A Repository for Working-Class Memories and Hybrid Hellenisms: The Hellenic Cultural Museum in Salt Lake City, Utah

Abstract: Representations of the Greek immigrant experience in the Hellenic Cultural Museum (HCM), a vernacular Greek American museum in Salt Lake City, Utah, commemorate the everyday life, labor struggles, and folk culture of early twentieth-century working-class Greek immigrants. As a repository of working-class memories, the museum challenges a set of dominant US immigration narratives around class and race, including the white ethnic bootstraps success model. At the same time, the museum's exhibition draws from popular narratives of Hellenism in the United States and Greece to distinguish local Greeks as a prominent community of the Intermountain West. The HCM thus oscillates between regional and nationally dominant understandings of the Greek American experience, proposing hybrid identity narratives that enrich the public narrativization of Greek America. The vernacular background of the exhibition, on the other hand, poses a set of museological challenges in terms of accessibility and inclusivity, which affect the understanding of Greek America vis-à-vis its museum representations.