The Czechs in Texas

Dear reader,
I promise to continue the tail from my last post and take you to Israel and Palestine. For now I am taking a brief detour from the land of memory to write about some of my people, the Czech Texans.

Heritage
parts of who I am, part of the makeup of me
I, the duplicity of being many things and only one thing
Self, reclaiming polka, reclaiming dirt under the fingernails,
reclaiming the sound of a tongue never spoken in my home.
Choosing to focus on one part of me, the me of my last name the people of my fathers father, the farmers of rural Texas and Rural Moravia, The people who chose Texas in all her glory to make their home, tell me your story

I am learning so much living in Texas. It is a heart felt experience doing the research of my immigrant people's to the United States. I love seeing small towns on the map of central Texas that have my families last name as the name of the main drag. Being an immigrant minority with a hard to say last name has not been easy. I have often wondered who my people are? What does it mean to be from the former Czechoslovakia? Also how did my people end up in Texas? I am finding out the answers to these questions and constructing a film all about it. It is so exciting being in the throws of a new and very personal project.

Today I read an account from one of the earliest settlers in Cat Spring Texas, Austin county. He talked about coming to the US to flee economic and religious persecution in Bohemia. He arrived here with all his children and started off living with friends and relatives until they saved enough to have their own farm. At this time the civil war broke out and Czechs were being forced to join the confederate army.
"Here I was fleeing my homeland, where I was a serf to the ruling German Hapsburg, and now I am being forced to defend slavery and fight to keep it in place." It is heart breaking to imagine. Many Czechs hid to not be taken into the army or opted to do manual labor in Mexico, hauling cotton. The man who write the account had a son that died doing this brutal work. I am learning how the civil war affected immigration, also about the importance of the cotton trade with Mexico to keep the confederacy economically afloat. It reminds me of the maquiladoras today where Mexicans are being badly treated and payed unfairly to produce tons of cheap clothing for people in the US.

I want my sweet pea to know about her people. I don't expect her to take the same kind of fascination with it that I have, but I want her to know where her people came from and have sensual memories of this place. That is one of the reasons we moved to Texas, to soak up this land and build our own experiences into the landscape of stories I only heard growing up. I am learning a lullaby in Czech. I have the melody and am now working on the words. This song I know my daughter will take with her. It can be her special piece in a great symphony of heritages we have blessed her with. If this is the only Czech she and I learn together I know I will have done a good job, passing on one of our native tongues.