ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a theoretical basis for studying the Bellevue community. It looks at the secularization, Protestant ethic, and social class models; at the Parsonian or personal meaning conceptualization. The chapter explores the concepts of ethnicity and change. The study of Houston’s Greeks stresses the importance of self-identification as Greek and of attachment to the Greek community as fundamental to ethnic identification. While much research on Greeks in America is a product of the renewed ethnic consciousness that began in the late 1960’s, the original era of Greek immigration in the early twentieth century produced a significant body of literature. The chapter outlines the particularistic concept of being recognized as an individual, and of being recognized simply because “one is,” is of vital importance to the Greeks. It considers the fundamental assumption that, for members of this community, “being Greek” is both a highly individual and a highly social phenomenon.
