Shaping immigrant and ethnic heritage in North America: ethnic organizations and the documentary heritage

This article will explore some of the issues that immigrant and ethnic groups have dealt with when tackling the task of archiving – gathering and preserving the documents that tell the group’s story – and that of history- or memory-building through archives, a process I will refer to, for the sake of convenience, as ethnic archiving. The paper will trace the process of ethnic archiving through the case study of three specific groups–Finnish, German and Jewish communities in the United States–in the period preceding and following the ethnic “revival” of the 1960s. These groups were chosen because they illustrate the evolution of ethnic archiving among immigrant groups that arrived in the United States before the 1920s and the adoption of restrictive immigration laws. The similarities and differences these groups display are visible in the groups’ negotiations of, and answers to, the following questions: Who should be responsible for archiving? What should be the purpose of archiving and of the transmission of migration heritage? What should be archived and transmitted? These questions have broad implications for the shaping of history and memory.