Įtvirtinant etninį paveldą ir lietuviškosios kilmės šaknis "naujajame pasaulyje": lietuviakilmių teksasiečių tapatybės galios kontūrai JAV

ENThe transnationalist paradigm predominant in anthropological investigations of current international migration emphasizes identity politics as an approach applicable to researching patterns of people’s going from (leaving) and arriving in (entering) certain places of residence. In this paper I apply the category of identity politics or power (the force of identity) as a research perspective to better understand the ethnic identity of the earlier Lithuanian immigrants to Texas and their present-day descendants. On the basis of this perspective and the empirical evidence I gathered from anthropological field research done in the United States in 2002 and 2004, this paper delineates the migration-conditioned identity configuration that asserts itself as a quest for local as well as ethnic/historical/cultural recognition in the United States. The force of identity manifests itself through the documentation and actualization of the gowing of local (Lithuanian) roots and of the ethnic-cultural heritage. The article shows how the identity mobilized by trans-Atlantic migration and embodied by descendants of Lithuanian origin “rewrites” the local multicultural history of Texas by supplementing it with a Lithuanian component.