Brazilian Diaspora in the Czech Republic An Ethnographic Probe into the Brazilian Community
Main Article Content
Abstract
This research draws on an online survey and semi-structured qualitative interviews with Brazilians living in the Czech Republic. Despite the limitation of a relatively small sample size, this research offers a compelling exploration of the Brazilian community's life in the Czech Republic, contributing to a broader understanding of diaspora dynamics in the region. While the number of Brazilians in the Czech Republic remains low and there are no significant historical ties between the countries, it nevertheless represents an important research topic in the field of ‘new diasporas’ that may arise in different parts of the world. In our paper, we discuss different themes that relate to the migrants’ experience of living abroad and how they conceptualise their Brazilian identity under new conditions. We use an interpretive approach to understand the subjective meanings ascribed by the members of the diaspora to relations in the country of origin and in the Czech Republic.
Article Details
Articles published in Brasiliana are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
When publishing open access, the author signs an author publishing agreement in which they retain copyright and give Brasiliana the right to publish the article. Our Open Access publications are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
References
Alexander, C. E., J. Chatterji, and A. Jalais. 2016. The Bengal Diaspora: Rethinking Muslim Migration, London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Anderson, B. 1983. Imagined communities, London: Verso.
Bachmann, I. 2011. ‘A Gente e Latino: The making of new cultural spaces in Brazilian diaspora television.’, in Lorenzo-Dus, N. ed. Spanish at Work: Analysing Institutional Discourse across the Spanish-Speaking World. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.
Barbosa, R. 2016. Brazil and Canada: economic, political, and migratory ties, 1820s to 1970s, Lanham: Lexington Books.
Britannica, 2022. https://www.britannica.com/topic/diaspora-social-science, accessed 3. 2. 2023.
Brubaker, R. 2005. ‘The ‘Diaspora’ Diaspora’, Ethnic and racial studies, 28 (1): 1-19.
Chaves, J. 2017. ‘Disrespecting borders for Jesus, power, and cash: Southern Baptist missions, the new immigration, and the churches of the Brazilian diaspora’. Ph.D. Dissertation: Baylor University.
Christou, A., and King, R. 2015. Counter-diaspora: the Greek second generation returns "home", Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Clifford, J. 1994. ‘Diasporas’, Cultural anthropology, 9 (3): 302-338.
Cohen, R. 1996. ‘Diasporas and the nation-state: from victims to challengers’, International affairs, 72 (3): 507-520.
Cohen, R. 2022. Global diasporas: An introduction, New York: Taylor & Francis.
Czech Statistical Office. 2023. Foreigners with a stay of more than 12 months. https://www.czso.cz/csu/cizinci/cizinci-s-pobytem-nad-12-mesicu, accessed 3. 2. 2023.
das Graças Brightwell, M. 2020. ‘‘Economia da Saudade’: Comfort food for London’s Brazilian diaspora’, in D. McNally, ed. Geographies of Comfort. New York: Routledge.
Delamont, S., and Stephens, N. 2008. ‘Up on the roof: The embodied habitus of diasporic capoeira’, Cultural sociology, 2 (1): 57-74.
Duarte, F. 2005. ‘Living in ‘the Betweens’: Diaspora consciousness formation and identity among Brazilians in Australia’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 26 (4): 315-335.
Embaixada da República Tcheca em Brasília. 2022. Compatriotas tchecos no Brasil. https://www.mzv.cz/brasilia/pt/relacoes_bilaterais/compatriotas_tchecos_em_brasilia/index.html, accessed: 3. 2. 2023.
Glick Schiller, N. 2011. ‘Locality, Globality and the Popularization of a Diasporic Consciousness: Learning from the Haitian Case’, in R. O. Jackson, ed. Geographies of the Haitian Diaspora. New York: Routledge.
Glick Schiller, N., Basch, L., and Blanc‐Szanton, C. 1992. ‘Transnationalism: A new analytic framework for understanding migration’, Annals of the New York academy of sciences, 645 (1): 1–24.
Grossman, J. 2019. ‘Toward a definition of diaspora’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 42 (8): 1263–1282.
Hesterberg, T. not dated. It’s Time To Retire the ‘n ≥ 30’ Rule. https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/cs//pubs/archive/34906.pdf, accessed 3. 2. 2023.
Ikeuchi, S. 2019. Jesus Loves Japan: Return Migration and Global Pentecostalism in a Brazilian Diaspora, Redwood City: Stanford University Press.
Jöns, H., Mavroudi, E., and Heffernan, M. 2015. ‘Mobilising the elective diaspora: US–German academic exchanges since 1945’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 40 (1): 113-127.
Joseph, J. 2012. ‘The practice of capoeira: diasporic black culture in Canada’, Ethnic and racial studies, 35 (6), 1078-1095.
Kwak, S. G. and Kim, J. H. 2017. ‘Central limit theorem: the cornerstone of modern statistics’, Korean J Anesthesiol, 70 (2):144-156.
Laakso, L., and Hautaniemi, P. 2014. Diasporas, Development and Peacemaking in the Horn of Africa, London Borough: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Levitt, P., and Glick Schiller, N. G. 2004. ‘Conceptualising Simultaneity: A Transnational Social Field Perspective on Society’, International migration review, 38 (3): 1002-1039.
López-Calvo, I. 2019. Japanese Brazilian Saudades: Diasporic identities and cultural production, Denver: University Press of Colorado.
Marcus, A. P. 2014. ‘Convenient Liaisons: Brazilian Immigration/Emigration and the Spatial-relationships of Religious Networks’, Espace populations sociétés/Space populations societies, 2-3: 85-97.
Margolis, M. L. 1993. Little Brazil: an ethnography of Brazilian immigrants in New York City, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Matory, J. L. 2009. Black Atlantic religion: tradition, transnationalism, and matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 2023. Brazilian nationality, https://www.gov.br/mre/pt-br/embaixada-helsinque/consular-services/brazilian-nationality, accessed: 3. 2. 2023.
Ministry of the Interior (Czech). 2023. Report on the situation in the field of migration and integration of foreigners in the territory of the Czech Republic: 2022. Prague: Ministry of the Interior.
MPI. 2018. Migration in Brazil: The Making of a Multicultural Society, https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/migration-brazil-making-multicultural-society, accessed 3. 2. 2023.
Padilla, B. 2011. ‘Engagement policies and practices: expanding the citizenship of the Brazilian diaspora’, International Migration, 49 (3): 10–29.
Pawłowska, K. 2017. ‘Ethnic Return of Armenian Americans: Perspectives’, Anthropological notebooks, 23 (1): 93-109.
Perezgonzales, J. D. 2016. Statistical Sensitiveness for Science, https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1604/1604.01844.pdf, accessed 3. 2. 2023.
Rial, C. 2012. ‘Banal religiosity: Brazilian athletes as new missionaries of the neo-Pentecostal diaspora’, Vibrant: Virtual Brazilian Anthropology, 9: 128-159.
Rocha, C., and Vásquez, M. A. 2013. The diaspora of Brazilian religions 16, Leiden: Brill.
Safran, W. 1991. ‘Diasporas in modern societies: Myths of homeland and return’, Diaspora: A journal of transnational studies, 1 (1): 83-99.
Sales, T. 1999. ‘Constructing an ethnic identity: Brazilian immigrants in Boston, MASS’, Migration World Magazine, 27 (1/2): 15.
Saraiva, C. 2017. ‘Orixás across the Atlantic: the Diaspora of Afro-Brazilian religions in Europe’, in Schmidt, B. and Engler, S. eds. Handbook of Contemporary Religions in Brazil. Leiden: Brill.
Sheffer, G. 2003. Diaspora politics: At home abroad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sheffer, G. 2006. ‘Transnationalism and Ethnonational Diasporism’, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, 15 (1): 121-145.
Siar, S. 2014. ‘“Highly skilled migrants’ strong ties with their home country: Evidence from Filipinos in New Zealand and Australia’, Journal of International Migration and Integration, 15: 655-676.
Takhar, A., Maclaran, P., and Stevens, L. 2012. ‘Bollywood cinema's global reach: consuming the “Diasporic Consciousness”’, Journal of Macromarketing, 32 (3): 266-279.
Tölölyan, K. 1991. ‘The nation-state and its others: In lieu of a preface’, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, 1 (1): 3-7.
Tsuda, T. 1999. ‘The motivation to migrate: The ethnic and sociocultural constitution of the Japanese-Brazilian return-migration system’, Economic Development and Cultural Change, 48 (1): 1-31.
Tsuda, T. 2003. Strangers in the ethnic homeland: Japanese Brazilian return migration in transnational perspective, New York: Columbia University Press.
Vertovec, S. (1999). ‘Conceiving and researching transnationalism’, Ethnic and racial studies, 22 (2): 447-462.