ABSTRACT
This essay explores how Greek women in America identify themselves: how they recognize themselves as Greeks in America, draw lines of continuity or mark discontinuities between themselves and others, negotiate their reproductive roles, and find avenues for expressing themselves from day to day. The focus is on the home, the narrow space of the everyday in the expansive world of the Greek diaspora, where migrant women tacitly accepted a mandate that they recreate a miniature Greece in America. This is an overlooked area in diaspora studies, possibly because it is mundane, certainly because it is hard to reach. Too few archival or even literary sources cover the everyday practices of Greek migrant women and their daughters and granddaughters in the home. Home is also a difficult area for scholars to enter. It is hard to observe an unmarked area of activity. How to enter it without disrupting its regular flow? How to elicit talk about what works on people’s subconscious without generating self-consciousness?
