Bri in between

Starting things is always hard. Trust me, I’ve tried to write some version of this, my third initial post to give up on the blog about three or four times now. The issue, in my head, at least, is that I think I have a lot of things to say, and as this is the start of this whole journey, I have to fight the urge to try and tell you all everything at once, and when I do it turns into a impressive jumble of words and thoughts that don’t really make much sense to anyone aside from my and my brain. I won’t subject you to that. Instead, I’ve decided to start at the very beginning and tell you a bit about me. In this case, I mean specifically to tell you a bit about my particular culture; the Czech-American diaspora. 

Depending on how you found this blog, you might have already heard about it in some way, shape, or form, which is great. If not, that’s great too! In this post, I’m going to share a bit of my own take on the diaspora–a take that is very much informed from my past in Czech academia researching this very topic, so I like to think it has a bit of factual standing. It might be a bit different from what you’re used to hearing if you yourself are a part of the diaspora, but hey, that’s the whole point! Here, I’ll explore a bit about who and what the Czech-American diaspora is, why we are the way we are, and what our communities look like today. It’s definitely a bit different from what you’ll find in the modern Czech Republic, though it has been shaped by a lot of the US’ relationship with the Czech lands throughout history.

A bit of history

I want to preface this by saying that this is in no way a perfect and all-encompassing history of Czech immigration to the US. It’s the quick and simple version. If you’d like a much more in-depth version, I highly recommend reading “To Reap a Bountiful Harvest” by Štěpánka Korytová-Magstadt where she lays a lot of the immigration stories out beautifully and with great sources. In fact, maybe one day I’ll get my shit together enough to have a whole list of recommended reading per topic. But if you’re here to read my quick take on it, here we go! 

Czech history in the US can be traced as far back as colonialism has existed here. We have records of Bohemians and Moravians in the US from the time of the early British colonies, though the mass immigration really kicked off in the mid-1800s for a number of reasons. Firstly, the US had expanded rapidly and now had a whole bunch of land (that wasn’t rightfully theirs, but that’s a conversation for a different time) that they wanted European settlers on, and so gave it away either for free or very cheaply via programs like The Homestead Act of 1868. 

This timing could not have been more “perfect” and by perfect, I mean that many working class people in Europe were looking for ways to live better lives. The 1800s were a time of great upheaval in the Czech lands; the National Awakening was in full bloom and Czechs were feeling powerless in their place in the Austrian empire. The Bohemian Kingdom (which included Moravia for much of history, though if you’re interested in some really cool old history, I’d highly recommend checking out Great Moravia) had been a huge power player in European history until Habsburg domination moved the center of power into Vienna. 

The Czech language, while not banned as explicitly as the Slovak language was in the Hungarian part of the empire, became the language of the poor and uneducated until the National Revival, and was at this point in the process of being revived and reconstructed by scholars. The revolutions of 1848 had failed to give the Bohemian lands more power (think of how Hungary was in the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and the regular people either didn’t have many paths to living wage themselves. Landowning was very limited to the wealthy. Many Bohemians and Moravians were also in a cycle of constantly being drafted into the army to fight in Austrian wars. It’s no wonder that people felt like there wasn’t a path to a decent life for them in the Czech lands.

At this same time, there was a huge amount of propaganda coming from the US–letters from friends and family members who had already moved over saying how good things were, newspaper articles, and even ads taken out to convince people to immigrate, and so move to the US they did. (I’ll note immigration was MUCH easier then compared to the visa and immigration process today.) While some Czech immigrants moved into cities (and many more Slovak immigrants), in the typical Czech fashion of seeking out adventure and being “in the nature” as they say in modern CZ 🙂, the vast majority of these settlers took advantage of the “free” land* and formed their own supportive communities throughout the Midwest. 

States with large Czech-American populations today are Nebraska (home to the Czech capital in the US, Wilber), Kansas, Oklahoma, Iowa (which also boasts a historic visit from Dvořák and the current US National Czech and Slovak Museum & Library), Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin, South Dakota, and, of course Texas (though I’ll point out that the Texas Czech community was formed a bit differently and sometimes even carries those differences in the Texas-Czech culture today, for better or worse). If you’re unfamiliar with these places, one important thing to know is that these are the BIG states in the US. Ones which take hours to drive across and have lots of open space between towns. This had a very cool (if you’re me) effect of creating relatively isolated ethnic communities where rather than assimilating due to proximity to the established “American” culture at the time, members of these communities were able to preserve their culture, language, and customs while adding the “American” traits that were useful to them.

Now the mid-1800s were definitely not an end to Czech immigration to the US. For a while, these established communities served as a touch point for more and more people immigrating from the Czech lands to the US. They established Czech language schools and institutions, had Czech music and theater, wrote Czech-language newspapers and generally maintained connection with friends and family members who still lived back in the Czech lands and the culture generally thrived for a time until the Cold War, when communication halted both ways. Today, the people who are members of the Czech-American diaspora range from being the descendants of these immigrants to those whose parents or grandparents, or even they themselves came over to the US, bringing with them a more modern culture. Because of this, the experiences tend to be varied, but share lots of common threads.

*Note: this land was absolutely not “free” and did already belong to people, but the US government was ignoring that fact

Why are we like this?

Now that I’ve explained a bit about how the Czech community came to be in the US, it’s useful to talk a little bit about how we are today. Of course, as any great scholar will say, you can’t divorce yourself from your past fully, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the community here has preserved a lot of the older folk customs…with a few changes. This has a lot to do with who came over, and why. Since the communities were so spatially isolated in the US, the culture at the time of immigration is usually what was preserved. Many immigrated at a time when the National Awakening in the Czech lands was in full force, so there’s very much the feeling of “we immigrated so that we could be Czech” among the families that came over – a feeling that still persists to this day. 

This means that language was especially well preserved in the first few decades that the Czech communities were formed in the US, and so many people grew up speaking it as their first language until after World War II. What’s really interesting though, is that the version of Czech spoken stayed frozen in time and didn’t develop into the modern Czech currently spoken in the Czech Republic. If you speak with an old timer in one of our communities, chances are they’ll speak something more akin to what Božena Němcová would have used in daily life. Older phrases are preserved, like “Dobré jitro” in place of “Dobré ráno” and spelling isn’t really standardized. Unfortunately, after 1948 the push to speak Czech was discontinued on the American side for fear of “being un-American” so the Czech language in our communities is slowly being lost (though a few of us are working hard to try and keep it alive).

Other aspects of Czech culture, like traditional food and cooking have also been especially well preserved, in part because it’s always been accessible, as well as delicious. Families hand down recipes for pork, cabbage (often using the Germanized name of sauerkraut), and dumplings, sausages, and rye bread. Koláče are so popular in our communities that the non-Czech Americans have even started eating them, though I’ll be honest, they’ve also committed some crimes against koláče and all that is holy in the process. 

A lot of the food that has been passed down has been impacted by what’s traditionally been available in the US. Koláče and buchty, for example, have been adapted to the fruit that’s in season or available in certain communities, and while tvaroh is popular in Europe, here in the U.S. it’s been replaced with either cream cheese or cottage cheese. Since our communities have been here for generations at this point, this is now considered standard, and when members of the diaspora go to the Czech Republic and see the original versions of the food, it can sometimes be a bit of a surprise. When I lived in Prague, things were close enough to feel familiar and comforting, but just altered enough that I could feel the difference of both generations and distance.

If you’re not a member of the Czech-American community (or maybe even if you are) you might wonder a bit why these traditions and this identity is so important to us. It’s been generations after all, shouldn’t we “be American” by now? It’s a great point, and the truth is that it could have gone a totally different way than it did. In the Czech-American case, our ethnic identity as Czechs has actually become tied in and complimentary to our idea of American identity thanks in large part to the historical relationship between the United States and the historic struggle for a Czechoslovak state (which is something I found so fascinating, I started a PhD studying it and am now creating this whole site).

I’ve laid out a bit of the history earlier in this post, but at the time when a lot of people immigrated to the US from the Czech lands, the push for greater sovereignty if not independence within the Austro-Hungarian empire was growing. While we know that not every person who immigrated from the Czech lands was specifically a supporter of this push, it was certainly popular with a number of them. Many of the Bohemian and Moravian immigrants at the time kept in touch with relatives who were back in the Czech lands, creating a built-in network of support for Czech and Slovak causes in the US. The Czech immigrant population in the US even had a LARGE hand in the founding the first Czechoslovak Republic (První republika), which for a lot of people is still seen as the Czech golden age.

In order to prove that the Czech and Slovak cultures were valid and the people in the Czech and Slovak lands (which contained many other, rich ethnic groups at the time) capable of self-determination, Czech and Slovak leaders like Masaryk and Štefánik had to come to the US and lobby the US government to agree with them. And where Masaryk and Štefánik went (which were many of the Czech and Slovak communities that still exist today), parades and festivals that look a lot like the ethnic heritage festivals held today in Czech-American communities followed. This was something that the Czech and Slovak diaspora communities in America really bought into, and even though many left their homeland for purely economic reasons, many took the moment to re-define their immigrant stories and paint them as part of the struggle for Slavic self-determination, and the fight for a representative democracy allowed these immigrants to be simultaneously Czech and American. It’s been generations, but this dual identity persists in some form today.

During the First Republic, connections between the US and newly-created Czechoslovakia were thriving, but unfortunately that wouldn’t last too long and during the Cold War, this pathway of communication between the Caech diaspora in the US and Czechoslovakia slowed as communication and connection was seen as a risk on both sides. This fear would unfortunately lead to the loss of all of the knowledge that had been handed down for generations–knowledge and connection that we are very much trying to get back to this day.

Luckily for those of us in the Czech-American diaspora, the fear would dissipate eventually. Once it was deemed safe in the 1960s, people began to take more interest in their Czech-American identity and ethnic festivals began to pop up or restart throughout the US. Ethnic tourism was all the rage and thawed relations between the US and Czechoslovak Socialist Republic meant that regular people could be in touch again. Because of that earlier severance of connection though, a lot of what we had known in the US about ethnic identity had to be re-made, causing even more difference between the Czech-American identity and modern Czech identity.

Czech-Americans Today

Today, the Czech-American community is a little more varied. There tends to be a modern diaspora of people who moved to the US more recently, and then the “older” immigrant communities of people whose ancestors immigrated in the 1800s and whose connection to the folk culture has been preserved in more rural areas. While some newer immigrants have moved into the older communities and found connection, for a lot of modern Czechs the heritage that they celebrate feels something akin to the theme park version of Czech folk culture. Over time, Czech-American identity has morphed into its own thing, which many people are very happy to continue preserving. I’d be slacking if I didn’t point out that there are those of us within the Czech-US communities that are working to re-establish the connections between the Czech-American diaspora and the Czech Republic by blending the folk culture and Americanized version of our identity with modern Czech culture. If you haven’t guessed it already, this is where I fall in the spectrum. My goal here is to help bring some modern perspective to our communities.

Konec

If you’ve stuck with me for this long, thank you! I hope you’ve enjoyed this little journey we’ve been on. This is really just the quick and fast version of who/what makes up the Czech-American community. It’s something that I hope to explore more fully in future posts. The Czech-American community has been around for generations now, and while our culture is definitely different from modern Czech culture, the differences are what makes it all the more fascinating. Our community is fully American, rooted in the Czech past, and plays a unique role in preserving some of the older folk culture and language, which I think is pretty cool.

Have thoughts or questions? Or are you from the Czech-American diaspora too? If so, I’d love to hear about it!