YakimaGulagLiteraryGazett

Saturday's Croatian Fest in Seattle was covered in the main overground news source for the Yakima Gulag, namely The Yakima Hereld Republic, which ran an article on it in the Sunday edition.
The Fest celebrates the large Croatian population in the Soviet of Washinton yearly and is something I could not do because it would have involved takeing a bus and missing an obscene amount of homework. Still it's worth going, and loads of fun.
Two towns not far from the Gulag, namely Cle Elum and Roslyn have large populations from various towns in Northern Croatia, Mrkopolje and places near there, who arrived in the late 19th century and early to mid 20th century, and worked as miners, there used to be a number of coal mines in that area. They lived quietly and worked hard. They are a nearly invisible minority.There used to be a dance troupe from the Cle Elum/ Roslyn area which billed itself as a Yugoslav dance troupe, they came into existance before the breakup, and were multi ethnic as the community there did have some non-Croats such as Albanians and Serbs, and a tiny number of Bosnian Muslims and Serbs. This dance troupe wore varied lovely national dress,whatever ethnicity a member was, that is what he or she wore, except I think a few of the guys may not really have been Albanian, it's just that the everday dress of modern day male Albanians is easy to run up on a machine, (I got a kick out of how similar it is to the traditional everyday dress of male South Asian Muslims, with the white kurta like shirt, pajama like pants, and crochet caps and vests, you see that to this day on Muslim men in Pakistan, India and even Afghanistan!) they had both live and recorded music and did all the various regional dances in their widely varied costumes with out a change, so for any given dance, the costumes were mixed and varied, it was for a time a visual does of 'Brotherhood and Unity' I really enjoyed their performance the time I saw them perform out of picking out which was the national dress of which ethnicity. The war caused the breakup of the ensemble. They were nearly all of them understandably very upset by the war, and could not bring themselves to concentrate on music and dance at such a time. On top of it, after a time despite their best efforts, they got into political arguments. Ages ago I remember reading in the paper about their break up as a group. They were such a unique and beautiful group, it was one of the things about the war that made me cry, that something so far away could have repercussions in a part of the United States which is so far away from what was going on there is an interesting lesson in our interconnected world! I felt sad because it meant even here there was no hope of creating that type of unity. One of them said the group broke up because 'how can I dance with people who'se cousins are killing my cousins? How can we make music together?' I felt sad when I read that. I often remember that quote, and think in time of war, this is what kills art, not the dictators and not the censors. People will defy dictators and censors instinctively, but indeed I myself could not dance or sing with people who were killing my relatives, or expect if my relatives were killing their relatives, expect that person to sing or dance with me. I could understand it. I hope some of them tried to at least do relief work for their assorted peoples. I hope some of them tried to at least help their relatives in those awful times and I am sure if they felt strongly they tried to do something helpful, not destructive.
There are a still a few old families of Croats in the gulag itself, who are mostly related to families in Cle Elum and Roslyn and there are newer immigrants who came as a result of the war in Bosnia. Many of those families who arrived from Bosnia are mixed couples, mostly Croat-Serb couples. They are hard working and hardly make a ripple as they work their way through the steps of getting in on the American Dream of learning English, getting a job and a house.
The community liveing on the coast is more visible, they have things like the dance ensembles and the picnics etc. They tend to come from places like Vela Luka, Split and Dubrovnik, and to live in places like Aberdeen, Cosmopolis, Seattle, and Tacoma.
One reporter who started at the Yakima Herald Republic as a teenager is Croatian American, her name is Adriana Jovanovic and she has been an excellent reporter, she's helped a lot of the young people who worked on Galaxy, the defunct YVCC (Yakima Gulag People's Institute of Higher Re:Education) to get a toehold in journalism. She was who wrote the very excellent article in Sunday's paper.
She has a nice eye for the human interest type of story and everyone I ever talked to who has met her has nothing but nice things to say about her as a reporter and as a person.
Unfortuantely you have to pay for online articles after a certain time period at Yakima Herald Republic, but there are links about the article in another blog, go to my skellywright link then go to his link called Idajevo or just go to his profile, his other blogs and you will find Idajevo. He has a nice writeup and some nice links to pictures of one of the dance groups that performed at the Fest.