ABSTRACT
This sentiment captures aptly the texture and threads i will follow in this chapter. Through the review and examination of scholarly sources this chapter will describe the integration experiences of Bosnians living in the United States since the mid 1990s. Recently published research is supported by discursive practices such as blogs, popular culture and social networks, and serve as a background in exploring the notions of home, memory, and nostalgia, since these themes either are dominant or linger as a subtext, waiting to be brought to the surface. Fifteen years after the War of Yugoslav succession, Bosnian refugees and exiles in the United States are living their lives in the shadows of Realpolitik solutions to the global refugee problem, namely the will of ten Western countries that have annual quotas to resettle refugees on a permanent basis (Colic-Peisker 2005: xi). The United States is one of these countries. Between 1995 and 2009, between 135,000 and 145,0001 Bosnian refugees arrived in the United States (Yearbook of Immigration Statistics 2006, 2009), resettling mostly in St. Louis, Chicago, new York City, Atlanta, and Jacksonville (Embassy of Bosnia and Herzegovina, n.d). Bosnians in the United States seem to straddle the worlds of silence/memory repression and the profuse flow of words and images that revolve around the remembered past, such past being a symbolic center to which lived present is always compared.
