Following World War I, migration of ethnic Hungarians from Romania, Yugoslavia, and Hungary to South America, and especially Brazil and Argentina, skyrocketed. Most Hungarian migrants settled in the booming metropolises, in particular in Buenos Aires and São Paulo, and found employment as blue-collar workers. Diaspora leaders and the Hungarian government alike disapproved of this settlement pattern and urged ethnically closed, agrarian settlements with the hope to retain ethnic identity. In doing so, they copied the well-trodden path of other settler colonists hailing from Central and Eastern Europe, most importantly, Germans and Poles. This paper will contextualize the Hungarian migration in Brazil and Argentina by comparing the settlement policies and discourses with Polish and German narratives. It will argue that the lower migration numbers and the later onset of the en masse migration explain the difference in contemporary representations of the settler communities.

This article explores the Habsburg Empire’s influence on interwar Polish and Austrian emigrant colonial projects in South America. It traces these initiatives to late nineteenth-century Galician and Austrian activists who, concerned about the exploitation of their nations’ labor migrants abroad, sought to redirect workers from racialized occupations in Western Europe and the United States to linguistically homogeneous settler colonies on the frontiers of Brazil and Argentina. Although these activists failed to fully implement their emigrant colonial visions within the Habsburg Empire, the article examines their afterlives in the Austrian and Polish successor states. It reconstructs the elective affinities and connections between Polish and Austrian colonial enthusiasts, from their collaboration in the 1890s Austrian-Hungarian Colonial Society through the 1920s when they finally institutionalized their visions as official policy in their respective republics. By highlighting the personal and conceptual relations between Austrian and Polish expansionists, this paper argues that their shared Habsburg roots gave them more in common with each other than with other emigrant colonialists of the interwar years. In illuminating the legacies of Austrian-Hungarian emigrant colonialism in the Polish and Austrian successor states, this study demonstrates the lasting imprint of the Habsburg Empire on the political imaginaries of migration policymakers who outlived it.

Following the First World War, the emigrants residing in the United States were massively ‘returning’ to the countries of East Central Europe, including Yugoslavia. A few more came to the fledgling South Slavic state in the ensuing period, especially in the wake of the Great Depression. Enticing the migrants to ‘return’ became one of the cornerstones of Yugoslavia’s nationally underpinned migration policies. The latter were formed as a response to the socio-political transformations following the Great War, and especially the shifts in the international migration regime. With the global push towards state interventionism and migration restrictions, managing human movement became one of the pillars of the country’s nation-building. The emigrant return was thus embedded in Yugoslavia’s ethnic engineering: by participating in the programs of internal colonization, the returnees were to settle nationally sensitive areas and therefore replace the unwanted ethnic minorities. The aim of the paper is twofold. First, by setting the country in the East Central European context, it will display Yugoslavia’s comparative feebleness in advancing diaspora programs. Second, it will reflect on the policies of emigrant return, resulting also from the country’s inability of emigrant oversight. It will argue that while the discourse on these policies was plentiful, their actual impact was hardly visible. Yet, despite the meager effect, long term consequences should be considered, given that socialist Yugoslavia in the first decade of its existence (while still being an autarkic state) regarded the emigrant return as a vehicle for the country’s economic development.

The presentation should focus on Czech and German migrants to central Mexico (the states of Puebla and Tlaxcala) that arose since the late 19th century thanks to the modernization efforts of Porfirio Díaz and the development of the textile industry in need of specialized workers of various professions. They were disturbed considerably by the Mexican revolution, the social and political turmoil that followed it (especially the Cristero war) as well as the global economic crisis of the 1930s. Yet the two “national” communities continued their existence, within, but at the same time separate from the local Mexican society. The presentation will depart from a unique documentation left by a Czech migrant (autobiography, correspondence) that reveals both the functioning of the Czech community and the relations of its members to the German one. While ostensibly manifesting their allegiances to the “old motherland”, the Czech and the Germans nevertheless sought the company of each other in the unfamiliar surroundings of revolutionary Mexico.