Refashioning Ethnicity in Czech-Moravian Texas

KEVIN HANNAN

THIS STUDY OUTLINES CHANGE in the structure of ethnic culture in a Texas community, with emphasis on the determinant role of language. The Texas Czech-Moravians were distinct among Czech communities in America in that neither numerically nor culturally did they represent an immigrant microcosm of the Czech Lands. Some eighty percent of Czech- Moravian immigrants in Texas were natives of the highlands of northeastern Moravia adjacent to Slovak and Polish territory. Bohemia and Austrian Silesia with Moravia form the historical lands of the Czech Kingdom, which during the centuries preceding the creation of Czechoslovakia in 1918 were under Austrian rule. The traditional culture, religious traditions, and spoken language distinguished the highlands of northeastern Moravia from the other Czech Lands to the west. The homeland ethnicity has been described in Texas in various ways: Czech, Czecho-Slavic, Czecho-Slovak, Czech-Moravian, Moravian, Bohemian, and Slavic. Each of those names relates to a specific historical period and to distinct political, cultural, and social influences. Identity had been shaped by the loss of Czech independence over the centuries, as the Czech Kingdom came under Austrian rule, by historical religious struggles, and by the emigration or assimilation of the native Slav nobility. More recently, popular perceptions of identity shifted with the creation of Czechoslovakia, the Second World War, the modification of political borders in 1945, the establishment of the pro-Soviet communist government, and the events of 1993 that resulted in the breakup of Czechoslovakia and the establishment of the Czech Republic.