Yona Stamatis
Performing Belonging: Reimagining Greek America through
Embodied Artistic Practice

“Do you speak Greek?”
“Which church do you go to?”
“Are you going to Greece this summer?”

When I was a child, these questions would cling to me like damp clothing after a rainstorm, heavy and uncomfortable. Interacting with fellow Greek Americans always exacerbated underlying feelings of insufficiency and displacement, for I knew that I lacked satisfactory answers to their questions: My command of Greek was limited. I did not attend Sunday school. I had never been to Greece. My family life had been shaped by cultural and religious plurality. My father carried with him the Greece of his childhood, steeped in the traditions of the church, hard work, and tales of the American dream. My mother carried the restless hum of city buses and crowded streets—her upbringing on New York’s Upper West Side instilling in her a love for books, art, and music, and the teachings of Orthodox Judaism.

Moving between my Jewish and Greek American family networks, I learned early on to mask and compartmentalize. Humor and charisma became my protective shields. When probed about my religious beliefs, I would reply, “I’m Orthodox! I just don’t know what kind.” And then I would laugh, because laughter was easier than unraveling my discomfort. I would laugh again at the irony of leaving my Greek American family’s Christmas gathering for the family Chanukah celebration that commemorated Jewish resistance to Hellenistic rule. We never told our respective sides where we had just been or where we were going. We were accustomed to moving about in an in-between space that no community knew quite how to hold.

It was music that came to offer a conciliatory space for me to embrace these complexities not as markers of difference or as personal failures of self-definition, but as fundamental to my belonging as a Greek American. It was neither the songs of Stelios Kazantzidis and Mikis Theodorakis that my father carried across the ocean, heavy with exile and the ache of loss, nor the pop songs of Anna Vissi and Sakis Rouvas that offered solace. It was rebetika, rough-edged and mournful, born in the cracks of cities long ago by men and women bent under the weight of a world that would not love them. As I picked out the notes of the songs on my 3-stringed bouzouki, I heard the sounds of my own displacement. And I found in the creators of this music—most deceased long ago—an unlikely imagined community.

My Greek American family regarded my affinity for rebetika with a certain degree of awe and confusion. “Why sit all day and cry? Life isn’t all about crying!” my father would say. But rebetika was my way of performing, negotiating, and claiming a place in Greek America that was truly mine, though admittedly never theirs: Rebetika had made me increasingly legible within the Greek American community, but never entirely of it. And for me, this was a kind of badge of honor.

I wonder now so many years later, how prevailing narratives of Greek America have come to rest in such a narrow frame? How has this rich tapestry woven from migration, struggle, and reinvention, come to be hemmed in by rigid markers that obscure the multiplicity of Greek American lives so that cultural, ethnic, sexual, racial, gender diversity etc. are largely treated as exceptions rather than as the rule?

What forces have fixed these boundaries? Has our guide been nostalgia for an imagined purity, the weight of assimilationist narratives, the comforts of tradition for a fractured diaspora?

And I wonder how Greek American institutions—churches and other cultural and educational organizations that serve as the heartbeat of our communities—might help rewrite this narrow script that leaves so many with deep feelings of exclusion and rejection? There must be a way to celebrate Greek culture without sidelining the complexities of migration, diverse lifestyles, interfaith families, and evolving cultural practices.

When I think of profound social change I think of music, a medium of expression and communication that moves beyond the confines of reductive categories and labels, and into the realm of embodied experience. For music does not engage the mind alone; it calls the whole body to witness. It moves in the blood, in the breath, in the small bones of the ear. It binds us not with words but with rhythm, a constant push and pull against the workings of our own nervous system. We listen, we answer, we fall into step. And in that falling, we belong. Might music help individuals and institutions construct a new model for Greek America that centers rather than sidelines hybridity, syncretism, and postmigration in a manner that feels simultaneously inclusive and unthreatening? Can we follow the lead of musicians already working in this space? Jazz bassist Petros Klampanis comes to mind, whose compositions are syncretic negotiations of modal and rhythmic structures of Greek folk traditions and contemporary jazz. His compositions do not merely juxtapose but synthesize these diverse idioms into a fluid aesthetic. To this Greek American, Klampanis’s music foregrounds a postmigrant transnational space of belonging that exists somewhere beyond the confines of identity.

As we look to the future, I challenge our institutions to take lead of this charge, by becoming consciously agonistic and experimental, mobilizing Greek America as embodied syncretism, ever-evolving and always pluralistic. Bypassing the constraints of verbal communication, let these institutions draw inspiration from artistic practice by creating embodied experiences of inclusion and belonging: This means moving past temporary gestures and symbols of recognition by replacing an ephemeral rebetiko glendi or a temporary exhibit about the Jews of Greece—mere nods towards acceptance rather than inclusion—with embodied experiences of Greek America as hybrid and markedly complex.

Engage participatory music practices to encourage individuals to inhabit and perform hybrid identities in real time so that cultural heritage becomes a dynamic, participatory, and socially generative agonistic practice that rewrites static narratives of belonging and exclusion. And draw lessons from music and the arts more broadly, so that we participate in these endeavors—celebrate them!—not as intellectual exercises but as embodied practice with the potential to shift our very understanding of Self and Other. I suspect that the Greek American community will expand and flourish as a result, inviting with open arms participation, identification, and inclusion in all that Greek America could offer.

Την ξενιτιά, την ορφανιά, την πίκρα και τη λύπη,
όλα μου τά´δωσε ο Θεός, κανένα δεν μου λείπει.

Ουσάκ Μανές «Το Τραγούδι της Ξενιτιάς» (1937)
–Στράτος Παγιουμτζής

Exile, orphanhood, bitterness, and sorrow,
God gave me all of these, none is missing.

Ousak Manes “The Song of Exile” (1937)
–Stratos Pagioumtzis

January 09, 2026

Yona Stamatis is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology and director of the Music Program at the University of Illinois Springfield. Her research explores folk and popular song traditions, with particular attention to the intersections of music and social change. Recent publications include “Rage Against the Machine’s Evil Empire: Music and Political Socialization in Early Adolescence” and the English-language translation of Holocaust Songs of the Greek Jews by Mariangela Hadjistamatiou. She is a violinist and bouzouki player in the rebetiko tradition.