Transnational Chicago: The Local and Translocal Networks and Loyalties of Post-Socialist Lithuanian Immigrants

Abstract

The processes of post-socialist transformation, especially large-scale migration from Eastern Europe to the Western hemisphere, are creating an ‘expansion of space’ from the local to the supra-local. This process involves the expansion of personal-, familial- and friendship-based networking practices which acquire significance as transnational mobile livelihoods and as significant dimensions of urban dynamics in global cities like Chicago. What are the networks, attachments and social bonds of Eastern European migrants in Chicago? Ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Chicago in 2013 among recent Lithuanian immigrants brought out the importance of a cultural identity of East European-ness involving contested loyalties and limited integration. While living locally, Lithuanian immigrants are expected both to be bound to the ethnic community and to be immersed in the multicultural life-style of the mega city. However the research has shown that livelihoods and social relations among ‘one's own people’ are involved in trans-ethnic networks and that the bonds of intimacy and the alliances among ‘one's own people’ run through homeland roots and patrimonial linkages rather than through the citizenship loyalties of the state (the United States and/or Lithuania). The circle of ‘one's own people’ implies extensive reciprocity and social networking among ‘friends’ and co-workers based on ‘one's own resourcefulness’ a kind of social capital. Thus, ‘sharing important acquaintances’ ought to involve ‘doing favours’ and livelihood experiences transplanted from oversees are practised in Chicago as ‘local’ life-styles and are used for transnational networking, securing in the process the social status of those involved.

The shift since 1990 in urban anthropology has motivated most anthropologists to define their field of study as anthropological research in urban settings, rather than as urban anthropology (Pardo, Prato & Kaltenbacher, 2013: 2–3). This stance reflects a shift in focus from the community studies inspired by the ‘urban ecology’ model of the Chicago School and the urbanisation processes in post-colonial societies to the legitimacy of grassroots action and the relationship between the local and supra-local and their significance for urban dynamics (2013: 2–3). It could be added that the processes of post-socialist transformation, especially large-scale international migration from Eastern European countries (e.g. Poland and Lithuania) to the Western hemisphere (i.e. Western European and North American countries), are also creating ‘new realities’ for the urban settings in the West. The relationship between the local and the supra-local becomes enacted by transnational processes, which entail a sort of mobile livelihood. This livelihood framework posits mobility as an ‘expansion of space’. ‘Moves do not involve displacement, but rather multi-placement, an expansion of the space for personal and familial livelihood practices in two or more localities’ (Olwig & Sorensen, 2002: 6).

The transnational strategies and practices of immigrants are vivid and explicit examples of what anthropologists are taking increasing interest in, i.e. social relationality between the local (community or neighbourhood) and supra-local (regional, national, and transnational) levels or in other words, how micro-level networks like ‘family-kinship’ or networks of ‘one's own people’ function translocally. Thus participation in transnational networks, engagement in mobile livelihoods (Olwig & Sorensen, 2002), and the creation of transnational loyalties (Vertovec, 2009) are becoming immersed and contextualised in new local (immigrant country) contexts and in newly created ways of making a living in supra-local worlds.

In this respect, the transnationalist perspective is important as it offers an understanding of local urban developments from a translocal point of view and encourages a focus on transnational settings. Chicago is an appropriate example of such a multicultural city that has been a destination of Eastern European (Polish and Lithuanian in particular) immigration. Among all the constants of Chicago's history, its ethnic diversity stands out. Since the 1900s the city has been the largest Lithuanian city outside of Lithuania and only recently challenged by London. Moreover, in the early 1920s there were more ethnic Lithuanians in Chicago than in Kaunas, at the time Lithuania's capital and largest city (Kavaliunas, 1994).

Current research on post-Soviet Lithuanian immigrants in Chicago (Kuzmickaite, 2003; Čiubrinskas, 2009; 2013b; Kripienė, 2012) shows the impact of globalisation and the transnational processes on the identity politics of immigrants. It opens up a question how the diversification of the loyalties and belongings of immigrant Chicagoans is created, shaped, or changed by local and supra-local socio-economic contexts.

What are the specific linkages and bonds of the post-socialist, transnational Lithuanian immigrants in Chicago? The point of departure for answering this question is that these immigrants, although living their lives locally, are framed transnationally as they are affected by enculturation into patterns of knowledge, modes of conduct as well as ‘generic’ – in Jonathan Friedman's (1996) terms – cultural identity that was ‘transplanted’ from overseas. Such cultural identity presupposes contested loyalties, limited integration, and living lives locally while adhering to a model created abroad (in Soviet–post-Soviet Lithuania). These immigrants are expected to be bounded in ethnic communities within local Chicago or attracted by the multicultural life-styles of this megapolis, but our research reveals them as creating and recreating alliances of ‘one's own people’ by crossing ethnic lines and getting involved in trans-ethnic social networks locally and in trans-Atlantic contexts.

This essay is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2013 (Čiubrinskas, 2013b) in different neighbourhoods of the city of Chicago and its suburban areas, like Lemont. Lithuanian transnationalism, i.e. the translocal or trans-Atlantic links, dependencies and loyalties of Lithuanian Americans, has played a long role in the history of US immigration. That of the last immigrants, i.e. of the post-socialist Lithuanians, has a particular form.

Post-socialist transnationals in Chicago

Post-Soviet Lithuanian immigrants have arrived in the US since 1990 when Lithuania declared its independence from the Soviet Union. From 1990 to 1996, an estimated 30,000 Lithuanians arrived in the United States seeking jobs and a better life. Between 10,000 and 15,000 of these immigrants settled in the Chicago area, first in the so-called Lithuanian neighbourhoods in southwest Chicago – Marquette Park, Brighton Park and Gage Park – and later, along with the old Lithuanian forced migration diaspora, in the Western suburbs. In 1991 they began to form their own social and cultural organisations: ethnic schools (alongside existing ones established by earlier immigrants in Naperville; newspapers (‘Amerikos Lietuvis’, ‘Vakarai’, ‘Cikagos Aidas’); business clubs (Rotary Club of Chicagoland Lithuanians); sports clubs (the Lithuanian Basketball League with 15 teams) and Lithuanian capital enterprises (Atlantic Express). It is remarkable that their shared experiences of the Soviet past as well as peculiarities of social (Soviet type) networking and participation in cultural practices play a significant role in distancing them from the rest of the Lithuanian diaspora, especially from those who belong to the forced migration wave of the DP.¹

So even though post-Soviet transnationals attend ethnically delineated social institutions (e.g. Lithuanians do attend Catholic Churches and ethnic Saturday schools), gatherings and cultural practices, our previous research project on Lithuanian immigration to the USA shows (Čiubrinskas, 2011) that the question of their belonging is full of frustration and uncertainty. Moreover the immigrant identity is situational (Kuznecovienė, 2009). It undermines attempts to retain their Lithuanian culture and heritage and encourages strategies for coping with the risks of marginalisation, and even with their illegal status (Liubinienė, 2009: 19). Thus, new post-socialist immigrants transcend ethnic boundaries and easily get into the same networks with the other immigrants from post-socialist Eastern Europe (especially with Russian speaking former Soviet countrymen, as well as Ukrainians and Poles) by using Russian as a lingua franca and/or sharing mutually comprehensible discourses, rules of conduct, moral norms and even sense of humour. Such networks are created as social networks of ‘one's own people’ on the basis of the shared experiences and statuses from the country of origin. These are especially used by undocumented immigrants (those who overstayed their tourist visas prior to the waiving of visas in 2009) who feel marginalised due to their unskilled labour jobs and usually very limited command of English. The members of ‘one's own people’ usually have strong ties with friends and relatives left behind in the home country. Many move between Lithuania and the US, running businesses here and there, and their transnationalism is actually enacted as translocalism.

Transnationalism as translocalism

Transnationalism is a post-nationalist nation-state reality of late modernity where nation-states are challenged as having ‘become global places that define where one is in one's element, and where one can be perceived as foreign’ (Olwig, 2003: 66). Transnationals are usually seen and categorised in the host country as ‘radically different culturally’ (2003: 66) as they are perceived in terms of having origins in another nation-state. Thus immigrants are quite often perceived as people from a qualitatively different place who are therefore radically different culturally from the locals. In other words, the identities these migrants share with the local population such as cook, student, neighbour, etc. are underplayed in relation to their cultural identity, which is rooted in another nation-state and marks them as different (2003: 66).

The cultural embeddedness of immigrants is usually seen as a point of departure for categorisation. It paves the way for the double loyalty of immigrants to the host country and the country of origin, because transnationalism is not just de-territorialisation or deconstruction of the embedded histories or identities. The mass of research conducted on migration and globalisation proves that massive transnationalism does not eliminate the need to study how international labour migrants and political refugees construct their histories about their roots and how they thereby shape their political practices (Malkki, 1992; Olwig & Hastrup, 1997; Appadurai, 1996; Krohn-Hansen, 2003).

In opposition to de-territorialisation, the process of re-territorialisation is clearly noticeable among immigrants as they essentialise and re-territorialise their histories, cultures and identities, making such notions as ‘kinship’ and ‘native soil’ important (Krohn-Hansen, 2003: 86). They give a sense of territorialised descent and a narrative of belonging as well as acting as if searching for recognition of their life in the world of translocal flows. These translocally lived worlds are also marked by a continuing quest for the recognition of particular translocal distinctiveness, which goes in opposition to an almost habitual belonging to a particular place inside the country of origin that was learned through enculturation and socialisation. Transnational and translocal newcomers to a host country are obliged to do hard creative work in order to build new social ties and linkages, enhance and elaborate appropriate livelihoods, and take morally challenging positions of loyalty.

Diaspora as social networking

Diaspora itself could be understood as a type of new social field (Glick-Schiller et al., 1995), which could be treated as a community or social network. In this case Giordano makes a clear separation between those two conceptualisations. He stresses that diasporas are different from social networks as the former are more ‘cultural’ and the latter are organisational entities (Giordano, 2011). The concept of diaspora in the context of global cultural politics has become a symbolic resource (Olwig & Hastrup, 1997; Olwig, 2004; Sheffer, 2013). Its symbolic power rests on ‘transplanted’ (Bodnar, 1987; Sheffer, 2013) and ‘shared’ culture (Kokot et al., 2013). ‘Transplanted’ is meant as Sheffer puts it: a ‘diasporian's identity and identification are not entirely “invented” or “constructed” after emigrating from their homelands and consequently settling in their hostlands’ (Sheffer, 2013: 68).

The clearest example of this could be the religion they practised in their country of origin and continue to practise in their hostlands, which contributes to their connections, loyalty and activities on behalf of their homelands. Additional aspects include the family connection factor, which is maintained for many generations; the historical memories of the ethno-national-religious tradition they maintain, especially in connection with their actual or imagined homelands; the original language spoken by the same ethno-national entity in their homelands; the celebration of holidays, food, music, etc. ‘All these factors contribute to the continued existence of such diasporas and to the directions of their activities on the three levels – homeland, hostland, and the international arena’ (Sheffer, 2013: 69).

Diaspora as shared culture is, as defined by Giordano, ‘a culture-based corporate group that often takes on actual institutional forms in the shape of associations, brotherhoods, clubs, committees, etc.’ (Giordano, 2011: 66). Robin Cohen even further insists on understanding diaspora through cultural traits and collective representations inherent to diasporic phenomena (Cohen, 1997: 26; cit. from Giordano, 2011).

Diasporas as cultural units, share (at least to a degree) common sets of cultural knowledge including interpretations of history, concepts of identity, value systems and moral imperatives (Kokot et al., 2013). ‘Moral duty’ or an overarching cultural idiom of ‘sacrifice’ has been identified in various diasporas, resulting in strong normative pressures to contribute to the well-being of future generations, the community and the wider diaspora, while the demands of the home country are given highest priority (Benovska-Sabkova, 2013; Čiubrinskas, 2013a). Thus, economic success and philanthropy are intricately related.

Social networks are what shape livelihoods and define communities, especially diasporic ones, which are largely symbolic (Cohen, 1985) rather than marked by local closeness. Networks could form a diaspora, especially those networks which cope with risks. Indeed the largely personified and compartmentalised livelihoods of immigrants are ones that are immersed in social networks as these livelihoods are closely related to the migrants’ attempts to avoid marginalisation and subjecting themselves to the discriminatory structures of race, ethnicity and class that tend to place them in a marginal position in the receiving society and in urban residential settings. Thus, networks could be created as strategic linkages, both against marginalisation and sometimes even ‘non-integrationist’, especially the ethnic networks formed by the diaspora of forced migrants. So, diasporas could be understood as composed of specific strategic networks rather than as compact entities because they differ from the ethnic enclaves by their ongoing relations to the home countries and the global network of ethnic communities.

In our case it is the network of the global umbrella organisation, the Lithuanian World Community, which was founded in 1946 (Kucas, 1975). These relations usually reinforce ethnic identity and cohesion, but at the same time they can also lead to the creation of various patterns of differentiation in the use of urban spaces within a diaspora. As described by Avenarius, in California, the older generation of Chinese immigrants lived in the dense ethnic ‘Chinatowns’ localities, while the new stratum of affluent and highly educated migrants have formed decentralised networks in Orange County, preferring the ethnically ‘unmarked’, suburban life-style of affluent US citizens (Avenarius, 2013). A similar pattern was revealed by my fieldwork in Chicago when middle-class Lithuanians started a diaspora by moving from their ethnic neighbourhoods in southwest Chicago, namely Marquette Park and Brighton Park, which became subject to an influx of Hispanics and blacks, to mainly white lower middle class suburbs with ‘good schools’ for their kids. They clustered around the suburb of Lemont, which is ethnically ‘unmarked’ but which has in actuality been known as the focal centre for all of the US and even world diaspora Lithuanian activities since the late 1980s.² The same pattern has been followed by the new post-socialist immigrants who, while initially staying in the city's so-called ‘Lithuanian neighbourhoods’ in the 1990s, started to move in the 2000s to Chicago's southwest suburbs around Lemont, Palos Hills, Romeoville, Naperville, Downers Grove, Woodridge, Darien, Hinsdale, etc.

The significance of social networks among diaspora communities is not limited to residential patterns and ethnic cohesiveness alone. The diaspora maintains ongoing relations with the country of origin that range from symbolic references and ritual remembrances (for Lithuanians, for example, the Christmas Eve celebration) to active practices of transnationalism which are especially visible in the networks formed to maintain patrimonial ties with the people back home. This is seen through trans-Atlantic family-kinship networks and networks of ‘one's own people’ formed in the host country's society. Actually, such social networks are a prime social identity resource as well as a social capital resource. Belonging to transnational bonds of attachment usually means moral obligations to the country of origin, which could also be materialised through norms of reciprocity, for example, not only though a moral obligation to send remittances but also through potlatches during the visits back to the country of origin and the safeguarding of one's status as a respectable kinsman and/or friend.

Accumulation of social capital through networking was very well established under the former Communist system as a way of obtaining resources in the form of reciprocal favours or ‘blat’ (Ledeneva, 1998). Indeed, in an economy where many forms of exchange are not monetarised, blat becomes even more important and social networks can operate as an alternative market institution regulating exchange and information. In a range of recent studies, this kind of social capital has been shown to be important in the privatisation of resources in Eastern and Central European countries and in the way in which capitalism has developed utilising existing or new social networks (Szelenyi & Szelenyi, 1995). Our data shows that blat as a specific form of reciprocal favours has been transplanted to the diaspora and has found niches in Western societies. Giordano has accordingly stated that a network analysis might show that ‘patronage, highly personalised coalitions, and factionalism are quite widespread and a definitely not-unheard-of phenomena even in Switzerland, Holland, Germany, or Sweden’ (Giordano, 2003: 12). We can also add that in the US, at least as far as it has been revealed from fieldwork among the East European diaspora in New York (Kripienė, 2012) and Chicago (Čiubrinskas, 2013b), patterns of blat and bribery have been especially documented in the sphere of immigrant networks related to ‘finding a job’ or ‘getting an education’.

Networking locally and trans-Atlantic

(a) Ethnic ties

Ethnic networks, like ethnic strategies, are firmly rooted in diaspora life but these are seen as basics, like a background for the creation of self-identity which proves and is proven by cultural embeddedness and enculturation. Ethnic ties, networks, institutions and communities-neighbourhoods are used as sorts of comfort zones to defend against marginalisation strategies. For example, as mentioned, in Chicago the common residential pattern is to move closer to the neighbourhood where circles of ‘their own people’ are the densest (Lemont) after initially settling ‘somewhere’. This enables them to participate in an ethnic school, ‘sports’ (basketball), church, services, etc. and helps to avoid labelling and ‘visible minority’ status. It is common practice that immigrants are sometimes exotised just by their (‘incomprehensible’) names in relation to the Euro-American-oriented middle-class cultural backgrounds that they are supposed to share with many white Americans.

Another popular pattern in exploring ethnicity in order to make linkages is through the ethnic (Saturday) schools, Lithuanian language Catholic churches, and ethnic life centres still operating in the old diaspora neighbourhoods that are nowadays mainly populated by Latino and African Americans. Despite interactive and supposedly ‘dangerous’ neighbourhoods, ethnic ties are maintained just to ‘keep the basic link to Lithuanian’, i.e. educating children in the ‘heritage’ language as well as socialising in ethnic clubs and other leisure activities (i.e. concerts given by artists from the country of origin) on the premises of schools, parish houses, ethnic life centres, etc. All of these ethnic institutions act as umbrella organisations providing a floor for even more intense networking which eventually spreads into the sphere of employment with Lithuanian capital-based enterprises (Atlantic Express Corp., Unlimited Carriers, etc.) becoming part of the ethnicity used as a major networking resource.

(b) Family-kinship linkages

The family-kinship networks of transnationals encompass an extensive field of relations, cultural values and moral values significant to the people on both sides of the Atlantic and under rather different social and economic circumstances. It involves maintaining patrimonial properties, running family businesses, bringing up and educating the younger generations and taking care of the elderly. For those who stay in such networks, migration is not usually considered to be a very significant move in the lives of the family members. Very few family members who moved abroad describe themselves as migrants per se. Migration is usually considered to be for joining the family (especially among the younger generation), earning a better income, or getting a better education, and is generally considered to be for helping those left at home. This motivation was the most frequently encountered in the author's research and is common among those starting a family business in the host country. If this business prospers, family members and relatives from the country of origin are invited to come and join (the ethnic Lithuanian catering chain in Chicago, ‘Grand Dukes’, being the best example of this).

This example proves that migration is rarely individual. Although individuals do move, they actually move as members of a family network. The host country need not be imagined as an ‘exclusive national entity’. Most of my informants came to the US but actually joined ‘their own people’, i.e. their circles composed of family, friends, etc., which comprise a ‘safe vantage point’ that becomes like a background for transnational relationality, for maintaining old family-kinship networks and for establishing new ones, as well as friend networks and social and cultural identities. Such identities are not strictly bounded by places, localities and states, but are intertwined with the maintenance of personal ties, i.e. kinship-friendship, and are not necessary bounded by ethnicity. Thus the Lithuanian nation-state is given meaning and loyalty as to the homeland and approved through the family-kinship networks.

A family network is especially important in helping a new immigrant to get settled as well as for maintaining ties with the country of origin, which produces translocality: ‘the majority of legal immigrants send children back to Lithuania to spend summers with grandparents, cousins, and former friends. Constant contact and family reunions (if they can afford it) help immigrants hold on to their identities and stabilise their new lives’ (Kuzmickaite, 2003: 82).

It is a clear form of translocal networking which binds the two locales, one in a Chicago neighbourhood, the other in some local place in Lithuania.

(c) Alliances of ‘one's own’ people

The post-socialist Lithuanian immigrants in most of Chicago's working environments share similar positions with the other immigrants from Eastern Europe. When actually answering the question of who they are friends with in Chicago, the most frequent answer given by my informants was, ‘with Lithuanians and Europeans, but not with Americans’. The immigrants from Eastern Europe are assumed to be ‘Europeans’. So when they enter into friendships and friendship-based networks, especially with co-workers, they are creating trans-ethnic alliances in local-Chicagoan and supra-local transatlantic contexts and environments as ‘Europeans’ but not as Euro-Americans.

Thus inter-ethnic, former Eastern Bloc-related networks are easily created. They confront the structural or channelled multiculturalism, which is well defined by Gerd Baumann's research in London as ‘demotic discourse’ (Baumann, 1997), and ethnic communalism through the crosscutting ties of the inter-ethnic networks. This is clearly seen through discursive practices, i.e. the ‘demotic discourses’ (Baumann, 1997) of Eastern European immigrants from the former Communist region in multicultural Chicago. It is how the labour migrants and ‘brain drain’ immigrants with a Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Russian or Polish background are recreating the region by using Russian as a lingua franca and by sharing work places and the media.

Such social networks of post-Communist immigrants are naturally based on the common social and economic experience of the Communist regime, visible in the immigrant job market, such as the economy of favours, nepotism and clientelism. Participation in such social networks or ‘groups of one's own’ or ‘groups of friends’ or ‘alliances of mutual favours’ is a source of higher salaries, more secure jobs, benefits and, finally, a means of successful adaptation, that helps immigrants achieve higher social and economic mobility in American society (Kuzmickaite, 2003).

Limited loyalties

Ethnicity as a social networking resource and its incorporation into a diaspora could act as a model of social and cultural citizenship. In this case, the approach to citizenship as a prime expression of loyalty is altered by the concern with the moral and performative dimensions of membership beyond the domain of legal rights (Glick-Schiller & Caglar, 2008: 207). The ethnic community's formation as a form of social and cultural citizenship may be less feasible in small cities, but that is not the case in Chicago, where ethnic life is flourishing. So the ethnic life of the Lithuanian diaspora in Chicago could serve as a multiple resource for the construction of cultural citizenship and loyalty to translocal descent. It fits well with the contemporary post-melting pot American pattern of identification, which was well defined by David Hollinger as ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ (Hollinger, 1995), which is producing fragmented identities that disregard both states, i.e. the state of origin and the host state, by focusing on homeland and roots.

The connotation of ‘home’ as a ‘certain place where I belong’ provides a good example of the ways in which transnational loyalty is shaped. By definition, migration (forced or voluntary) implies diasporic or double loyalty, both to the country of origin and the host country. However, the cultural embeddedness of ‘home’ is a process which it seems is able to slow the formation of this double loyalty, limiting it towards only the country of origin, but it is applicable almost exclusively to the old, refugee-related, Lithuanian diaspora.

In their case, the idealism related to the idea of ‘home’ was shaped as an alternative to and compensation for the socially-embedded trauma of their home=homeland that had been devastated by the Communist regime. Thus, their real homes in Chicago (in Cicero and Lemont) were created as cultural collections (Clifford, 1988), i.e. homes as museums (Kockel, 2002). ‘Home-as-place’ was created as an alternative to the real home left behind oversees. It was also like a museum of both: inherited items as family reliquaries and newly created/collected objects as symbols of the homeland.

The ‘home making’ of the post-socialist East European labour migrants is focused on re-enactments of the ‘home’ based on the social memories and everyday life experiences left ‘at home’ in the country of origin. It is a recreation of the home as one's ‘own space’ (Liubinienė, 2009) based on the bonds of intimacy of one's ‘own people’ where trust is based on reciprocity rooted in the socialist and post-socialist ‘economy of favours’ (Ledeneva, 1998). Such an ‘own space’ provides a culturally embedded enactment of ‘home’ as ‘own circle’, as a network comprised of ‘one's own’ alliance: family-relatives-friends.

Conclusion

In answering the question what are the specific linkages and bonds and how local and supra-local social networks and loyalties have been created by the Lithuanian immigrants in Chicago's urban dynamics, it is worth stressing that the translocal relationality of transnational urbanites is resourceful in ‘being here but not entirely of here’. As has been pointed out by Salman Rushdie in his Imaginary Homelands (1991), the position or livelihood ‘of being “in” but not entirely (or only) “of” the West’ (Scott & Marshall, 2005: 289) in our understanding is a claim for the recognition of specific social resources and moral positions. These are built upon bonds of intimacy expressed in ‘one's own’ alliances, in patrimonial family-kinship linkages, and in loyalties to homelands and roots instead of state citizenship. So in this case belonging to a local neighbourhood could easily be supplemented by belonging to a native town or place in the country of origin. In this case, participation in the Chicago Neighbourhood Festival fits in well with immigrants’ participation in family reunions or a native village festival back in the country of origin.

For example, the social bonds used to create a circle of ‘one's own’ people or ‘friends’ include sharing an ethnic language (sometimes even a dialect) or a lingua franca (in this case, Russian), festive culture, gossip, life-styles, etc. but the most important is networking as reciprocity among ‘one's one’ people. It is a kind of winning of social prestige by knowing how to make, do and be involved in the extensive use of social networks of friends and co-workers. It is based on one's resourcefulness, which comes as some sort of social capital built upon the former socialist and/or early post-socialist livelihood experiences which was of key importance for successful life oversees (Lankauskas, 2013). All of this agrees with transnational networking, which is well-known in migration studies, of sending remittances and enacting philanthropic or potlatch-type practices back to the homeland which is supposed to bring status through charitable actions and give-aways to one's fellow countrymen.