Hrvati u Brazilu kao nevidljivo iseljeništvo
Croats in Brazil as an Invisible Diaspora

Summary/Abstract: In this paper, we present a thematic and methodological-theoretical history of immigration in Brazil, divided into three periods (up to 1918, from 1918 to 1945, and after 1945), in order to explain the causes of invisibility of this Croatian community and to point to the effects of the immigration policy that set up Brazil as the “disposal area” of marginal groups. We have pointed to historical events that prompted people to go from Croatia to Brazil, which made this country one of the three major emigrant recipients in Latin America even though not much attention has been given to it by the scientific community or in politics. We then interpreted the statistical data and estimates related to the number of immigrants in the country using a mixed methodology of quantitative and qualitative approaches to assess the current number of persons of Croatian heritage in Brazil. We continued with an analysis of prints, testimonies, and reports that describe the life of the community itself. These offer us insight into lower-level mechanisms that have influenced the deliberate disappearance of Croats, which has become one of the major characteristics of the community as a historical construct. In addition, we have highlighted ways in which media writing and some other instances were in constant dispute over the definition of the very experience of emigration, sometimes with positive viewpoints, but most often with negative ones, that over time became exclusive, thus contributing to the disappearance of Croats-Brazilians from the official destination maps. We end the article with a review of the relationship between the emigrant and his individual adjustment to the situation, which necessarily contributed to the hybrid identity that the Brazilian state officially encouraged, and enabled him to gain a better position and greater rights in the new society.

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