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Family Photos, Oral Narratives, and Identity Formation: The Ukrainians of Berisso

2004; Duke University Press; Volume: 84; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-84-1-5

1527-1900

Daniel James, Mirta Zaida Lobato,

Latin American and Latino Studies

In the 1920s, several hundred immigrants arrived in Argentina from the Car-pathian Mountains, the steppes of Ukraine, and the villages of Poland. Many of them established themselves in Berisso, an industrial suburb of La Plata in the province of Buenos Aires, where they became industrial workers in the Swift and Armour meatpacking houses. In Berisso they set up their representative organizations and molded their identities. Julian Zabiuk was one of those immigrants. He arrived in Berisso from Solone (Zalizchyky, a village near Lviv in Eastern Galicia), worked in the packinghouses, and lived in the community until his death.1 Julian Zabiuk’s passage through history only held meaning for his family and friends. However, Julian did place his family photos into two albums, which his son Bogdan preserved. These photos found Julian a place in history when we, two historians interested in Berisso’s past, came across their story. Julian’s transformation into the subject of history, however, depended on our finding meaning in these images and the narratives that we had collected in Berisso. The albums challenged us to discern how those without professional training in historical interpretation may have used them.We will analyze the web formed by oral narratives and photographic images in the formation of Ukrainian identity in Berisso. This process was not a single or homogeneous movement. On the contrary, it emerged from conflicting memories and competing narratives reflected in certain strands of collective memory—immigrant workers in the packinghouses, the harmonious world of labor under Perón, the peaceful coexistence of different nationalities, religions, and political philosophies. Such elements were transmitted not only through the spoken word but also through objects such as photos, letters, and monuments, and events such as ceremonies, theater, and fiestas.This essay centers on the family photos of Julian Zabiuk, which speak to a history of family uprooting and reconstitution and demonstrate the tensions surrounding the construction of Ukrainian identity in Argentina. The meaning of these photos varies with our analytical perspective. If the analytic lens closes in, we can see Julian Zabiuk’s own history—at least partially—within the wider picture, through family photos from Ukraine and the diaspora. When we pan out the analytic lens, the history of the ethnic community appears. By thus adjusting the focus, the meanings of Julian Zabiuk’s personal and ethnic history take on a density that runs parallel to our own apprenticeship in reading the clues contained in these stories and images.In 1987 Juan Ciuper sat in his house and spoke slowly of his experience as an immigrant laborer. Only much later did many of his observations about Ukrainians acquire significance for us. These narrative passages were like the “minuscule singularities” of which Carlo Ginzburg speaks, which were slowly transformed for us into trails, traces, and signs of the cultural relationships and transformations of the Ukrainians of Berisso.2Let us look at some of the symptomatic fragments of this narrative:Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians appear in this narrative as positionings, as expressions of a dispersed and fragmented human experience related to both the process of nation building in Europe and to transatlantic movements of population. These positionings were changing. Ciuper’s great-grandfather was German, but he became a Ukrainian. Some were Ukrainians but identified themselves as Russians; others could be considered Poles. Ciuper’s words, when treated as evidence, can lead in several directions. These paths raise the issue of the need to analyze the complex relationships between memory and national/ethnic identity.“Identity” refers to a cultural process that seeks to give coherence—both imaginary and real—to the experience of diaspora (family and national). The shifting identities Juan Ciuper cites were shared by hundreds of Ukrainians who arrived in Berisso in the interwar period. Julian Zabiuk, like Ciuper, arrived in Argentina from Ukraine, but Julian left us no oral testimony, and his experiences of migration and identity formation are accessible only through his album and in the memories of his son.Immigrants’ identities form through a complex combination of experiences that include what they were and what they were becoming. As Stuart Hall suggests, cultural identity is not something that ever really exists in a preformed state, transcending time, place, and history. Rather, it is always in a process of constant transformation.4 Identity is not something fixed in the past, awaiting discovery; nor is it a crystallized essence waiting to be uncovered. On the contrary, it is subject to the movements of history, culture, and power. However, Hall also points out that cultural identity is not merely a question of whim and imagination, since all identities have their histories, and histories have real effects, both material and symbolic. In addition, they are always constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative, and myth. Cultural identity is an unstable point of identification constructed through speech, acts, and artifacts. It bears repeating: an identity is not an essence, but a positioning.The notion of cultural identity as an unstable point of identification invokes Fredrik Barth’s concept of the ethnic group.5 Barth’s notion of ethnic differentiation has been used in some studies of Argentine immigration.6 However, the perception of “the different” is only one part of Barth’s analysis, and this one concept does not take into account the complexity and conflicts involved in the construction of that ethnicity. For Barth, the institutional (traditionally emphasized in studies of immigrant communities) and the subjective are intimately related, and both take part in the process of defining ethnic boundaries. This, in turn, is closely linked with changes occurring inside and outside the group. Barth argues that the traces chosen by people as cultural markers serve to define them as an ethnic group; these choices depend on a sociocultural system that is not predictable. Moreover, cultural identity is, for Barth, constituted in and through conflict, and the boundaries that define identities are spaces of antagonism. This understanding of identity construction also changes how we conceptualize the political, since we can no longer imagine it as residing solely in specific institutions.7Ciuper’s account found parallels in other Berisso narratives, as well as in the cultural artifacts that sustained them. These accounts were both immersed in, and at the same time in conflict with, the grand narrative of the harmonious community. This story finds expression every year in the Fiesta Provincial del Inmigrante. This annual fiesta aims at constructing a multicultural immigrant community, past and present, without tensions, conflicts, or clashes.Ciuper’s account, like that of Julian’s son and other residents, together with more public narratives such as the Fiesta del Inmigrante, are inscribed within a social practice of commemoration. These practices assign meaning to events from Berisso’s past: arrival, work in the packinghouses, the community of labor, the October17, 1945 demonstration, and Peronism.8 This social practice of commemoration has a very precise point of origin: the destruction of the Armour frigorífico after its closing in 1969.The paragraphs transcribed from Juan Ciuper’s narrative provide us with evidence of the conflicts among the immigrants of Berisso centered on Ukrain-ian identity. These accounts are not isolated from their social contexts or concrete political experience. They were not elicited in interview contexts directed toward uncovering the experience of Ukrainian immigration, the constitution of its representative institutions, or the political divisions in its midst. Nor can they be inscribed in some sort of dialogue that pitted the narrator’s perspective against that of the interviewer. The central focus of our questions instead concerned work in the packinghouses and life in the community. The narrators were not responding to some external public of possible “readers” or “listeners.”Nevertheless, Juan Ciuper could indeed be said to be acting as the spokesperson of a group when he declared, “There was great discord . . . . Why did they want to divide us?” Who were “they”? Among whom did the split occur? What were the causes of the split? As we considered these questions, it did not occur to us that we were becoming a channel for an ideological discourse centered on ethnic identity and its boundaries.9 The narrative was drawing us into a conflict, and yet we lacked the other side that would allow us to measure the subjective nature of this particular interpretation. Moreover, as historians, such a confrontation had no place in our cultural tradition nor as part of our object of study.Ciuper’s narrative placed us face to face with traces (Ginzburg’s “minuscule singularities”) of a more complex problem that would require other types of evidence to reconstruct the cultural transformations experienced by the Ukrainians of Berisso.We learn of Julian Zabiuk’s life experience not through oral narratives but through the two family photo albums he constructed late in life to tell his story: the uprooting and disarticulation of his family and the wider Ukrainian community. Here we encounter a nostalgic evocation of what has been lost (Ukraine) and the process of reconstitution in the New World.Julian organized the albums according to different temporal criteria. At a more general, abstract level, we can say that there exists a diachronic narrative (birth, growth, and death or departure: uprooting, arrival, and finally resolution structured around the poles of integration and differentiation). This abstract temporal organization is of limited use for Julian Zabiuk, since in some way it is the history of humanity in general. Zabiuk sought a way to represent the unique and particular nature of his experience within the metanarrative of the nation and community, but the typical diachronic structure of a family album is insufficient. This is not, however, the only reason he alters the usual structure. We suggest that he also does this because a synchronic organization better reflects an old man’s process of reconstructing his past by means of photographs. The intervention of the investigator, by seeking to order time according to criteria of chronological succession, alters the synchronic aspect of recollection in oral testimony. The synchronic arrangement enables Julian to bring together and make visible those pieces that left the deepest traces in his memory—uprooting, diaspora, identity, family, and integration. At the same time, the unique structure of Julian’s album maintains him as an active historical presence among the living.The albums introduce us both to Julian’s personal life and to the world from which he created an image of himself for others. If we knew the professional photographers who took many of these photos, we could also analyze the images as documents of private life in the way Luis Priamo suggests10 or as reflections of what other authors have called the studium, or simply “performance.” Starting from Roland Barthes’s notion of the studium, a photo can speak of a sense of respectability, of social ascent, of family images, of conformism, and of ways of dressing. However, we could also go further and respond to Barthes’s challenge to find the punctum: the detail that wounds (punctures) and that thereby provokes in the spectator a different gaze.11 The punctum contains the metonymically exceptional. It is probably unintentional and tells us that the photographer was there. But the punctum is, above all, situated on a very individual level. It is concerned with what the photo signifies for one viewer and not necessarily for others (for whom it may simply be one more photo among thousands of similar images).Let us look at an example of what we mean by this individual gaze. When we first saw the albums, one photo especially grabbed our attention. It was of a young boy, roughly 15 years of age (figure 7). At first, our eyes were drawn to the traditional embroidered shirt that was showing under his suit jacket. It seemed to us that the photograph symbolized the tension between two worlds: the modern and homogeneous (the suit) on the one hand and, on the other hand, markers of peasant, immigrant identity (muddy shoes, traditional shirt). Beyond that, his facial expression added, for us, a shocking element that seemed to expand to encompass the entire photo. This expression represented, at first, simple hunger. Later its range of reference expanded, as the photos of other devastating famines projected in our minds’ eyes. The only difference lay in the subject’s clothing, which contrasted with the seminaked bodies that make up these other images.Later we associated our discomfort, when faced with this photo, with the stories told us by a Ukrainian woman in Berisso about acts of cannibalism practiced in her village at some time in the 1930s. At this very moment, the face of the young boy acquired its metonymic function of designating the hunger suffered by the people of the ex–Soviet Union. Thus, the punctum of this photo—the detail that wounded us—symbolized the massive famines that occurred in the Soviet Union. Catherine Merridale notes that a certain consensus among historians is emerging about the demographic catastrophes that occurred under Stalinism.12 The history of these disasters can be divided into three stages: 1914–21 (World War I and the Civil War), 1926–39 (forced industrialization, collectivization, and the political repression known as the Great Purges), and 1939– 45 (the invasion of Finland and the Great Patriotic War). So, behind the face of the young boy (and in an unintentional way) there appeared the faces (at least for us, and herein lay the punctum) of 10 million dead who were added to the 23 million of the 1914–21 period and who appear in the fantastic-sounding anecdotes of an old woman. Perhaps it is worth adding a paragraph from Merridale on this theme: “The Civil War was immediately followed by a severe shortage. This was most severe in southern Russia, especially the region of the Volga and Ukraine. Total mortality figures for this region are estimated between 1.5 and four million. The picture is complicated by infanticide, which was not new, and also by cannibalism that had not been effectively reported until this time.”13 The photo of the boy had almost certainly been taken during the second phase noted by Merridale.14We might say that these photos display a permanent tension between universal metanarratives and the particular: the fragmentary, momentary, and fleeting experience that they also register. Returning to the metaphor of the photographic lens, we can say that widening the focus brings into view elements associated with ethnic identity—general features of Ukrainian culture and identity that would be recognizable in Canada, the United States, or Argentina. If, on the other hand, we focus tighter with the lens, details of family life and local tensions emerge. In order to separate the universal from the fragments of daily experience, it is necessary to have knowledge of the context and access to other information. This can transform the historian into what we might call a “privileged reader,” whose function becomes clearer at the end of the story.In the albums, we find a combination of professional photos and spontaneous, immediate snapshots that lack overt symbolic intent but reflect the desire to arrest movement and time in a precise instant. These snapshots can be associated with the defense against the ravages of fleeting time, fragments whose endless succession threatens to erase memory.15 But photos are not the only artifacts that we find in these pages; postcards also help Zabiuk to make sense of the history he wishes to recount for us. Postcards first circulated in the sixteenth century as greeting cards with biblical motifs. However, the first modern postcards date from the nineteenth century; they were first sold in England when cheap, public mail service was established. By World War I, the international consumer market for postcards had expanded enormously, aided by technical changes that modified the quality of the product. Many North American immigrant organizations included the production of postcards as part of their cultural activities, and they sold them to raise funds.16 Postcards, which were often bought by organization members themselves, also helped to create a sense of solidarity and belonging and carried ideological messages. We can see the symbolism they disseminated in the cards from Julian’s albums. The postcard of the Ukrainian national poet Taras Szeweczenko, surrounded by patterns that represent the needlework typical of some regions of Ukraine, is a good example. The card of a map of Ukraine—which includes the territories “occupied” by Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Rumania, as well as those under Soviet domination— functions as a symbol of the divided and occupied nation. The map is situated in a discursive space that has both pictorial and textual (names, keys, figures) dimensions. It is also a representation of that space we label “scenery.” According to Jens Andermann, scenery is the medium “charged with dramatizing the appropriation of land” as an “ideal property,” rather than a material one.17 For Zabiuk, the map carried mnemonic meanings that have no direct expression in language and that are linked to the nationalist discourse so resonant in Berisso in the interwar period.Argentina has been noted for its rapid incorporation of elements thought of as the trappings of modernity. According to Luis Priamo, Rosahuer was the first producer of Argentine postcards, using the excellent photos of H. H. Olds.18 None of Julian Zabiuk’s postcards were produced by these well-known figures, however. It is likely that postcards produced by as-yet unknown photographers circulated among the popular sectors.It is certain that these postcards played an important role in the visual narrative of Julian Zabiuk. This narrative is complex, since it is constructed as a collage. In addition to photos and postcards, Julian included newspaper cuttings and one of Bogdan’s school exercises. The newspaper clipping shows Fray Cayetano Rodríguez, director of the library created by the First Governing Junta in 1810 (see figure 10). The scholarly formation of his son, an important aspect of the national state’s educational project, enables Julian to incorporate an Argentine into his pantheon of otherwise Ukrainian heroes.Julian constructed his albums as a family and national testament. However, not all the artifacts are constructed in the same way. There are also collections of “loose” photos. Julian kept these photos in a box, without any order or classification. The viewer constructs the story, superimposing it on the images.What is the nature of the historical evidence that photos, such as those in Julian Zabiuk’s albums, offer us? Despite their apparent documentary power, their status as historical evidence has been the subject of intense debate. The notion that a photo can summon up the past in any unmediated, transparent way is now generally regarded as a form of naive realism. Stuart Hall sums up this consensus when he says, “The evidence that the photographic text may be assumed to represent is already overendowed, overdetermined by other, further, often contradictory meanings, which arise within the intertextuality of all photographic representation.”19 Part of the problematic status of photos as historical evidence lies in the equally problematic issue of their narrative capacity.20For an analyst like John Berger, who has puzzled over the issue of photos and narrative more than most, the photograph represents a particular instant that is captured in a decontextualized way. The very act of taking a photo implies discontinuity and rupture—the removal of a momentary fragment from the continuum of time. This decontextualization compromises the narrative capacity of the photo. For Berger, “[I]t is a vision of the world that refuses interconnection, continuity, but which confers on each moment a mysterious character.”21 From this perspective, the photograph (especially the photo in the public realm) cannot narrate or (unlike memory) conserve within itself any wider signification. Berger argues that photography’s fundamental lack of context creates an inevitable ambiguity that no amount of detailed analysis can dispel.Yet, Berger has offered various tools for rescuing the photo’s narrative capacity. In Another Way of Telling, he posits that certain photos may communicate through their suggestion of an “extra-temporal ideal” that resonates with the viewer’s experience and sensibility.22 At other times, influenced by Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Berger has stressed the combined use of words and images, in a sort of politically committed photojournalism or montage.23 Berger proposes to tie photography to social and political memory rather than using it as a substitute for them. This alternative function of photography is what connects it with the phenomenon of memory and is what allows Berger to argue for the need to construct a context for each photo, either through other photos or through words, which can grant to mute photographic images a signifying power.Yet, contextualizing and recovering the narrative capacity of working-class family photos remains a daunting task. In most cases, the photos are without verbal cues. Even albums rarely have an explicit textual thread to provide a narrative plot. And while oral and written narratives often refer to shared experiences, photos rarely do; the discursive community is not immediately available, and the photograph remains enigmatic for the viewer who does not have some personal knowledge of the image’s context. Similarly, the photos in family albums rarely attain the aesthetic quality necessary to reach Berger’s deferred level of narrative power. It is no accident that he develops the notion of the photo’s “extra-temporal ideal” through an analysis of the photos of Andre Kertesz, one of the great photographers of the twentieth century.Yet, we would argue that family albums do offer a more mundane narrative option.24 While the individual photos may remain mired in decontextualized ambiguity, something has changed by putting them in an album. The relationship established between the photos makes it possible to read a story. Selection and arrangement, an active process of historical construction, have been used to tell a story. Reading this narrative remains a profoundly complex and ambiguous practice. Photographs do point to a disjuncture in the viewing experience, but at the same time, they allow for the possibility of gathering the fragments of dispersed lives. Photos, therefore, imply discontinuities associated with a sense of irretrievable loss. Armando Silva describes the reading process in this way: “[O]ne photo is linked to the next and thus its vision produces the figure of the ‘leap’ . . . since we must leap from one photo to the other to recompose its global mission. Its enunciation changes, as in the theater, with each staging, as a new photo is introduced that changes the order of those already present.”25We can say that photographs acquire meaning when we can situate them within a network of signs where the present and the past appear newly connected. The story told, the past constructed, will still be partial and fragmentary; the narrative will still be plagued by discontinuities and silences of that which is not, or cannot, be spoken or read. The logic underlying the selection and ordering is, however, open to interpretation. The series of images in Julian’s album constructs both a family story and a broader narrative of ethnic identity that is lost, affirmed, and reconfigured.Here we would reintroduce a figure mentioned earlier. What makes the reading of the narrative logic possible, beyond the montagelike signifying power of photos over other photos, is the role of the spectator, the “privileged viewer/reader.” This privileged status comes from access to outside knowledge that compensates for the lack of context, stabilizes the ambiguities, reveals underlying tensions, and allows the viewer to read the subtext behind the photographic codes and conventions.What, then, of the relationship between albums and memory? Albums can certainly serve as both instigators and preservers of memory. They embody a desire to preserve the external image, which helps remembrance. We attempted to use them in this way with Julian’s son, Bogdan. But what of Julian? What was the nature of the memory he drew upon and embedded in these albums? We have tried to imagine the moment when the elderly man sat down to open his memory box and construct his album. Our reconstruction of this scene was influenced by an image that Benjamin drew of Proust, “[T]he first,” Benjamin says, “who was able to break open the secret drawer of mood and appropriate for himself what lay within: that disorderly heap that we ourselves, having faithfully mislaid it there, had forgotten and that now simply overwhelms the one who stands before it—as happens to a man at the sight of a drawer stuffed to the brim with useless, forgotten toys.”26 We might imagine Julian Zabiuk being overwhelmed as memory threw open the disorderly pile of moments past, and he struggled to bring some sense and order out of the chaos and contingency of the past. This is, of course, conjecture, but if we follow the logic of Benjamin’s image, several things follow. The fragments of the past that confronted Julian Zabiuk acquired their meaning only at the moment he uncovered them. Their meaning emerges retrospectively as part of an ongoing process of remembrance.For Benjamin, memory functions in such a way that images simply accumulate with no apparent order. There is no chronology that orders this succession of memory flashes—only images connected by certain “traces.” Benjamin argues that the image acquires its meaning to the extent that it finds a corresponding moment in the present. This implies, too, that the meaning of a memory can only be seized upon in the moment that the image that embodies it emerges: that is, in the present. If this process does not take place, memory is doomed to be irretrievably lost.27If these albums raise the issue of memory, they also engage the threat of forgetting. Not only does an album preserve precisely what is most likely to be forgotten; the process of selection also entails corresponding processes of jettisoning or destruction. Let us recall Benjamin’s depiction of the mythical figure of Penelope.28 Penelope’s acts of weaving and unraveling, repeated over and over again as she waits for Odysseus, demonstrates her faith in the absent person. This labor allows her to forestall the catastrophe of forgetting and preserve her unfulfilled desire. But the figure of Penelope also speaks to us of the impotence of memory. By weaving and unraveling, she brings into question our capacity to maintain memory. In order to struggle against the consequences of the mechanical repetition that could be associated with the figure of Penelope (memory as a task of endless repetition), Benjamin conceived of the notion of the past intruding on the present. Julian Zabiuk can construct his photo album and tell us his story because, in Benjamin’s words, he can interpolate past and present. Only when he can elaborate his immigrant past, with its uprooting and dispersion, can the fragments of his story acquire meaning. Only when he becomes a narrator does he recapture the involuntary memory, intimate and fragmentary, that encounters its echo within the community narratives.We have imagined that when Julian Zabiuk opened his memory box he was at first overwhelmed. Yet confronting these images from the past was not a negative experience; he may have also experienced a moment of profound recognition—what Benjamin calls a hymnic moment. This hymnic moment does not imply a nostalgic gaze but rather an active and deliberate selection of images that will allow him to situate his personal experience within a broader context of immigration and Ukrainian identity. By placing himself on this broader terrain, Julian enables us to glimpse the social dimension of his memory and to interject ourselves and interpret his history. If we remain within the confines of private, intimate memory, then the images can only have meaning for Julian Zabiuk. Situated in a broader terrain, we can hope to identify the social meaning of his act of remembrance.Putting together a photo album involves joining the present with the past, overcoming the discontinuities produced by the photographic act. The photo is also a way of resolving the conflict provoked by the losses associated with migration and the idea that the past is finally gone for good and that life will continue in the new society. Christian Metz argues that we can compare photo albums with other rituals and social practices, particularly those associated with death.29 Photos allow us to accept death and the loss of what we love (people, places, customs) but also imply that life goes on.Comparing Julian’s album with a collection of random snapshots is instructive. Juan Matkovic, a Croatian immigrant to Berisso, left a quantity of mainly undeveloped negatives still unorganized in his memory box. Matkovic’s hymnic moment never arrived; he did not interpolate past and present and therefore did not turn himself into a visual narrator. The state in which he left the photos is symptomatic of the problem. His photos did not p