Multicultural

I spent Wednesday afternoon with fellow Fulbrighter and musciologist Justine Koontz here in Daugavpils at the Polish Cultural Center. Justine has been researching Latvia's choral traditions, which are sort of astonishing, and a side interest has the been the existence of the many cultural centers in virtually every town or city in Latvia that help support choral activities. A town's cultural center, to put it simply, is where the town's citizens make art. They sing, they dance, they paint, they write poetry -- whatever their creative passion might be. These centers have played a huge role in preserving Latvia's folk culture. I may be wrong, but I think that they were set up by the Soviets, no doubt to help acculturate comrades to the greater glories of socialism. Even so, if I am correct, this is one thing that the Soviets actually got right, even if their motives were ideologically grounded in the usual communism-for-the-Motherland.

My student Krzysztof accompanied us. He is a Polish Erasmus student studying Russian at Daugavpils University, so he's fluent in Polish, and I figured -- correctly, as it turned out -- that we might need a translator. Krzysztof was nervous about this, though he shouldn't have been. His English is very solid and his Polish superb, and he did a wonderful job acting as our intermediary with Svetlana, one of the lovely staff members at the Center. (For those of you who don't know, Erasmus is an exchange program for students and faculty within the European Union nations.)

What impressed us, first, was the range of activities in the Polish Cultural Center. There are choirs and dance troupes, of course, but also a sizeable lending library of Polish books, an art gallery, a children's center, a kitchen, and exhibits of Polish costumes and cultural artifacts; the place was buzzing with activity as we wandered about. Svetlana told us that Daugavpils is about 15% Polish, so that the linguistic and cultural map of the place is even more complicated than the usual Latvian/Russian paradigm. In fact, Daugavpils was part of Poland at one time, but then it's been part of every neighbor that it has, being a border city in a place with endlessly shifting borders.

What impressed Justine, second, is the fact that there isn't the kind of cultural purity that she sees in Rīga. In other words, cultural centers in Rīga are very concerned with preserving specifically Latvian culture. In Daugavpils, the Polish choir sings works in Polish but also in Latvian, which would not be done in Rīga. Certainly Rīga's status as the capital and hence the center of all things Latviana has something to do with this; one would expect Latvian culture to be the center of discourse. But Rīga's cultural centers -- choirs, dance troupes, what have you -- could acknowledge that Latvia is actually more culturally complex than it first appears. Apparently it chooses not to.

Daugavpils does, though. There is also Russian and a Belorussian cultural centers in town, and to my knowledge none of them is particularly concerned with the kind of cultural purity that is seen in other parts of the country. I've noticed this first hand; I have heard Russian choirs singing in Latvian as well as in Russian. On a more practical level, restaurant menus are always printed in two languages, Latvian and Russian and often three, with English thrown in for good measure. I have not seen Polish on a menu, though I have seen it in other print venues. Justine, whose ear for Slavic languages is far better than mine, said that she heard Polish on the street more than she expected in Daugavpils, which is saying something as well.

It is common knowledge that Daugavpils is the most culturally diverse city in Latvia. It's also common knowledge that it's the city that most Latvians don't like very much, even if they have never been there, and Daugavpilians have a self-effacing attitude about living there themselves, as if they are supposed to apologize for being from Daugavpils. As someone who was born and raised in Flint, Michigan -- another aging industrial town that Michiganians love to hate -- I can say with authority that I understand this attitude only too well. I totally get Latvia's concern with preserving its own culture, and it also seems to me that the kind if multiculturalism that Daugavpils has is seen at some level as a mild threat to Latvian-ness. I am not singling out Latvia for criticism here. As the United States grows ever more diverse, there is more and more pushback against the "other," as we have seen with the election of a president whose entire platform was based on "America first," America being defined as straight, Christian, white men who have determined that their endless privileges are under threat from everybody. (It might be fairer to say that the American pie should be divided more equitably, and that doing so would be a good thing.)

Daugavpils could be and should be the model for Latvia and the Baltics about how to make multiculturalism work. There are certainly tensions here about identity, but they are not overwhelming, and I hope that Daugavpils sees its diversity as a genuine asset and not a liability. I would be putting this kind of information about various cultures living here on the tourist brochures, and Daugavpils University has already started capitalizing on this: it advertises that one can study Russian in the most Russian city located in the EU, and many students from all over the world do just that. The Polish Cultural Center's work in seriously preserving Polish culture while acknowledging that this Polish culture is infused with other cultures seems to be a model for this. As Justine put it, "When you never know who your neighbors are going to be in ten years, it's a good idea to get along with them." Exactly.