MIGRANT DECISION-MAKING AND LIFE-PROJECTS IN THE FRAME OF MACRO-REGIONAL POWER HIERARCHIES, MIGRATION SYSTEMS, AND DIASPORAS

In this essay I connect the decisions and experiences of individual migrants, starting with Wladyslaw Chuchla, and place them in larger, even global frames of decision-making and the options societies of departure and of arrival provide as well as constraints they impose. This involves relating Chuchla’s – and, in a comparative perspective, other migrants’ – place of birth in its evolvement over time in the macro-region and its history. It also involves a discussion of the routes to exit from both the local course of history and the geography. Thus, I discuss the Atlantic Migration System and the Polish lands in an integrated perspective: were conditions in the Polish lands singular or may they be compared to patterns in other parts of the world? I will look at the agency of migrants leaving other parts of the world but sharing with Chuchla the destination North America. This discussion will raise methodological and theoretical issues. Local communities are the spaces in which men and women make their decisions. They are transculturally rather than transnationally connected but the frames in which decisions are made characterize larger regions. I argue that migrating men and women made their decisions to depart and about where to arrive in the frame of inter-state power relations, impositions by the elites (and, sometimes, neighbors) of self-elevated national cultures, and in local everyday-cultures, norms, beliefs framed by regional economies and the human capital that could be developed in them. Emigration was a counter project to “nation” building. Polish migrants could chose destinations in a near-global diaspora, provided information and travel connections existed to their place of departure. Diaspora, too, is localized and in many different ways transcultural.