There has been a steady influx of individuals and smaller groups from Central Europe to the southern parts of the American continent since the colonial period that grew stronger throughout the nineteenth century. Then, important main impetus for greater motivation for settling in Latin America came with the migration Immigration Act of 1924 which limited the possibilities for Central and Eastern Europeans to enter the USA. Coupled with the instigations from part of the Brzailian government, these developments resulted in settlement of thousands of Czechs in Brazil, some in compact ethnic communities, others dispersed across the country, and an even higher number of migrant workers who moved back and forth across the Atlantic. While the presence of these migrants resulted in economic developments (in partocular in such fields as beer brewing or railroad  construction) and sometimes in cultural enrichment, there were also negative responses from part of the Brasilian press and public, expressing the  fears of political and cultural destabilization brought about by these “strangers”.
The migrations of Czechs to Brazil have been already studied by Czech historians, within the frame of the efforts to identify “Czech footsteps abroad” and to understand the nature of modernization processes in the mother country – the mass migration was one of the negative results of these  processes. Recently, efforts are being made to put the specific case to the broader context of different types of migration – transatlantic, continental or  regional – and to understand the situation in the whole of the Central Europe (Austro-Hungarian monarchy and the newly unified Germany).[1] There has been, however, less work done with respect to the receiving societies and their specific ways to deal with the migration wave. The aim of the  project is precisely this: to insert the problem of Czech enclave in Brazil into the study of modern Brazilian history, and at the same time to map the preserved archival funds and newspaper coverages of the period, to complement the documentary funds in Central Europe.

[1][1] For the general problem of the migration from Central Europe to Latin Ameirca, see the volumes from a series of  conferences organized by the Centre of Ibero-American Studies: Emigración centroeuropea a América Latina I-IV, all edited by Josef Opatrný (published between, 2000 and 2006). There are also other valuable collective volumes and monographs, such as Juliana Puskás (ed.), Overseas Migration from East-Central and Souteastern Europe 1880-1940, Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1990; Ursula Prutsch, Aventureros, utopistas, emigrantes : del Imperio Habsburgo a las Americas, Budapest 2017; and specifically for the migration to Brazil, Ursula Prutsch, Das Geschäft mit der Hoffnung: österreichische Auswanderung nach Brasilien 1918 – 1938 (Wien/Köln/Weimar: Bohlau, 1996).