American Ethnicity and Czech Immigrants’ Integration in Texas: Cemetery Data

The lasting traces of Czech immigration to Texas and the once prominent immigrant community lead to the cemeteries. The purpose of this study is to show how to read Czech cemetery data in Texas from the 1860s to the 1950s in order to understand the immigrants’ integration and contact with their German neighbors and the dominant Anglo-American society. To immigrants in the middle of the 19th century, Texas offered land and freedom of movement. But the reasons to return home outweighed those to stay for some of the earliest immigrants who were unable to align themselves with networks established by the German immigrants who preceded them. Those who followed the pioneers lived within interethnic social structures that they gradually abandoned in favor of the ethnocentric Czech community. Language choices, the interplay of Czech and English, and the endurance of the Czech language in tombstone inscriptions yield synchronic and diachronic data whose analysis and interpretation reveal sociolinguistic networks of immigrants, rules of social cohesion and ethnic identity.