A startling point in a piece published in 1976 makes me pause:
"The laborers were told to trade at certain Greek businesses or they would lose their jobs. The owners of these meat, grocery, and clothing stores were all agents of [the notorious labor agent Leonidas] Skliris" (413).
[Stomach churning, I recall the notorious exploitation of child labor, connected with illegal contract labor, in the shoeshine business.]
Papanikolas punctuates her conclusion with a melancholic rendering of labor exploitation as an early source of immigrant wealth in the state:
"Men who had combined a business with supplying labor for Skliris as a sideline were the earliest of Utah's successful Greeks. Their days as labor agents dimmed and the origin of the money that bought their businesses and property was almost forgotten" (433).
Emotional unease ripples on me. Rage for the blatant preying on precarious newcomers. Indignation too for the erasure of this knowledge, a forgetting enabling sugary peans today about wealth-making as ethnic success.
The labor agent money-grabbing machine is soaked in blood. Siding with companies exploiting miners, it served as a major source furnishing strikebreakers, undermining the labor movement and its struggle for the improvement of working conditions. A share of blame stains it for the amputated bodies, the murders of strikers, the devastation of human lives.
But yet another structure of feeling moves me, deep appreciation. Prizing a historian for naming truths, countering callous amnesia.
The historical memory is categorical, laborers subjected to systemic intra-immigrant violence. What is the least we owe to that past?
"The laborers were told to trade at certain Greek businesses or they would lose their jobs. The owners of these meat, grocery, and clothing stores were all agents of [the notorious labor agent Leonidas] Skliris" (413).
[Stomach churning, I recall the notorious exploitation of child labor, connected with illegal contract labor, in the shoeshine business.]
Papanikolas punctuates her conclusion with a melancholic rendering of labor exploitation as an early source of immigrant wealth in the state:
"Men who had combined a business with supplying labor for Skliris as a sideline were the earliest of Utah's successful Greeks. Their days as labor agents dimmed and the origin of the money that bought their businesses and property was almost forgotten" (433).
Emotional unease ripples on me. Rage for the blatant preying on precarious newcomers. Indignation too for the erasure of this knowledge, a forgetting enabling sugary peans today about wealth-making as ethnic success.
The labor agent money-grabbing machine is soaked in blood. Siding with companies exploiting miners, it served as a major source furnishing strikebreakers, undermining the labor movement and its struggle for the improvement of working conditions. A share of blame stains it for the amputated bodies, the murders of strikers, the devastation of human lives.
But yet another structure of feeling moves me, deep appreciation. Prizing a historian for naming truths, countering callous amnesia.
The historical memory is categorical, laborers subjected to systemic intra-immigrant violence. What is the least we owe to that past?
The emotional force of historical consciousness drives the desire to keep speaking up against sweetened ethnic mythologies. In the halls of the academy, webinars, writings, the obligation boils not in appeasing power but speaking truth to it.
Yiorgos Anagnostou
September 9, 22
Work Cited: Helen Papanikolas, 1976. " The Exiled Greeks." In The Peoples of Utah, edited by Helen Papanikolas, 409–35. Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society.
Yiorgos Anagnostou
September 9, 22
Work Cited: Helen Papanikolas, 1976. " The Exiled Greeks." In The Peoples of Utah, edited by Helen Papanikolas, 409–35. Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society.
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