Archival Records about Croats in Brazil: the (in)Visibility of the Community between Primary Sources and Scientific Literature

Abstract

The paper presents and describes archival records about Croats in Brazil and consequently on emigrants from Croatia in relation to that country, with the aim to enable easier access to future researchers and interested readers of this subject matter. The starting hypothesis is that the Croatian emigrant community is still relatively invisible in the context of migratory studies, as well as in general terms within the recipient country and the Croatian homeland. This is due to various reasons: the quantity and the accessibility of written records, possibilities of research and financing academic journeys to Brazil or Croatia, presence and activities of emigrants with the purpose of connecting and maintaining relations with the homeland, decreased emphasis on the national identity or lesser awareness of it with many emigrants, economic and political structural imbalance of the community in the new homeland in relation to other ethnic groups, relations of the local leaders and representatives of institutions, late opening and unstable work of consulates and embassies, the ideology of racial mixing and the conceptualization of identity according to the ius solis principle as the dominant model of Brazil’s national policy towards immigrants and their integration into the Brazilian national corpus. Also important in that regard is the emigrational policy of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy which mostly favoured emigration of Slavic population, as is that of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia that strived to decrease the number of other minorities that were not part of the contemporary Yugoslav national corpus by favouring the departure for Brazil as a melting pot country. Besides outlining the particularities of the relations between these two countries in which migrations are salient for understanding and closer ties, the paper puts special emphasis on the invisibility of archival records i.e. sources. The invisibility is explained as the result of poor archival policy and failure to register information on immigration, both of which are necessary in order to acquire and preserve records, as well as the result of the forced national cohesion in the 1930s, which became instrumental in shutting down all institutions with ethnic features. Selfcensorship appeared after 1964 due to the policy of Brazilian nationalism, which forced immigrant communities to hide or not to care for their joint and/or institutional past and memory. Bearing all that in mind, this paper can serve as a starting point for future research that will cast light on the complex history of immigrant Croats and their progeny in the largest South American country and at the same time serve as a point of contact between the two countries, since there is a general view that such points do not exist. The paper starts with a brief introduction, followed by three projects that charted and systematised archival records as the first step in creating a consistent database which will be accessible in the future. The main ideas and the context of the creation of the most important scientific works for this subject matter are explained next, ending with the description of archival records relevant for the history of Croatian immigration i.e. immigration from Croatia to Brazil, with the special emphasis on the correlation between primary and secondary sources, as well as the contributions of the community/homes and academic research. The paper presents existing projects,

books and papers and by analysing them strives to demonstrate how to reverse the invisibility of the Croatian immigrant community and sources. It also delineates the institutional projects created via different collaborations, including the one between the community and the Unicentro University, archival records that became available because of that, as well as academic papers that deal with records in critical and analytical manner. These records also contain sources that are not widely accessible or quotable. Researching and understanding this topic is a formidable task regarding the approach (both in terms of language and physicality), but it is at the same time very promising. A certain amount of conducted scientific research does exist, but the large part of the records has not yet been systematised and processed. This should be done and then with additional new papers become a part of a wider field of migration studies in Croatia and the world.