Abstract
In her 1947 autobiography, They Crossed Mountains and Oceans, Anişoara Stan, a Romanian-American ethnographer and folk artist who emigrated to the United States in the early 1900s, captures the challenges of pursuing her Romanian-American dream of creating an open-air ethnic museum meant to underscore the significant contribution of immigrants to the American culture. While she does not dwell too much on her own process of acculturation, she offers glimpses into the lives of several Romanian-American immigrants she encountered in various parts of the United States. Therefore, this article proposes a close reading of the fragments about first-generation immigrants through the lenses of social class and gender with a view to examining the ways in which they tried to pursue their Romanian-American dreams as they navigated the challenges of immigration in the urban spaces of the 1920s in the United States.