9
Portugal itself faces the Atlantic, and its islands lie part way to the New World. Constantly looking outward onto the sea, it was natural for the islanders, particularly those of the Azores, to see the Americas as a near neighbour and a desirable destination. For centuries the New World had meant only Brazil, but in the nineteenth century many Portuguese emigrants began to go to the Caribbean, to various parts of Spanish America and to the Anglophone US and Canada. Portuguese emigrants settling in English-speaking areas of the New World found a foreign language environment and a racist culture that raised barriers to settlement and integration that they did not find in Spanish America.
The Caribbean
The establishment of Portuguese communities in the Caribbean provides one of history’s subtle ironies. The Portuguese had been among Europe’s leading slave traders and had been the last European nation finally to abandon the trade in the 1840s. But, just as the flow of black slaves from Africa was at last reduced to a trickle and as first Britain and then France abolished slavery, so poor Portuguese found themselves substituting for the black slaves on Caribbean plantations.
The first emigrants to the Caribbean came from the Azores and were recruited privately to go to Trinidad in 1834—the very year of the abolition of slavery in the British Empire—and they arrived on board the same ships which had been used in the slave trade. The next year emigrants from Madeira were recruited for British Guiana and in the years up to 1846 12,000 arrived in that colony, escaping the famine conditions in their homeland.1 The earliest emigrants had been recruited as contract labourers, but these contracts were forbidden by the Portuguese authorities in 1836 and subsequent emigrants went on a purely voluntary basis, encouraged by unofficial agents who received bounties on the numbers they recruited. The Madeiran authorities tried to control this outflow but their attempts merely led to a rise in clandestine emigration. In the course of the nineteenth century 86 per cent of all Madeiran emigrants went to the Caribbean and 70 per cent of those to British Guiana, so that by 1889 there were 36,724 settled there.2 In the 1870s, however, Hawaii replaced Guiana as the preferred destination for Madeirans.3
One unusual feature of the emigration from Madeira to Trinidad was the number of religious refugees. Conversions to Protestantism had begun to increase in Madeira as a result of the missionary work of Dr Robert Kalley, and in 1844 a persecution began. This persuaded some hundreds of Protestant Madeirans to emigrate at first to Trinidad, from where many went subsequently to Hawaii, while others moved on to form a colony of Madeirans in Illinois.4
Trinidad thus acquired two separate groups of migrants from Madeira, as the Protestants and Roman Catholics formed very distinct communities. In other respects Madeiran emigration followed a familiar pattern. The first emigrants were single males, mostly poor and with little education, referred to by a local newspaper in Trinidad as ‘the mere sweepings of the lanes and crossings’.5 Many workers sent to the sugar plantations died of disease, while others soon departed to the healthier cocoa plantations or to take up urban employment. Unlike the pattern that became familiar in countries like the US, the Portuguese did not remain in a closed community but dispersed through the island, and when Tobago was joined to Trinidad in 1889 some of them settled in that island as well.
By the last decade of the century many of the earlier migrants had been joined by family members. The Madeirans ran small businesses in the island towns—typically so-called ‘rum-shops’, the profession of cantineiro being one that Portuguese found congenial in many countries where they settled. However, they were also to be found in a wide variety of other urban occupations, as shopkeepers, domestic servants, mechanics, seamstresses, petty traders, general labourers as well as clerks, barbers, drivers, overseers and managers.
Jo-Anne Ferreira describes the complexity of Trinidadian society where upper-class people of British origin occupied the highest reaches of the racial pyramid and where
the Portuguese … are sometimes referred to as ‘Trinidad white’, implying that they are not fully but partially “white”. For many years upper class Euro-Trinidadians did not consider the Portuguese to be “white” because of the stereotypical Mediterranean olive-skinned complexion of many. Centuries of miscegenation have produced Portuguese of a variety of descriptions, ranging from the very fair to the very dark.
Non-whites also
did not consider the Portuguese to be their social superiors and therefore felt no obligation to treat them with any deference or particular regard. Some women, however, willingly fraternised with Portuguese men in a purposeful effort to give their children a “white” father.6
Although some people from the islands continued to arrive throughout the twentieth century, the Portuguese became increasingly integrated with other groups. The number of people in the Portuguese community had never been large and, as there was never any concentrated Portuguese settlement, ‘now, not even the descendants of these shopkeepers are recognised as “Portuguese” by most outsiders to the community, mainly because of the social and racial assimilation of members of this relatively small group’.7 The Portuguese were last counted as a separate ethnic group in Trinidad in the 1960 census, when they numbered 2,416. By the twenty-first century a Portuguese identity had often become just a folk-memory, marked if at all by family names or by Portuguese traditions in the local cuisine. Access to the internet, however, and the increasing level of education of many descendants of Portuguese immigrants have led to a revival of interest in the Portuguese heritage and family history of many West Indians which had become almost extinct. It is possible that this rediscovery of family histories may lead to the re-establishment of active links with the wider Portuguese world.8
Planters in St Kitts, Antigua and St Vincent also sought to attract immigrant labour once slavery had been abolished. Between 1845 and 1848 some 2,000 Portuguese settled in St Vincent and a further 2,500 in Antigua. The immigrants mostly came from Madeira and at first were paid eight pence a day, ‘less than half the first class wage of native labourers’,9 although they received free housing, land for growing food, salt meat and medical attention. There was a frighteningly high death rate—on one plantation 26 out 58 immigrants dying within a year.10 After serving their initial contracts, the surviving Portuguese immigrants either sought work on other islands or turned to running bars or small shops. However, a description of the Portuguese as essentially small-time shop owners is not the whole story. As encumbered estates were sold up during the course of the century, some of the wealthier Portuguese invested in land and became themselves owners of plantations.
Most of the Madeiran immigrants who arrived in these islands were not indentured labourers as their Indian contemporaries were, and this left them free to move from plantation labour to other occupations, although it also meant they did not have paid return passages to their homeland. Most of them stayed in the islands but, because they were doing work that had, until very recently, been done by black slaves, as in Trinidad, they were not accepted as members of the ‘white’ community and were treated as a separate ethnic category somewhere between white and black.11 This, together with the fact that most were Roman Catholic, made their integration into the existing white community a slow process. Neither did they integrate with the black population, and in the second half of the nineteenth century there were outbreaks of violence against the Portuguese by the black population in British Guiana in 1848, 1856 and 1889 and in St Vincent in 1862. This was a consequence of their success in small-scale businesses that was perceived as a form of exploitation of the black working class.
In search of fresh opportunities, and perhaps a more congenial racial environment, many Portuguese made their way from the British islands where they had first arrived to French, Spanish and Dutch Caribbean territories, and in the 1850s, as a codicil to Portugal’s role in supplying the world with cheap labour, Cuba brought in 125,000 Chinese labourers using Macao, as a recruitment centre and Portuguese ships to transport the workers.12
Bermuda also received a number of Portuguese immigrants. Between 1815 and 1850, as the era of shipbuilding and seafaring came to a close, economic change swept over the island. Slavery was abolished in the 1830s and in 1847 the legislature voted £400 in bounties for those shipping companies that could recruit Portuguese immigrants from the Azores and Madeira to work on the farms, where it was hoped they might introduce a wine industry. The remainder of the nineteenth century saw a steady, though small, drift of Portuguese to Bermuda to work in agriculture, and by the 1870s the growing of onions by Portuguese immigrants had turned into an important export line. By 1900 the Portuguese population in Bermuda numbered 1,017. In 1922 the Immigrant Labour Board again sought to recruit agricultural labourers from the Azores and over 400 islanders arrived during the ensuing two years. In the 1930s additional recruits were obtained to work in the nascent tourist industry.13 As a result of this continuing immigration, the Portuguese community in Bermuda has maintained its identity better than Portuguese communities in some of the other islands, and in 1997 the Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Affairs recorded distinct Portuguese populations in the Caribbean only in Bermuda, Aruba and the Dutch Antilles.14
British Guiana received by far the largest influx of Portuguese from Madeira and their history has been lovingly recorded by Mary Noel Menezes. At first their story followed very much the same trajectory as that of the Madeirans who went to other islands. Initially they were welcomed by the planters who saw in them the potential for a large and hard-working labour force, but within a few years problems had arisen. A large number of the new arrivals died as a result of disease exacerbated by poor living conditions. Two Commissions were actually appointed, in 1839 and 1841, to look into the causes of this mortality. The governor, Henry Light, always ambivalent about the Portuguese, wrote to London that
the Portuguese are very filthy in their habits, averse from medicine; no priest being on the coast to encourage them, they desponded at the first attacks of disease. Eager to gain money while in health, they overworked themselves in spite of the remonstrances of their employers, before they were acclimatised.15
As a result, official recruitment was stopped between 1842 and 1846, though by that time emigration from Madeira was self-sustaining and needed no recruitment agents.
A further problem was that many of the Madeirans rapidly left the plantations to which they had been assigned and began to earn their living either as itinerant traders or as shopkeepers. The keeping of food or rum shops was always a family business, which greatly reduced overheads, and in this the Madeirans were assisted by the close connections maintained with communities in Madeira, who supplied the emigrants with agricultural and other produce to stock their shops.
By the 1850s many Portuguese were making good money in retail trade and there were allegations that they were operating a virtual monopoly which excluded black Guianese. ‘It is no common praise,’ wrote The Colonist in 1852, ‘to a race who came here scarce ten years ago destitute and penniless, that, in many instances, they are now wealthy merchants.’16 Immigrants continued to arrive, partly because conditions in Madeira remained very hard but also because the kinship and communal networks drew ever more people to seek opportunities in what was seen as an extension of Madeira on the South American continent.
As the numbers increased and the community became more prosperous, the Madeirans took steps to create an infrastructure of institutions to support their community. First was the building of churches—the church of the Sacred Heart being erected for the Portuguese community in Georgetown in 1860—followed by schools, welfare organisations, musical groups and theatres. The first Portuguese-medium schools were opened in the 1860s and a college in 1890.17 The Portuguese Benevolent Society was founded in 1875 with the object of providing ‘relief to the sick, the elderly, the imprisoned, the unemployed, those unable to work, widows and orphans and to provide funeral and burial expenses’—a nineteenth-century reinvention of the Misericórdia of past centuries.18 There was also a determined effort to keep the Portuguese language alive and to foster Madeiran culture in all its forms. Priests used the Portuguese language in church and the festivals were those specific to Portugal, including the celebration of 1 December, the day that commemorated Portugal’s independence from Spain in 1640. The result of this was that the Madeiran community remained very separate from other communities in Guiana, marrying among themselves and not mixing with the British or with Indians or black Guianese. Some people who had made money returned to Madeira where they were known as Demeraristas, and the community in Guiana made a point of retaining close links with their homeland even to the extent of refusing naturalisation and, on occasions, sending petitions to the king of Portugal. As early as 1855 the Portuguese government appointed a consul in Guiana as if in recognition of the continuing Portuguese identity of the immigrants. In 1898 the Madeiran community celebrated in style the five hundredth anniversary of Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India, even going so far as to name their newly founded cycling club the Vasco da Gama Club.19
Throughout the nineteenth century the Madeirans in Guiana suffered the same discrimination from the race-conscious society of the British Caribbean as those who went to Trinidad. Brian Moore maintained that ‘on account of their racial affinity to the dominant white classes, they enjoyed a social importance out of proportion to their numerical position’;20 but they were never accepted as social equals of the British. In the censuses carried out by the British, the Portuguese were placed in a category apart from other Europeans and this has, apparently, persisted in post-independence population counts where the nationality backgrounds of the population are listed as Europe, Portugal, Africa, China and India.21
The Portuguese also suffered from the hostility of other ethnic groups, notably the black ‘creole’ Guianese. Brian Moore attributed this hostility to the commercial success of the Portuguese, which had been achieved largely at the expense of the creoles, who were ruthlessly exploited by the Portuguese store owners. In this, he claims, they were aided and abetted by the British upper classes which, even if they did not mix with the Portuguese socially, saw in them a white middle class which would provide a buffer against the vastly greater numbers of creoles and Indians. On three occasions the hostility of the creoles erupted in rioting and looting of Portuguese shops. The first occasion was in 1848, when the Portuguese had refused to join a strike of plantation workers. The second occasion occurred in 1856, following an anti-Catholic campaign orchestrated by a creole speaker known as the ‘Angel Gabriel’. The third occasion in 1889 followed the murder by a Portuguese of his creole mistress.22
Towards the end of the century increasing numbers of young Madeirans in search of access to the professions were sent to Roman Catholic schools in Britain, notably Stonyhurst and Mount St Mary, and by 1900 people of Portuguese origin were not only practising in all the professions but had become substantial property owners and had belatedly started to seek election to political office. However, as their status rose, this, paradoxically, seemed to accelerate their disappearance as a distinct ethnic group. In spite of the large numbers of Madeirans who had gone to British Guiana in the nineteenth century, the distinct Portuguese community there shrank in size, partly through people returning to Madeira or moving on to other American destinations and partly through integration in the wider community. According to the information gathered by the Observatório da Emigração, the population in Guiana of Portuguese origin in 2002 was only 1,500.23
The story of the Guiana Portuguese, their exclusiveness, their passionate clinging to their Portuguese identity, their creation of institutions to support their community, are all very reminiscent of the Portuguese Sephardic Jews and the community they created in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century.
With the possible exception of Bermuda, by the last quarter of the nineteenth century Portuguese had ceased to emigrate to the Caribbean as labourers, though some family members from Madeira, who were recruited to join established Portuguese businesses, continued to settle in Trinidad as late as 1975. In the twentieth century many descendants of the original Portuguese population moved on from the Caribbean to the US and Britain. Although the Portuguese community had been well organised in the nineteenth century, supporting Portuguese language papers, Portuguese social clubs and churches, Portuguese ethnic identity and links with Portugal and Madeira weakened in the course of the twentieth century. Second and third generation Portuguese moved increasingly into the tertiary sector, aided by the available educational opportunities, and the use of the Portuguese language largely disappeared.
In the history of the Portuguese diaspora it is comparatively rare to find descendants of Portuguese immigrants playing an important role in politics. There are, however, two exceptions to this among the Caribbean Portuguese. Two men, descendants of Portuguese immigrants, have been prominent in Caribbean politics: Albert Gomes who was Trinidad’s chief minister on the eve of independence, and Ralph Gonçalves who became prime minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines in 2001.
Argentina
As has been described in an earlier chapter, the period between 1580 and 1640, when the Portuguese and Spanish Crowns were united, saw large numbers of Portuguese settling in and around the major Spanish American cities, especially the settlements on the Río de la Plata. This great river seemed to many people to mark a natural boundary between Portuguese and Spanish America, and in the seventeenth century the Portuguese, eager to secure a share of the commerce with the interior, planted an outpost on the north bank of the river, which became known as Colónia do Sacramento. Portuguese soldiers garrisoned the town and settlers and traders made their way from São Paulo south to the river, in the process gradually occupying the coastal regions which became the province of Rio Grande do Sul. These settlers were not so much immigrants coming direct from Portugal as Portuguese already settled in Brazil who were migrating to find new opportunities on the frontier. Throughout the eighteenth century Colónia do Sacramento was fought over and changed hands many times before Portugal finally abandoned the town in 1776. By this time, however, large numbers of Portuguese were settled throughout the Río de la Plata basin and in 1816, six years after the effective independence of Buenos Aires from Spain, they constituted the second largest immigrant group in the city.24 The Portuguese at this time formed a wide social spectrum, from wealthy merchants who married into local Spanish families to contraband traders and comparatively humble artisans.
Settlement in Argentina was, therefore, already woven into the tapestry of the Portuguese diaspora when large-scale migration from Portugal to ex-Spanish South America began in the late nineteenth century. This migration, from 1870 onwards, was similar in some respects to the contemporary migration to Brazil, though in Argentina there was no organised recruitment of contract workers for plantation labour. Most immigrants were young males and the employment opportunities they found as cart drivers, porters and day labourers were largely unskilled occupations.25 As in Brazil the early immigrants usually came with the intention of returning to their families in Portugal, but in time increasing numbers of women and children crossed the Atlantic to join their families and to settle permanently in the New World.
Marcelo Borges estimates that between 1857 and 1959 around 80,000 Portuguese arrived in Argentina (averaging 800 a year)—more than half between 1910 and 1930, which was one of the peak periods for emigration from Portugal. There was a sharp rise in immigration again between 1946 and 1956, the peak year being 1951 when 2,000 Portuguese passports were issued for Argentina.26 The vast majority of these immigrants came from two regions of Portugal: the Algarve and Guarda regions. This regional origin gave the emigration to Argentina a special character, markedly different, for example, from the emigration to the US or Canada where the principal region of origin was the Azores. By contrast the Atlantic islands only contributed an average of 3.4 per cent of Portuguese migrants to Argentina.27 Within the areas of Algarve and Guarda there was also a high concentration in certain districts, and Borges has shown that as much as 14 per cent of all immigrants came from the single town and district of Loulé in the Algarve. Outside Buenos Aires there was a close link between places of origin and places of settlement, brought about by the operation of the networks which facilitated the migration—migrants leaving Portugal to join friends, neighbours and kin already settled abroad who could offer accommodation and general assistance to the prospective immigrant. Once again family and neighbourhood connections appear to be as important as the macro-economic conditions in the labour market in determining the patterns of migration.
According to the census of 1914, 80 per cent of the population described as Portuguese lived in the city of Buenos Aires or in the surrounding province, a distribution that had changed little by 1960. The rest were scattered widely in other provincial centres. Outside the capital 40 per cent of Portuguese lived in rural areas or worked in agricultural occupations, where the demand for labour was seasonal and therefore attracted workers looking for seasonal employment.28 This pattern repeated itself as immigration continued, but over time a larger percentage sought work in the cities. In the rural areas around Buenos Aires the pattern was for the first Portuguese arrivals to be seasonal workers who returned to Portugal in the winter. This made good sense as the southern hemisphere summer, when demand for labour was highest, coincided with the northern hemisphere winter, and men might cross and re-cross the Atlantic two or three times. This strong tradition of seasonal migration was quite different from the patterns of emigration and settlement in North America. Eventually a man’s family would join him in Argentina and he would settle permanently. This influx of migrant labour largely ceased after the 1930s and second and third generation Portuguese were less inclined to work as labourers. Many now owned land and had become independent farmers in their own right.29
In the western Pampas the Portuguese settled around Salliquelo and Casbas, and most came from the same limited areas of Portugal. The Portuguese who went to Patagonia, however, were not going to settlements that were already well established; they were true pioneers. The city of Comodoro Rivadavia was only founded in 1901 and Portuguese, mainly from the Algarve, were among the first settlers. When oil prospecting took off after 1907, Portuguese enrolled as workers in the oilfields and became the largest single immigrant group in the region. Again single men predominated among the first arrivals, with family reunification becoming the established pattern after 1940.30
Another area where Portuguese immigrants settled in significant numbers was Villa Elisa in the Entre Ríos province. Again the Portuguese immigrants mostly came from the same region of the Algarve and concentrated in the flower growing business. As Borges wrote, ‘knowing what to expect and counting on the assistance of kin and paisanos [fellow countrymen] gave immigrants who used those channels more possibilities of relative success’.31 There were fewer failures and less return migration among people who had come from areas which had already provided most immigrants, suggesting that the support networks were in general very effective.
The first Portuguese Mutual Aid Associations had begun to appear around 1916, and in 2006 there were 52 Portuguese associations of one sort or another in Argentina.32 During the 1970s a number of new ethnic associations were founded: for example the Clube Português de Esteban Echeverria founded in 1978 and the Casa de Portugal Nuestra Señora de Fatima founded in 1981 in Villa Elisa. In general the founding of associations took place a decade or so after immigration ceased and reflected the growing prosperity of the Portuguese immigrants. These associations, it has been claimed, assumed to some extent the role of ‘ambassadors of Portugal in the new society’—though their image of Portugal was often far removed from the new realities of the country they had left.33
Given the large numbers who had emigrated to Argentina, it is surprising that the Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Affairs estimated in 1997 that there were only 16,000 Portuguese in Argentina—though this may be the number of those who still held Portuguese citizenship. In 2011 there were only 6,490 registered with the Portuguese consulate. These low numbers certainly suggest that there was an effective degree of integration by Portuguese migrants into Argentinian society.
Alongside the Portuguese, some Cape Verdeans also settled in Argentina. Most came as sailors and settled in the port towns of the Río de la Plata. Although Cape Verdeans had their own association in Ensenada as early as 1927, most of the immigration apparently took place in the 1940s and 1950s when the US was effectively closed to Cape Verdean immigration. One estimate suggests that in the first decade of the twenty-first century there were around 4,000 Cape Verdeans, or descendants of Cape Verdeans, in Argentina, but numbers are especially difficult to calculate as many Cape Verdeans have always considered themselves to be Portuguese and their descendants continue to hold on to that identity.34
Uruguay
Montevideo, lying opposite Buenos Aires on the Río de la Plata, was part of the same Spanish province until 1810, after which a series of confused wars led to the partial incorporation into Brazil of the Banda Oriental, as the left bank of the river was known. After further conflict, the region, which included the old Portuguese settlement of Colónia do Sacramento, became the independent state of Uruguay in 1828. As a result of the close relations with Brazil there were always a significant number of Portuguese traders, ship owners and artisans working in the country.
Although there was never any mass Portuguese immigration directly to Uruguay, settlers from southern Brazil moved in towards the end of the nineteenth century and two visible Portuguese communities grew up: in the capital and in Salto on the Uruguay River. A study made in 2007 described the Portuguese community in Salto as well-organised and very conscious of itself, though rather distant from Portugal. The Portuguese community in Uruguay is a good example of the use of a ‘Portuguese’ ethnic identity acting as an aid to community building rather than being a reflection of family ties with Portugal. The focus of the community was the Casa de Portugal, the heir of an old mutual aid association, the Sociedad Portuguesa de Beneficiencia, which had been founded in 1882. The main activities of the Casa were cultural and it had the responsibility of maintaining the Portuguese cemetery, but ‘with rare exceptions none of these people [its members] speak Portuguese and only a few keep contact with Portugal’.35 For many, ‘Portugal became progressively a distant reality, although symbolically strong…. It is striking, the degree to which many of these people feel Portuguese even without speaking the language or having ever been to Portugal,’ wrote Helena Carreiras. She described how in 2005 it was proposed to name a new school in the Salto region the Escola de Portugal. This involved consultations within the community and with parents, ‘data collection on the Portuguese presence in the area, collection of old documents, photos and family stories through interviews’. The inauguration involved preparing Portuguese food and rehearsing Portuguese dances. The national anthems of Uruguay and Portugal were to be sung and this ‘forced the association to search for the music and words of the Portuguese anthem, with no guarantee that someone would be able to sing it’. A collection of books given by Portugal, she concluded, will probably be regarded ‘as museum pieces with no practical utility’.36
The Casa de Portugal in Montevideo also grew out of earlier mutual aid societies. When surveyed in 2006, 80 per cent of its membership was made up of immigrants or the descendants of immigrants, but there was an interesting 20 per cent of people with other ethnic backgrounds who wanted to assume some kind of Portuguese identity. A description of its activities is probably typical of the activities of such organisations throughout the world:
Among the variety of activities of the Casa de Portugal there is the commemoration of the civic days of Portugal and Uruguay, the organization of Portuguese language courses, feasts, cultural events and conferences, as well as a weekly radio program Voz Lusitana. Although broadcast in Spanish, it disseminates news from the community and information and music from Portugal. The frequent visits of renowned Portuguese artists and intellectuals as well as public authorities are accompanied with special pride.… The Casa de Portugal also has an active folkloric group (rancho) of some fifty people, formed by Portuguese and youngsters of no Portuguese descent.37
In addition the Casa sends delegates to the Encontros das Comunidades Portuguesas e Luso-Descendentes do Cone-Sul (Meeting of the Communities of Portuguese and Descendants of Portuguese in the Southern Cone) founded in 1988.
At the end of the twentieth century it was estimated that there were possibly 10,000 people in Uruguay who could claim a Portuguese origin and 1,100 registered Portuguese. In the seventeenth century there were numerous communities, particularly in Asia, which thought of themselves as in some way ‘Portuguese’ but which had little connection with Portugal either direct or indirect. In spite of the activities of the Casas de Portugal, being ‘Portuguese’ in twenty-first-century Uruguay has something of the same flavour about it.
Venezuela
In central Venezuela there is a river called ‘Río Portuguesa’ which in 1909 gave its name to a separate province. However, it does not appear that this name has anything to do with the settlement of Portuguese immigrants. Tradition merely records that the river was given that name when a Portuguese woman was drowned in it.
Venezuela only became an important destination for Portuguese migrants in the 1950s at a time when emigration to the US was still difficult and Canada had barely started recruiting Portuguese workers. Between 1955 and 1974 75,211 Portuguese immigrants were recorded (an average of 4,000 a year). It was the rapid growth of Venezuela’s oil industry that created the opportunities and drew in the migrants. The peak year for migration was 1965, as it was for those going to northern Europe. Venezuela was a destination which particularly attracted Madeirans and 43,992 emigrants (41.1 per cent of the total) came from that island, mostly from Funchal. Aveiro and Porto were the only areas of mainland Portugal which provided a significant number.38 A number of political exiles also found their way to Venezuela—the most famous of them being Henrique Galvão who settled there after his notorious escape from prison in Lisbon in 1959.
Between 1975 and 1983 the numbers of immigrants remained consistently at around 2,700 a year (giving a total of 24,347), but between 1984 and 1990 immigrants numbered only 232 a year, reducing to just two recorded immigrants in 1989.39 In 2011 the Observatório da Emigração recorded 80,029 people born in Portugal and 121,939 with Portuguese nationality. The total number of people of Portuguese origin was 268,500.
The Portuguese community, like expatriate Portuguese nationals in many other countries, forms strong communal networks, banding together in a number of cultural, sporting and mutual aid organisations. As Nancy Gomes describes it, ‘the Portuguese community in Venezuela is very dynamic which is reflected in the numerous associations. There are more than fifty Portuguese or Luso-Venezuelan associations in Caracas and Valência, two of the largest cities in the country.’40 However, in spite of this impressive array of organisations, it has proved much easier for Portuguese living in Venezuela to integrate with the native population, with whom they share many cultural similarities and a language which can be easily learned, than it is for Portuguese immigrants in Canada or the US. It is very probable that the second and third generations of Portuguese will lose their distinct Portuguese identity as so many earlier emigrants to Argentina and Uruguay have done.
Canada
The Portuguese have had a long association with Canada. Portuguese navigators, chief among them João Álvares Fagundes, were the first to explore the maritime coast, giving a Portuguese name to Labrador (supposedly named after João Fernandes ‘o lavrador’). Large numbers of Portuguese were active in the Newfoundland cod fishery in the sixteenth century, and in the seventeenth century a few Portuguese individuals, women as well as men, settled in Quebec under French auspices.41 There was one Portuguese woman who made a dramatic intervention in the history of French Canada. In 1734 a slave woman, Marie Joseph Angélique, born in Madeira but owned by a French family in Montreal, set fire to her owner’s house with the consequent destruction of a whole sector of the town. Tried as an arsonist, she was sentenced by the court to have her hand cut off and to be burned alive—a sentence commuted on appeal to torture followed by hanging.42 It is interesting that this celebrated and much discussed case is not mentioned at all by David Higgs and Grace Anderson in their history of the Portuguese in Canada. However, it is the argument of this book that slaves, especially those born in Portugal, should be seen as part of the Portuguese diaspora and are inseparable from the currents of migration which spread Portuguese settlement around the world.
Unlike the emigration of Portuguese to Brazil or the US, the arrival of significant numbers of Portuguese in Canada only began in the 1950s and was the result of deliberate policy by the host country. In 1952 the Canadian government decided to encourage the immigration of Portuguese, initially because of an acute shortage of farm labour. The first immigrants arrived in 1953, settling in Toronto; then following the Capelinhos eruption in the Azores in 1958, a large number of displaced people left for Canada as well as the US. In 1959 the numbers arriving rose to 4,300 and in the 1960s an average of 6,500 arrived each year. According to Maria Baganha, between 1950 and 1988 138,000 Portuguese settled in Canada—accounting for 6 per cent of total emigration during that period. Numbers peaked in 1974 with 11,650 arrivals.43 Thereafter there was a notable deceleration. About one third came from continental Portugal and the rest from the Azores, the vast majority from São Miguel, which alone accounted for more migrants than the whole of continental Portugal. According to Jorge Arroteia, many of the immigrants did not come directly from Portugal but were moving on from a previous host country.44
In 2006, the Canadians estimated that there were a total of 410,850 persons of Portuguese descent living in Canada, or 1.3 per cent of the nation’s total population. Most Portuguese Canadians (69 per cent) were located in Ontario, primarily in Toronto, followed by Quebec with 14 per cent (mostly in Montreal) and British Columbia (8 per cent), with smaller populations in Manitoba and Alberta.45 In spite of the regular visits of the Portuguese White Fleet to Newfoundland until 1975, there appear to have been very few Portuguese who settled in the Maritime Provinces. What is clear is that the Portuguese community in Canada, in a comparatively short time, had grown to be one of the largest in the world of the Portuguese diaspora.
Research carried out in Toronto in 1989–90 showed that 72 per cent of immigrants were sponsored by family members already settled in Canada.46 This was the traditional pattern for migration that can be seen to have operated for hundreds of years, but in other respects Portuguese emigration to Canada reflected a major change. It was only in the 1960s that women began to leave Portugal in large numbers, and this is strikingly represented in Canadian immigration figures. Between 1962 and 1982 52 per cent of Portuguese immigrants of working age were women. Moreover, Wenona Giles, in her study of Portuguese women immigrants, concluded that women played a dominant role in the process of emigration, contacting networks of kin and organising the move.47
The first Portuguese immigrants who arrived in the 1950s came under contract to work on farms or on the railways. This was low-paid work which many of the immigrants found uncongenial or even impossible. There was a great deal of hardship, especially among those who did not know English, had no pre-existing network to help them and had no resources. Many drifted from one job to another, and this helped to create the stereotype of the unreliable, ignorant Portuguese immigrant.
Those who survived the early hardships gradually coalesced into compatriot communities in the main cities of Montreal, Toronto and Quebec. Here they found a variety of semi-skilled urban jobs, principally in construction, catering and cleaning. In the 1960s increasing numbers of Portuguese women came to reunite families, and with their arrival Portuguese neighbourhoods began to flourish: ‘sprucing up houses, planting vegetable gardens in their small front yards, and occasionally setting out a piece of religious statuary’.48 Carlos Teixeira quotes the description of the Portuguese neighbourhood of Kensington in Toronto by a reporter from the Toronto Star:
The Portuguese … like to paint their houses bright colours, scarlet being the favourite. They will even occasionally paint the mortar between the bricks white. They often grow cabbages and other vegetables in their front yards unless the yard contains a shrine to Our Lady of Fatima, in which case flowers are preferred…. Saints and religious figures were also depicted on azulejos [decorative ceramic tiles]… and placed beside the main door of the house. Immigrants brought the azulejos representing religious figures … as well as seeds for flowers and vegetables, directly from Portugal on their frequent trips back home.49
Portuguese families sought to buy houses, but to be able to do this in areas where the cost of houses was high required a great degree of cooperation within the Portuguese community, just as people would help their neighbours renovate properties. Edith Ferguson wrote about the importance of home ownership:
Owning a home is tremendously important to the rural immigrant…. In the villages of Italy and Portugal each family had its own home, even though it may have been small, poorly furnished and overcrowded. New immigrants find themselves here with no possessions, nothing but their hands. They bend every effort towards saving for a home, which gives them security, some roots and some status in the community. Without it they are nobodies.50
To help realise the dream of home ownership, it became common for Portuguese women, and even children, to try to supplement the family income by taking work in jobs that were often low paid and cash-in-hand, or they would accommodate single Portuguese in rented rooms to earn extra money.
As the Portuguese neighbourhoods grew, some Portuguese began to set up businesses to service the community. Prominent among these were the Portuguese ‘travel agents’ who offered a variety of services: translating, assistance with documents and financial advice, as well as helping to maintain links with Portugal or the Azores and providing assistance for other would-be immigrants. These agents have been described as mediators and, together with parish priests, the leaders of the community. As Caroline Brettell observed, ‘ethnicity is partially sustained in urban areas as a good business venture’.51
Although some second generation Portuguese moved out of the ‘ghetto’, the existence of the close-knit, largely self-supporting community, with its cultural life anchored in festas, the church and football, had established itself as the norm for the Portuguese community.
The vast majority of Portuguese migrants who came to North America were from very poor, often rural backgrounds and had very low levels of education. They came to take up unskilled work and, at least for the first two generations, tended to live in communities often surrounded by extended family or by neighbours who had come from the same localities in Portugal or the islands. As Fernando Nunes put it in 2003,
compared to Canada’s other minorities, the Portuguese–Canadian community … includes the highest proportion of individuals with only a primary school education (less than eight years), and one of the lowest percentages of those with some form of post-secondary education…. The situation is consistent with the Portuguese being found disproportionately in low-skilled, or unskilled manufacturing, construction and service occupations.52
The preoccupations and priorities of these immigrant communities centred on bettering their economic position, which they sought to realise by buying their own homes and establishing small businesses, typically the small, family owned grocery store. Achieving these objectives required the effort of all family members, even children of school age, and it was soon apparent that many children from the Portuguese community were dropping out of school and taking casual work to aid their families. This became a pattern for the whole Portuguese community. The low level of academic achievement and the high drop-out rate remained an issue not only for recently arriving families but for second generation children born in the US or Canada, and gave rise to some concern among educationalists. Reports as late as the 1990s documented
the alarming fact that successive generations of Luso-Canadian children and youth in the Toronto school system dropped out of school earlier—and in greater proportions—than other students, studied and performed at significantly lower academic levels, were found in greater numbers in Remedial Reading and Special Education programs, and lagged behind other students in reading and language skills.53
Studies of the Portuguese Canadian community made in the first two decades of mass immigration linked low academic achievement to the preoccupations of Portuguese migrant families and the ‘culture’ that grew up in their communities. ‘There are many requests for work permits for children between the ages of 14 and 16, and because family incomes are low, school authorities find it difficult to refuse.’54 Another report, dated 1970, concluded:
special problems of transition are faced by a people such as the Portuguese who have moved from a largely rural class background with low educational standards and an authoritarian family, state and church life to an urban milieu speaking not only a new language, but maintaining different educational standards and expressing an often secular life style.55
As has already been noted, Portuguese immigrants were poor and hence very dependent on networks of kin and neighbours for survival. The immigrants took low-paid semi-skilled and unskilled work and expected their children to follow in their footsteps and contribute to the stability of the family’s economic position. Having a poor education themselves, many adult Portuguese either saw little value in education or were unable to provide a supportive background for their school-age children. Ilda Januário and Manuela Marujo recorded that one of the women they interviewed told them that she would like to learn more English so that she could understand her children when they spoke to her.56 These characteristics helped to create a stereotype of the immigrant Portuguese, and this fed into the attitudes of teachers towards immigrant children. In this way a cycle of underachievement was established to which the immigrant community, education providers and the attitudes prevalent in the wider community all contributed.
The well-intentioned multicultural policies of the Canadian governments contributed to the growth of ‘ghettoes’ of Portuguese immigrants. Education is, of course, the principal tool enabling people in advanced industrial societies to increase their income and social status and is the main pathway by which immigrants can become integrated into the mainstream of the population. There is some evidence that the concerns voiced about the academic achievement of Portuguese immigrants, very real for the first two generations, have become less so for the third and subsequent generations as the process of integration into Canadian life has continued, and a number of writers of distinction have now come from the Portuguese community. However, it is difficult not to contrast the experience of Portuguese immigrants in Canada with the apparently more rapid and successful integration of those who went to Argentina or Venezuela.