Migration to the Self: Education, Political Economy, and Religious Authority in Polish Communities

Abstract

"Migration to the Self: Education, Political Economy, and Religious Authority in Polish Communities" examines the experiences of peasant labor migrants from the Polish lands as they moved across Europe and the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and notably how migrants narrated the changing labor conditions associated with capitalism. Rooted in interdisciplinary approaches to scholarship, I argue that the larger process of labor migration involved new ways of thinking about one's obligations to self and society, as well as the potential for imagining new forms of relationships between laypeople and clergy. Utilizing archival sources like diaries, memoirs, and letters, along with school textbooks and disciplinary records, visa applications, and life insurance claims, I consider four separate spaces where individuals encountered and weighed ideas of modern subjectivity: the school, the border, the mutual aid society, and the church. In so doing, I demonstrate that peasant migrants were both shaped by and actively shaping global economic forces, and that such trends had an impact on how migrants fashioned themselves as self-sufficient, upwardly mobile, and autonomous actors. Far from being a source of universality, however, I maintain that these individuals were participants in developing the structures of differentiation—the division of migrants into worthy and unworthy categories—that define border politics in the modern world.