Inventing Polonia: Notions of Polish American Identity, 1870–1990

Abstract

In the last quarter of the 19th century, the American Polish-language press began using the termPoloniato describe the imagined community of all Polish-speaking immigrants in the United States. Local Polish American settlements already bore neighborhood names. Where the Roman Catholic hierarchy permitted an ethnic Polish parish to form, Poles often designated the surrounding area — not only the parish buildings, but the whole network of neighborhood institutions and businesses — by the parish name followed by the suffixowo. By 1895, Poles in Chicago, for example, could read about news in different parts of the city nicknamed for local Polish-language parishes located there: Stanislawowo, Wojciechowo, Jadwigowo, Jackowo, and Michalowo. When speaking of all the Poles living in a single American city,Poloniacould be used with a qualifier such as Chicago Polonia, Buffalo Polonia, or Milwaukee Polonia. But Polonia by itself referred to all Polish immigrants who were bound — or should have been, the writers insisted — by a shared notion of Polishness.