My grandmother immigrated to the United States from Hungary in the early 1970s alongside her brother. One of the things that best helped her assimilate into American culture was music. She amassed a large collection of vinyl records and was especially interested in American artists. Her interest in music helped her settle down and embrace 70s American culture which eventually resulted in her marrying my grandfather, a man from North Carolina. This cultural connecting point between her Hungarian heritage and American culture shows that being American is all about the cultural and ethnic diversity and how groups of people from completely different backgrounds can fit into America’s cultural melting pot. Her immigration to the United States relates to the broader mass immigration of Hungarians during the 1940s and ‘50s following World War II. My grandmother and my great-uncle likely followed a similar journey to that of persecuted groups during the German occupation of Hungary in the ‘40s. My grandmother and her brother were similarly coming to America due to problems in Hungary, specifically economic hardships resulting from the oppressive Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party, a group who operated Hungary as a one-party communist state with significant influence from the Soviet Union. America was their opportunity to escape their oppressive homeland, and they were quite hopeful about it. Her vinyl records are almost a sort of right of passage bridging her old life full of hardship and struggle with her new life of freedom and opportunity that she found in America.

– GC

Relationship:  Grandchild of im/migrant Grandchild of im/migrant