Good morning! A team of people gathered to implement something that should have been done a long time ago: to start a story about the history of migration from Montenegro to America. Montenegrins in America are a small and silent minority which, if we exclude the brief episodes at the beginning, never became an organized community. The Serbian, Albanian, Slovenian, and Macedonian communities in America have become and survived, for example. Nevertheless, Montenegrin Americans have left a deep mark on the history of America. A deep footprint commensurate with their size and influence as a community.
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Montenegrin America
In large and demographically diverse countries like America, communities represent an important social support for individuals. They not only satisfy the deep-rooted human need for belonging and identity security, but also often assume a compensatory role in the context of socioeconomic inequalities. Through mechanisms of solidarity, mutual aid and informal support networks, communities act as an important factor of social cohesion, mitigating the consequences of institutional and market injustices.
The process of community formation often revolves around ethnic and religious institutions that are the foundation of cultural identity and social cohesion for many American communities today. Institutions as churches, mosques, temples, and cultural centers not only serve as gathering places, but also as resources for social support, education and political mobilization.
Montenegrin Americans, unlike many other ethnic communities, have never managed to form a sustainable and coherent community in the United States of America, precisely because of the lack of institutional infrastructure – such as churches, cultural centres or associations – around which they could gather and organize in the long term. Although the initial wave of emigration was not devoid of collective spirit, especially in Arizona, where lively political discussions were held between supporters of independent Montenegro and advocates of unification with Serbia, those early forms of joint action did not result in permanent organizational forms.
Orthodox Montenegrins most often found refuge in the Serbian Orthodox Church and the Serbian community, but at the cost of losing their identity and assimilating into the Serbian Americans. This is perhaps best illustrated by the example of the First Serbian and Montenegrin Voluntary Association, which changed its name to the First Serbian Voluntary Association after the annexation in 1918. This organization still exists today, and despite this name, it may be the only one that preserves a special reminder of Montenegrin Americans as an independent community. The historical and new logo of this organization, as well as the story of its origin, is a well-known story about the disappearance of a nation, which was also written about by the New York Times in the text “Annihilation of a Nation” (1922).
Despite these unfavourable historical circumstances, many Montenegrins in America have managed to preserve their identity and, within the scope of their professional activities, proudly highlight it. It is enough to mention Majko Stepovic, the former governor of Alaska, and his descendants who still identify themselves as Montenegrins today. Or Vasa Cuvovic and his family. Actress Milla Jovovic, who declares herself to be an ethnic Montenegrin on her official website. Coach Greg Popovic, who clearly said in a well-known anecdote that he is not a Serb, but a Montenegrin. Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, the wife of the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who used to dress herself and her husband in Montenegrin folk costumes at celebrations. Or Steve Pejovic and his descendants, who also cherish the memory of their Montenegrin origins.
Montenegrin America aims to collect, document and valorize these and numerous other stories through the publication of a book and the production of a podcast series that will be published continuously until the 20th anniversary of the restoration of Montenegrin independence. However, this media and documentary component is only the first step.
The essential ambition of the project is to, through research and visibility of the Montenegrin-American experience, create a good climate for the establishment of an endowment fund for Montenegrin-American studies at one of the American universities, which would enable financial support for American students and researchers, who would deal with the topics of the identity of Montenegrin Americans, the history of this diaspora and contemporary trends. The focus would be on topics of importance to anthropology, migration studies, ethnicity, political science and sociology. In this way, we want not only to preserve the memory, but to create the foundations for the future academic and institutional articulation of the Montenegrin presence in America.
That’s it for today. We wish you a pleasant rest of the day.
Kind regards,
Ljubomir Filipovic, CdM analyst and columnist
(Columnists’ opinions and views are not necessarily those of the CdM editorial staff)
