, see also Amerikanc›lar, Almanc›lar access to resources 150, 157 access to social networks 150 Aegean 28, 32, 47, 174, 175 Ahalli 56 Aksaray 77 Aksu River 8, 130 Alevi holidays 20 Alibeyköy 93, 102 Almanc›lar 163 Amazons 130 America, see United States of America Amerikanc›lar 32 ANAP (Anavatan Partisi). See Motherland Party 34, 75, 143 Anatolia 20, 24, 46, 47, 51, 52, 53, 58, 110, 152, 163 Anatolian Greeks, see Rum 46, 161 animal husbandry 30, 88 Ankara 39, 51, 52, 56, 58, 59, 73, 92, 98, 144, 145, 162, 164, 167, 172, 179 annual migration 32 annual yayla homecoming celebration, see yayla Appalachia 21, 44, 110

Arabs 38 Aretias 130, 166 Armenian and Nestorian insurrection 46 Armenians 7, 20, 46, 75, 164 Assyrian 51, 53 Ataturk. Mustafa Kemal 19, 20, 46, 49, 64, 66, 95, 110, 110, 112 attachment and connection to the land 147 autonomous self possession 153 bafll›k paras› (bride price) 39 Belgium 4, 29, 56, 57, 65, 126 B›çak, Hüseyin 84, 99, 112 birth rate 55 Black Sea 5, 7, 19, 20, 25, 26, 59, 91, 116, 159, 162 Black Sea Foundation, see Karadeniz Vakf› blood feuds 25 Blue Mosque 76, 77 Bosphorus 20 Brazilian Japanese return migration 13, 150 bride price, see bafll›k paras› Bulancak 49, 50, 59 Bulgaria 20, 64, 137, 163, 176

182

MIGRATING TO AMERICA

Bursa 29, 99 Caucasus, the 24, 25, 162 Celts 22 Cerasous 26 chain migration 11, 45, 49, 149 Chepni Turcoman 52 Chinese 38 Choruh River 24 Christians 7, 26, 46, 47, 52, 54, 172, 175 clannish behavior 23 collectivity 153; 3, 38, 153; 38 community 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 26, 32, 43, 56, 58, 65, 68, 69, 70, 73, 74, 75, 81, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 99, 102, 106, 101, 111, 113, 114, 115, 116, 118, 123, 124, 146, 150, 153, 156, 157, 159 communications revolution 149 compulsory migration 55 concentric spheres of affiliation 18, 102 cultural membership 122 cumulative causation theory 151 Delaware 61, 117 deportation 20, 52, 124 Dereli 59 disenfranchisement 53 district affiliation 103 Diyarbakir 51 Dominican Republic 38, 156 East Side (NYC) 50, 61 employment 6, 26, 56, 58, 66, 69, 82, 97, 105, 157; 157 Espiye 50, 51, 52, 53, 137, ethnicity, 7, 17, 19, 147, 153, 165, 169, 170, 171, 173; 17, 54, 68, 116, 141; 20, 26, 137, 165; 11, 21, 24; 38, 57

ethnic boundaries, 17, 54, 68, 72, 116, 151 ethnic diversity, 19-20, 26, 137, 165 ethnic identity, see identity, ethnic ethnic Laz, 11-12, 19, 21-22, 23-24, 24, 68, 103, 165 ethnic minority, 20, 38, 57, 76 ethnic Turks, 7, 20 multiethnic social networks, 151 ethnographic accounts 17 ethno-religious identity 153 Europe 5, 6, 8, 19, 29, 38, 57, 58, 60, 65, 66, 73, 74, 79, 99, 105, 140, 149, 164, 169, 171, 173, 176, 178, 179 evil eye 112, see also nazar boncu¤u extended families/kin 31, 82, 85 Eyüp 77, 164 family dynamics 10 Farsi 77 Fascist 100 Fatih 77, 93 Fazilet, see Virtue Party Feast of the Sacrifice, see Kurban Bayram› female chastity 24, 25 female place 34 fez, banning of 19 fieldwork 8, 11, 12, 15, 166 First Balkan War 46, 163 forced deportation 52 forced migration 5, 6, 45, 47, 49, 52, 152, 165 foreignness 17, 72 formal integration 91 forms of association 91 France 4, 5, 6, 29, 56, 57, 133, 134, 166, 173 Freetown 4, 170 Galata 76, 77

Index Gastarbeiter 56, 60, 103, 149, 176 Gebekilise 51, 58, 137 Gebze 29, 91 gecekondu, see shantytowns Georgia 21, 24, 26, 27, 28, 164 Germany 3, 4, 29, 34, 37, 43, 56, 57, 58, 64, 65, 68, 83, 99, 124, 145, 151, 163, 166, 176 Giresun Adas› 130 Giresun province 8, 12, 17, 26, 56, 75, 78, 93, 132, 164, 166 Giresun Spor 92, 93, 112, 119 Giresunlular Derne¤i vii, 11, 92-93, 93-94, 105, 140 Golden Horn 23, 70, 76, 77 Greco-Turkish war 26, 46, 49, 54, 75, 110 Greece 5, 6, 7, 20, 25, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 55, 64, 137, 145, 152, 161, 163, 164, 172, 174, 175, 176, 178 Greek emigration 46 Greek Orthodox Church of St. Nicholas 26 Greeks; 2, 6, 7, 25, 26, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 53, 55, 59, 75, 111, 115, 116, 161, 163, 164, 165, 169, see also Rum Greek-speaking Muslim population 47 group migration 82 Guatemalans 38 Gül Sitesi 9, 77, 80, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 115, 122 gurbetçiler 37 Hagia Sofia 76, 77 hazelnut harvest 8, 31, 83, 111, 124, 131, 132, 139, 146, 154 hemflehri (regional compatriots), vii, 8, 10, 15, 17, 18, 54, 55, 58, 65, 66, 68, 69, 72, 73, 77, 80, 82, 83, 85, 89, 101, 105, 106, 112,

183

123-124, 128, 135, 136, 140, 141, 147, 150, 154, 155 H›drellez, 8, 129, 146 hillbilly 21 homecoming ceremony 17 hometown association; see dernek 2, 5, 9, 11, 77, 89, 99, 96, 104, 105, 139, 164, 177 honor 12, 25, 100, 109, 136, 139, 177 identity 3-7, 18, 19-23, 24, 38-39, 46, 48, 52, 53, 68, 72, 89-90, 99, 102-107, 116, 139, 150, 151-153, 153-154, 157, 158-159, 162 collective identity, 3, 38, 153 identity construction 4, 23, 153 multiple aspects of identity 89, 153, see also ethnicity iftar (meal when fast is broken during Ramadan) 93 immigration 7, 14, 60-66, 96-98, 142 Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) 14, 97, 141-142 immigration officers 98; see also INS Indians 38, 165, for American Indians, see Native Americans intermarriage 47, 117 internal migration vii, 2, 3-5, 20, 23, 45, 56, 69-71, 76, 88, 99, 136, 149, 153-158, 161 Iondone 53, 137-138 Iran 52 Islamist party 2, 67, 76-77, 93, 99, 102, 122, 157, 164; see also Virtue Party Istanbul vii, 2, 4-5, 8-9, 11-13, 16, 17, 20, 21, 26-32, 36-38, 43-44, 52, 56, 64, 66, 67, 69-88, 89-107, 110, 111, 112, 126-134, 140-142, 144, 149-159, 161, 164

184

MIGRATING TO AMERICA

Italian-Americans 17 Italy 16, 17, 26, 95, 134, 161 Italians 76, 77, 161 Izmir 46, 52, 56, 110, 164 Greek military occupation of 46, 52 Jews 7, 52, 76 Kad›köy 90, 92, 93 Karabahçe 51 Karadeniz Vakf› (Black Sea Foundation) 90-91 Karadenizli 7, 54, 103, 152, see also Black Sea Karagöz shadow plays 22 Karaovac›k 128, 135-136, 139-147 Kartvelian language branch 24 Kazakh 77 Kemalism 100 Kennedy, Brent 110 Kennedy Kent vii, 1-2, 4, 6-10, 1718, 37, 41-44, 60, 61, 63, 65, 67, 82-83, 93-94, 98-99, 105, 109, 110-112, 115-124, 128-129, 133, 135, 142, 144-147, 149-153, 155159, 165 Kerasunta 58, 164, see also Giresun k›z kaç›rma 116-117 K›z›lelma 56, 133-134 Kurban Bayram› (Feast of the Sacrifice), 123 Kurds 68, 75, 103, 130, 151, 165 Kurdish language 20, 77 Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) 16, 95, see also Abdullah Ocalan Kufltepe 30 Kyrgyz 77 labor migrant communities 4, 6, 8, 23, 26, 33, 50, 58, 91, 134-135, 155 Latinas/Latinos 38, 113

layers of affiliation 89 Laz 11-12, 17, 19-26, 68, 109, 114, 124 Laz community 11 Laz jokes 22-23; Laz language (Lazuri) 24 stereotypes of 21-22 Lima 4 local allegiance 68 Long Island 11-12, 61, 64, 98, 111, 116 loyalty 46, 49, 95, 99 Lucullus 26 male space 10, 34 Manhattan 50, 74, 124 marriage arrangements 39, 41 marriage negotiations 39 mass migration 46 massacres 49 Mediterranean 6, 28, 32, 134 Melungeons 110 Mexico 4, 156 MHP (Milli Hareket Partisi), see National Movement Party migration 2-8, 10, 11, 14, 17-18, 19, 20, 23, 29, 31-32, 39, 46-54, 5558, 65-68, 69-70, 74, 79, 82, 8486, 88, 97-99, 124, 125-127, 136, 139-140, 145-147, 149-155, 157, 161, 164, 165, 167, see also internal migration, mass migration networks 2, 10, 23, 150, 151, 159, 161 migration patterns 11 migration web 4 subjective experience of migration 149 millet 24 Mingrelian 24 minority languages 20 modern nation 29 multi-site study 4

Index Muslims 7, 46-47, 74-76, 106, 122, 151, 152, 157, 163, 164-165, 170 mutual obligation 105-106, 150 Nataflalar. see Russian migrants National Consultative Assembly 104 national ethos 20 national solidarity 90 National Movement Party (MHP) 34, 105 nationalism 165 nationalists 50, 105, 164 nation-state, 3-4, 19, 45, 161 Native Americans, 109 nazar boncu¤u 112, 114 Netherlands, 4, 5, 6, 29, 56, 57 networking 4, 89, 100, 147 New Jersey 7, 61, 63, 65, 111 New York (state) 4, 7, 8, 27, 105, 110, 111, 113, 143, 164, 165 New York City 5, 7, 8, 50, 51, 5861, 62-64, 68, 69, 74, 98, 112, 113 New Yuva 69, 110, 111, see also New York Newark (Delaware) 118 noncontiguous space 150 non-Muslims 72 non-Muslims minorities 76 North America, immigration to 7 Norwalk (Connecticut) 116, 117 Ocalan, Abdullah 16-17, 95 oppression 20, see also religious oppression Ömerli 56 otçugöçü 139-141, 147 Ottoman Empire 2, 6-7, 19, 45, 49, 53 Ottoman migration to America 6-7 Ottoman society 46 Ottoman-Russian war of 1914 46

185

Pakistanis 38 Pancar (village) vii, 8-9, 11, 12-15, 17, 29, 32-33, 41, 61, 80, 82, 103, 126, 129, 147, 161, 165 pancar (beet greens) 13, 35, 36, 140 Pan-Turkism 100 Papazlar vii, 2, 4, 8, 9, 11-15, 1718, 43, 66, 69-88, 89, 93-95, 9899, 105-107, 111, 117-120, 123124, 128-129, 140-142, 144, 147, 149-159, 161 patronymic groups 24 Pazar (town) 24 Pennsylvania 7, 136, 164 Pera (Istanbul) 76-77 personhood 153 Peruvians 4, 5, 139, 153 political affiliation 103-106, 107, 159 political orientation, bonds of 34, 103-104, 105, 107, 159 politicization of labor unions 104 of squatters 17 Pontian Genocide 2 Pontian refugees 45-54 Pontic Mountains 21 population growth 45-46 population exchange between Greece and Turkey 26, 47, 48, 162, 163 pseudonyms for place names vii, 17, 29, 161, 162 Queens (New York) 7, 11, 114, 120-121, 124, 165, 167 Ramadan 74, 75, 93, 123 reciprocity and obligation, principles of 89, 102-103, 105, 107 regional affiliation 4, 17-18, 19, 54,

186

MIGRATING TO AMERICA

68, 89-90, 99-100, 102, 103-107, 123, 139, 151, 159 regional compatriotism 55-68 regional identity 4, 6, 89, 99, 104, 151, 153, 159 regional stereotypes 2, 17, 21, 127 relative deprivation 88, 150 religion 7, 38, 75, 76, 90, 102, 104, 116, 121-122, 137, 147, 157 religious discrimination 7, 122 religious meetings 89, 100-102 religious oppression 100-101 Rhode Island 117-118 Rum (Anatolian Greeks) vii, 5-6, 9, 25, 45, 48-51, 53-54, 59, 65, 68, 103, 115-118, 121, 123, 133, 135138, 144-146, 151-153, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165 mass exodus of 53 Rum refugees 2, 5, 9, 47, 51-54, 55, 59, 77, 111, 115-117, 123, 136-139, 150-153, 163 rural out-migration 2, 4-5, 17, 20, 23, 39-40, 69-76, 86-87, 102, 156, 161, 164 Rus Pazar› 27 Russia 26, 46, 50, 52, 59 Russians 27-28, 38, 77, 162 Russian prostitutes 17, 28, 162 Russian migrants 27-28, 38, 77, 162 Sebastaeia, see Sivas Secularism 12, 15, 19, 69, 73-76, 95, 100, 121, 157, 164 fieker Bayram› 123 sense of place and attachment 45, 48, 65, 89, 147, 150, 152 separatism 46, 49, 90, 100 Serbian peasants 52 settlement patterns 7, 20, 24 Seventh May, see Yedi May›s shantytowns 11, 17, 70, 71, 72, 73, 76, 77, 79, 87, 106, 111, 169,

174, 175 Sinope 26 Sivas 51-52, 130 Smyrna, see Izmir social capital 150 social meaning of work 88 social networks 2, 10, 23, 150, 151, 159, 161 social structure 151 Soviet Union, collapse of the, 27 former 27, 66 Spain 76 squatter settlements 17, 70, 71, 75; see also shantytowns stereotypes of Laz, see regional stereotypes of women and Americans 13 regional 2, 6, 17, 19, 20, 21-26, 127 Sunni Muslim 19, 68, 151, 164, 165 Sunnyside (Queens, New York) 7, 114, 124 Svan 24 symbolic violence 53 Syria 51 Syrians 7 Taksim (Istanbul) 76 theory of cumulative causation 88, 151 Topal Osman 49, 75 Trabzon 20, 23, 26, 28, 49, 61, 72, 90, 137, 140, 167 Trans-Caucasia 46 transhumanism 32, 128 transmigrants 3, 4-6, 18, 149, 152, 154, 159 transregional migration 3-4, 69-88, 107, 119, 125, 150, 153-154 Turcoman nomads 52 Türk Derne¤i 100 Turkey vii, 2, 3-11, 14, 17, 18, 1934, 38-39, 44, 45, 47, 51, 53, 55-

Index 58, 62, 64, 67, 69-70, 72, 74-76, 81-2, 84, 86, 90, 95-100, 102-104, 109, 110, 112-147, 151, 152, 154, 157, 161, 162, 164, 165, 167 Turkic tribes 20 Turkification of Greek place names 58 Turkish government 6, 10, 17, 7072, 76, 90-92, 95, 122, 164, 165 Turkish national identity 19, 20, 90 Turkish Republic, see Turkey Turkmen 77, 139 Turut, ‹smail 112, 163 Ukraine 26 umbrella organization 90 underemployment 6, 88, 97, 151, 157 United States of America 1-2, 4, 5, 6-8, 8-9, 11, 14, 17-18, 37-39, 3944, 45, 50, 55, 58, 63-68, 69, 8283, 86, 89, 93-94, 97, 98, 110113, 115, 120-124, 137, 141, 147, 149-159, 163, 164, 167 upward mobility 37, 106, 143 urban social segregation 2 U.S., see United States of America Van 46 Vancouver 64, 149 Vietnamese 38 yayla göçü (migration to the plateau) 31, 139-146 Yedi May›s 8, 129 Y›lmaz, Mesut 34, 75 Young Turks 7, 49, 75 Yuva’n›n Sesi (Voice of Yuva) 89, 95-100, 135, 140, 165 Yuva vii, 1-5, 7-9, 11-18, 19, 21, 23, 25, 28-34, 36, 37, 39-40, 4244, 45, 48-50, 53, 55-56, 58-68, 69, 70, 72-73, 75-88, 89-91, 93-

187

94, 95-101, 103-106, 110-119, 123-124, 125-136, 137-147, 149159, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167 Yuval›lar Derne¤i (Hometown Association for People from Yuva) 11, 78, 81, 89, 93-94, 96, 99, 105 Yuva River 30, 166 Yuva ve Köyleri Kültür ve Yard›mlaflma Derne¤i 95 Zan subgroup 24