Insights Into Polish Immigrant Experience: An Ethnographic Interview

Abstract

[Name] K and V have been my neighbors for the last 3 years, and they are proud Polish immigrants. They moved here from Chicago and brought his mother M with them. They are now the proud parents of 2 sweet children. We have had plenty of conversations at the mailbox and gotten to know each other on the surface. Our lives are in different places, so we don’t have a lot in common, but they are always great about bringing in a garbage can for you or grabbing a package. Taking this time to spend with them and get to know them like this was so amazing! I originally asked for half an hour to an hour to talk, I ended up being there for over 2! I know they are a family very rooted in their Polish culture, and the first thing I noticed in their house was that there was nothing ethnically decorative that jumped out at me, it seemed like any other home in any other neighborhood. A neighbor on my street when I was a kid had a Polish flag in their front window, so I think I was expecting something like that (Chapter 1 Ethnographic Eyes). V grew up in a small city outside Warsaw and moved to the U.S. senior year of high school. He compared his home city to Rockford in size. V came here to be with his father who had already been here for 2 years. When immigrating from a European country to the U.S. you need to prove that you have connections here. His father already had some family that was here. His mother came for a month every year, it was just normal to have their family divided. Crime is very different in Poland. It is minimal with some robberies. If there is a case involving a child, it is a huge deal and plastered all over all the headlines. If you commit a crime, you are treated as guilty until proven innocent and are usually incarcerated while it is investigated. V’s niece is 18 and is perfectly safe taking public transportation alone at night. Stark contrast to life in Chicago where you may or may not be safe during the day. V said that primary school over there is different in that you stay in the same one class with the same kids, but if you fail 1 class, you have to repeat the whole year over again. In Poland, you take an exam for placement options in high school, and V was in the best one there was. Upon coming here, he was placed at his district CPS high school and experienced true culture shock. There were police in the school, metal detectors, and fighting in the lunchroom. V spoke very little English and knew absolutely no slang. He said that it took him years to understand words like “gonna, woulda, shoulda”. Due to the language barrier, he was placed in general classes and much time left to his own devices to read and pass his classes. Math was a very strong subject for him, and at one point, the teacher moved him to the end of the room away from everyone. He thought he was being accused of cheating, but the teacher wanted to prevent the others from cheating off him as he was getting perfect scores. His father offered to send him back to Poland after 2 months, but he wanted to stick it out. During this time, V overstayed his visa, so he was here undocumented. That is an issue he worked hard to rectify after college. He was very excited at the possibilities living here offered as opposed to Poland, so before he started his own business, he got his documentation and became a legal citizen. Poland was a communist country during much of V’s life and he saw how hard it was to get ahead. He feels like that was a driving force to succeed here. In Poland, to start a business, you need to get a bunch of people on board to make it happen, where in the U.S., anyone can create a product and sell it however they want. His political views have become very republican, and very much loves the freedom of choice he has. And he is a big believer in the 2nd amendment. V’s business is in Chicago still, and he therefore still spends a lot of time there. He said in each week, he does business with at least 100 undocumented immigrants. Most are successful business owners who are doing very well. The reason they have not gotten their papers in order, you have to go back to Poland for a while before you can apply to come here, and there are no guarantees it will be approved. I asked him how fearful these people are about being discovered and deported, and he said not really. He was pulled over by police for speeding several times before he had all of his papers in order, and nothing was said about it. He said that there is a work ethic in these people that makes them work hard, save money and be model citizens because they want to leave their mark here. It kind of reminds me of the work ethic in How I made it from foster kid to judge. They have a relentless need not to fail, which also makes me think of Hyphen America. The stories and perspectives change so much person to person. K had very different memories to share. You weren’t necessarily able to go to the store and buy what you wanted and how much you wanted. You were given vouchers that had your allotment of things you could get. When babies were born, parents were given a box of supplies. They just give you whatever they have at the time, so her mother was given a box of clothes for a 2-year-old. When her mother told them it was too big and wouldn’t work, they said you either want it or you don’t, so she took it. They had family in the U.S., so they would send her family some packages with clothes for her. In Poland you either live in a city, or it’s the country and very common to live with relatives in the same house. Her grandparents lived with them, which made it easier for her parents to work. When they decided to move to the U.S., it took her parents about 5 years of being in the U.S. and working before they were able to bring her and her brother over. Her parents would come to Poland to see them for 2 weeks a year. Her grandparents chose to stay behind. Her brother is older than her and he never really acclimated to life here, so he moved back to Poland with the grandparents, and he lives in that house with his family now that the grandparents have passed. K’s perspective of what America was going to be like was what she got from watching movies like “Home Alone” and such. She thought that everyone had a big house and plenty of money, because that’s the dream. When she finally came, they had a small house in a suburb close to Chicago. K moved here when she was going into 6th grade. In that time in Poland, primary school was grades 1 – 6, then they went to middle school for 3 years. This was changed recently for primary school to be grades 1 – 8. Prior to coming here, she took an English class to learn the language, however, it was more of a class that taught English the way it is spoken in England. It was not much help to her for communication, and definitely not reading. The schools in Poland got very deep on Polish history and studied deeply back to the early days of the kings and queens. Science classes start splitting into biology, chemistry, physics and such in the middle school years. When K started school here, she struggled to make friends. She didn’t have the right clothes or know how to speak in a conversation. It took her about 5 months of the school year to really start to get comfortable with the language. But, where she was in all AP classes in Poland, she was in general classes here, and many times was just given a C and passed along because she was struggling to read and write. There was a support class she was in that had a teacher that spoke Polish. It was mixed grade levels,...