Forging ethnic heritage and Lithuanian roots: identity politics of Lithuanian descended Texans

In presenting this history of the thirdgeneration Lithuanian Trakimai family in Columbia, the authors tried to steer clear between Scylla and Charybdis. Telling the story of a family who had emigrated to Columbia seemed quite a challenge – especially because there aren’t that many details, and even those are various fragments from tales heard in childhood from Grandma and Mom and Dad, tales filled with the emotions of those who told them. This allows one to realize that history is not just a compendium of textbook facts and statistics in which the individual seemingly disappears, but an area of personal experiences, of taking responsibility, of challenges requiring decisions here and now, and of spiritual processes that for reasons of space often are omitted from text- books. In this way the field of history is as it were meliorated and drained, and in the telling of it history loses its vitality. On the other hand, we have little general knowledge about the Lithuanians who lived in this Latin American land and about their attempts to survive and maintain their ethnic identity under very specific cirmstances. Therefore, this paper aims not only to present the history of a third-generation Lithuanian family in Columbia, but also to reveal the development of a Lithuanian cultural identity there in the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, while at the same time acquainting the reader with the general social, cultural, and financial situation of Lithuanians living in Columbia at that time as well as their ties to Lithuanians in other countriesSociologijos katedraVytauto Didžiojo universiteta