ABSTRACT
Compared to America's "Polish pioneers," the second—Polish-American—generation was harder to define. These mostly blue-collar ethnic Americans spoke an odd patois of peasant Polish and Polonized American words that mirrored the hybrid nature of their culture, but more often they spoke English. With the coming of the third and fourth generations, however, defining what a Polish-American is became a far trickier matter, for ethnicity to them often seemed an intangible thing. Some were—as the sociologists would say—stereotypically marginal men and women, suspended between two social and cultural worlds. Culturally, little about these young men and women was identifiably Polish or Polish-American. In the 1970s, Rev. Leonard Chrobot, president of St. Mary's College at Orchard Lake, tried to update and refine the definition of the elusive Polish-American identity." Yet, unlike middle-class Black Americans, who are in many ways forced to remain separate and apart, upwardly mobile and assimilable Polish-Americans are much less likely to develop a true biculturalism.
