8
Estrangeirados—The diaspora of the upper classes
It is a mistake to think that Portugal and the Portuguese have always looked out into the world and away from their own continent. Portugal’s close proximity to Spain by land, and by sea to the maritime countries of northern Europe and the Mediterranean, has meant a regular flow of trade, of shipping and of people—a flow that has always been two-way as northern European crusaders, Italian merchants, ship owners, map makers and sugar growers, German gunners and printers and English merchants and Catholic exiles have all found their way to settle in Portugal.
As Portugal has always been a small and poor country, many ambitious and educated Portuguese have had to make careers for themselves outside their own country—indeed these exiles are in a very real sense an extension of Portugal itself, their exile enabling them to transcend the limitations of their home environment. The Portuguese have a word—estrangeirado—for educated Portuguese who live outside Portugal and are influenced by the culture of the countries where they work. Many of the educated and cultured Portuguese living in this often self-imposed exile have been important figures in European history, gathering round them groups of like-minded fellow countrymen, refugees from the poverty, lack of opportunity and narrow outlook of their homeland.
Like other royal dynasties, the Portuguese royal family exported princesses to marry foreign royalty and seal diplomatic alliances. Some of these Portuguese queens achieved fame and influence throughout Europe and were themselves responsible for a small diapsora of courtiers and attendants. Among the most famous of the Portuguese queens were Isabella, sister of Henry the Navigator, who married Philip the Good of Burgundy and was the mother of Charles the Bold; Leonor, daughter of Dom Duarte, who married the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III and whose betrothal was depicted by Pinturicchio in the cathedral of Siena; another Isabella who became the wife of the Emperor Charles V and mother of Philip II of Spain; and Catherine of Braganza who married Charles II of England and Scotland.
One of the most famous of all estrangeirados is the fictional narrator in Thomas More’s Utopia. In 1516 More presented the world with his fictional conceit—his imaginary land of Utopia, the Good Land and the Land of Nowhere. Utopia is described by a Portuguese navigator, called Raphael Hythloday, who had travelled with Amerigo Vespucci and had stayed behind to visit and then live in this newly discovered land where society was ordered according to rational principles. More had chosen a Portuguese to be his mouthpiece because the Portuguese were the greatest explorers of the day and accounts of their exploits were already circulating in humanist circles. Valentim Fernandes, the German printer resident in Lisbon, for example, was assembling a collection of accounts of Portuguese voyages which he was sending to his correspondent Konrad Peutinger, a friend of the Emperor Maximilian and a leading diplomat, who was also an antiquarian and humanist in his own right. By 1516 the Portuguese had already sailed to India, Indonesia and China as well as to North and South America, and from their voyages they were bringing back tales of new worlds and hitherto unknown civilisations.
There is little biographical detail about Hythloday that identifies him as typically Portuguese, but the idea that beyond Europe there were societies that operated according to different rules was already present in Portuguese narratives. The long letter written to the king of Portugal giving news of the landfall made by Cabral in Brazil in 1500 had described the Indians encountered by the Portuguese as peaceful and trusting; their absence of clothing, their lack of ‘shame’ and the innocence with which their naked women displayed themselves to the Portuguese were a representation of another social order, an order without the European’s obsessions with guilt and shame. In their descriptions of the societies revealed by their explorations, the Portuguese were to build contrasts with their own world and to shape a social and political discourse in which alternatives to the corruption and cruelty of their own world were shown to be possible. It was to be a discourse that was to constitute a central theme of the European Enlightenment. In this way the Portuguese diaspora, beginning with the fictional Raphael Hythloday, opened up European society to critical appraisal and ultimately to revolution.
Perhaps the most famous group of Portuguese exiles of the early sixteenth century were those who gathered in Seville. Their number included the cartographer Jorge Reinel, and it was in this company that Fernão de Magalhães (Magellan), himself a Portuguese exile, found companions for his voyage to the Moluccas, which ended in the first circumnavigation of the globe.
Another group, this time of clerics and scholars, gathered around Diogo de Gouveia, the principal of the Collège de Sainte Barbe, which was part of the University of Paris. A number of notable Portuguese scholars studied there, among them Diogo de Teive, as well as Ignatius Loyola and his companions, one of whom was the Portuguese Simão Rodrigues, prior to the founding of the Society of Jesus.1
Damião de Góis was another sixteenth-century estrangeirado, who studied in Leuven and Padua, travelled widely in Europe and established a friendship with the leading humanists and reformers in northern Europe, having his likeness drawn by Albrecht Dürer. Góis was one of the first to describe the Lapps of northern Scandinavia and to publish an account of Ethiopia.
Later in the century Portuguese exiles gathered around the pretender Dom António, Prior of Crato, in his exile in France and England. After his death in 1595, this group of Portuguese, unreconciled to the government of Philip of Spain, collected in Paris, among them João de Castro, who became the principal exponent of ‘Sebastianism’, the idea that the dead king, Dom Sebastião, would one day return to liberate Portugal from the Spanish yoke.
Many of the leading Portuguese writers and scientists of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries lived abroad for much of their lives and either produced their work abroad or found in their experience of ‘exile’ material for their writings. Among these should be numbered the naturalist Garcia de Orta; the historian Diogo do Couto, chronicler of the Estado da Índia; Rodrigo Lopes, physician to Queen Elizabeth and possibly the model for Shakespeare’s Shylock; the preacher and theologian António Vieira; Fernão Mendes Pinto and Luís de Camões himself. Later in the seventeenth century the artist Lorenzo de Castro made his career in England painting portraits and seascapes in the Dutch manner.
While the union of the Crowns of Castile and Portugal was still secure, many Portuguese nobles sought employment in the wider Spanish empire. By way of an example one might mention Francisco de Melo who commanded the Spanish army at the battles of Honnecourt and Rocroi in 1642–43.
In the eighteenth century the diplomat and writer on politics, Dom Luís da Cunha, held posts in London, The Hague, Brussels and Madrid and was Portuguese plenipotentiary at the Treaty of Utrecht, before taking up the post of ambassador in Paris where he remained until his death in 1749. At the same time a group of Portuguese gathered at the court of the Habsburgs in Vienna around the influential figure of Duke Emanuel Silva-Tarouca, who became a close adviser to Empress Maria Theresa. Silva Tarouca’s circle included the Portuguese ambassador Sebastião de Carvalho e Melo, later Marquês de Pombal, who married an Austrian noblewoman and brought much of what he had learned of the Austrian Enlightenment back with him to Portugal in 1750.
José Correa da Serra, a distinguished scientist and one of the founders of the Academia das Ciências de Lisboa, having been forced to leave Portugal for political reasons, became a Fellow of the Royal Society in London and a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He lived eleven years in Paris before moving in 1813 to the United States where he became a friend of Jefferson. He was the contemporary of the Abbé Faria, already mentioned, a Goan who lived in France and who is still recognised as one of the most important pioneers of hypnotism and psychoanalysis.
During the Napoleonic Wars a group of Francophile officers led by Gomes Freire de Andrade and the Marquês de Alorna joined Napoleon and served with the Portuguese Legion in the French army in Germany, allegedly bringing back French revolutionary principles to Portugal in 1815.
Hipolito José da Costa Pereira Furtado de Mendonça, the founder of the important periodical Correio Braziliense, which was published in London and appeared with 175 numbers between 1808 and 1822, was born in Colónia do Sacramento and, although he was educated at Coimbra University, was imprisoned as a freemason and then spent most of his life in exile in Britain.2
During the 1820s large groups of exiles, numbering many thousands, hostile to the absolutist ideas of Dom Miguel, gathered in Britain and France where they organised military expeditions to overthrow the rule of the ‘pretender’. One large group of these Portuguese was located in Plymouth, among them the poet and dramatist Almeida Garrett, and it was in Plymouth that his play Catão was first performed. When Dom Miguel was finally dethroned and expelled from Portugal in 1834, he formed a court in exile first in Rome, then in Britain and finally in Baden.
Throughout the nineteenth century many Portuguese intellectuals made Paris their home and this tradition continued into the twentieth century. Portugal’s Nobel laureate António Egas Moniz trained in Bordeaux and Paris; and its greatest nineteenth-century novelist, Eça de Queiroz, spent most of his working life in consular posts in Britain and France. It was in Germany that the famous Portuguese pianist Vianna da Mota (who had been born on São Tomé island) trained under the leading German musicians of the day. Vitorino Magalhães Godinho, possibly the leading Portuguese historian of the twentieth century, spent most of his working life in Paris and published some of his best work in French. Meanwhile Portugal’s most famous twentieth-century poet, Fernando Pessoa, was brought up in South Africa, attending school in Durban and university in Cape Town. In more recent times the distinguished neurobiologist António Damásio has made his career in the United States, while Portugal’s leading artist, Paula Rego, left Portugal at the age of fifteen, studied art in London and eventually became naturalised as a British subject.
One should also remember the political figures forced into exile during the Estado Novo, many of whom made careers abroad and, like their liberal predecessors in the 1820s, materially contributed to the eventual overthrow of the dictatorship—men like the poet Jorge de Sena; the journalist António de Figueiredo; the colonial administrator and member of the Cortes, turned hijacker, Henrique Galvão; and Álvaro Cunhal, the long-time leader of the Portuguese Communist Party, who lived in exile from 1960 to 1974.
These are merely examples to illustrate how the elite of Portugal have often formed their own diaspora, either driven abroad as political exiles or voluntarily seeking opportunities and a congenial environment in which to work, outside their homeland. In the lives of these individuals and their associates the Portuguese diaspora has to be seen as an extension of the cultural and political life of Portugal itself. ‘In order to be a great poet, you must fall in love and be disappointed; must leave your island and go, perhaps to Africa, yes, or to war; then, after this, you may become a poet’—words placed by the Azorean writer Alfred Lewis in the mouth of the village school teacher, Professor Silva.3
Migrations of the povo
As has already been described, seasonal and semi-permanent migration to neighbouring countries had always been a recognised part of the way of life of the ordinary people of Portugal as well as the elite. Seasonal migration to find work during harvest time from northern Portugal to Galicia and from the Algarve to Andalucia probably extends back to Roman times and was still a feature of the life of rural Portugal in the twentieth century. Marcelo Borges has shown how seasonal migration from the Algarve to Spain, Gibraltar and Morocco was part of the life-cycle of people of the region, providing one possible explanation for the comparatively modest numbers who left the Algarve for destinations across the Atlantic. These seasonal migrations formed what Borges describes as ‘distinct geographical migration systems’ integrating the economy of this part of Portugal with that of its neighbour.4
The city of Seville was one centre of attraction and large numbers of Portuguese of all classes had always been drawn from the Algarve to work in the city and its port of San Lucar de Barrameda. Gibraltar was another destination for Portuguese, especially after it was taken over by the British in 1704 and became an important naval base. Portuguese migrant workers supplied much of the labour force for the Rock, forming a permanent Portuguese settlement in La Línea, the Spanish city located just beyond Gibraltar’s border. Although, by the very nature of migrant labour, numbers fluctuated, figures for 1911 show that the Portuguese community in La Línea numbered 900 and in Gibraltar itself 364.5 A community of Sephardic Jews also settled in Gibraltar in the eighteenth century, whose history has been researched by José Maria Abecassis.6
Portuguese workers also sought seasonal employment throughout Anadalucia in harvest time, the British Consul in Jerez in the late nineteenth century reporting the presence of 2,000 Portuguese workers. The worker seeking seasonal employment in Spain did not require a passport—just a simple transit permit. As a result this became a recognised route for clandestine migrants who made use of the port of Gibraltar to leave for distant destinations without a passport. After the Rio Tinto copper mines were taken over by British interests in 1873, they also employed Portuguese workers, often as strike breakers, and many of these became semi-permanent, working for as much as fifteen years in the mines and bringing their families to live with them. Portuguese were also employed in cork cutting, in fishing and fish processing and many also sought employment in the fishing industry in Morocco in the early part of the twentieth century. Marcelo Borges points out that when migrants from the Algarve began to go to Argentina, this also took the form of seasonal labourers looking for employment in the Argentinian harvest, a continuation of the historic migration patterns which had existed for centuries between Andalucia and the Algarve.7
An explosion of emigration
For Portuguese of all classes the neighbouring European countries to the north had always presented opportunities for those seeking temporary or long-term employment. However, in the twentieth century this migration reached unprecedented levels, overtaking the long-established movement of emigrants to Brazil and North America.
The first wave of migration across the Pyrenees occurred after the First World War when France was suffering an acute labour shortage. Between 1920 and 1925, 38,047 Portuguese went to France to work and by 1931 there were 49,000 Portuguese living in France.8 Thereafter numbers of migrants remained small and migration ceased altogether during the Second World War. Between 1950 and 1954 official emigration figures show an average of 760 Portuguese leaving for northern European destinations each year, mostly for France. In 1955, however, there was a big change and in the five years 1955–59 3,918 left for European destinations each year (almost all of these for France). By 1959 France had over taken the US as a destination for emigration and was receiving about the same numbers as Canada. In 1960 6,434 Portuguese left for France, and this was followed during the next decade by a veritable flood of migrants.9
According to Francisco Carvalho, between 1961 and 1970 347,419 legal emigrants moved to France (nearly 35,000 a year).10 The peak year was 1966 with 73,419 departures. At the same time migrants had begun to go in large numbers to Germany. Here figures disagree. According to Carvalho, between 1961 and 1970 65,249 left for Germany; but Maria Baganha gives a figure of 82,886, the peak year being 1969. Bauer et al. give 1975 as the peak year for workers and 1973 as the peak for family emigration.11
These figures are all for people leaving legally with passports. To these have to be added the very large numbers of clandestine emigrants who were leaving without passports, largely to avoid military service in Africa. Most estimates suggest that the number of emigrants who left secretly for France at least equalled the numbers leaving with passports. Joel Serrão estimated that during the years 1969–73 out of a total of 706,509 migrants who left Portugal, 56 per cent left illegally.12 According to Baganha the single year 1970 saw a staggering 135,667 legal and illegal emigrants heading for France. These are truly extraordinary figures, the ‘torrent of emigrants’, as Serrão called it,13 sweeping past the totals of those leaving for Canada, the United States and Brazil. Portugal was not just suffering a haemorrhage, it was bleeding to death.
It was not too difficult to leave Portugal without a passport, as I discovered returning by train from Portugal through Spain and France in 1964. I had a seat in a compartment full of emigrant workers. When the train stopped at the Portuguese frontier the passengers seated opposite me all got up and removed the seat while one of their number lay down in the space between the seat and floor of the compartment. The seat was then replaced and the passengers resumed their places during the passport inspection. Once safely on our way through Spain, our hidden passenger emerged none the worse for the experience.
This high tide of emigration persisted until the end of the Estado Novo, although by 1974 numbers were already falling. From 1976 onwards emigration to both France and Germany steadily declined. For the five years 1984–88 only 2,800 a year left for France, with as few as 400 in 1987. The figures for Germany were roughly the same at 2,560 per annum. During these years Portuguese also went to Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, Switzerland, Sweden, the United Kingdom and Spain. One estimate suggests that in 1973 there were 86,200 Portuguese in these countries taken together.14 In 1986 Portugal joined the European Community and four years later the provisions for unrestricted movement of citizens within Europe came into force. This made it much easier for Portuguese of all classes to travel to Germany, and the numbers of Portuguese living there increased to around 125,000 by 1996.
What story is told by these figures? Following the creation of the EEC in 1957 the northern European economies were booming. The expanding industries of France and Germany needed large quantities of semi-skilled labour and this the Portuguese were ready to supply. Leaving for France and Germany was easy, with or without a passport, and workers felt near to home and were able to return without difficulty for holidays and visits. The incentives to work abroad were many: for men, good jobs with relatively high pay and the escape from military service; for women, the possibility to find employment and achieve a degree of economic independence; for young people, escape from the stifling cultural atmosphere of Portugal into the freer air of the Europe of the 1960s.
However, the experience of Portuguese emigrants in northern Europe depended very much on the attitude of the host country. Whereas the French encouraged family reunification and made it relatively easy for immigrants to settle and acquire French nationality, the opposite was the case in Switzerland and Germany; while the United Kingdom, with its vague and often inconsistent commitment to multiculturalism, fell somewhere between the two.
France Portugaise
For the first ten years of the massive Portuguese emigration to France, the arrival of migrant workers was unregulated and unmanaged. Around Paris informal settlements grew up in which Portuguese lived alongside North African and Spanish immigrants. One estimate suggests that there were 119 such shanty towns, some of them best described as shanty-cities. By the end of the 1960s some half a million Portuguese had settled around Paris in the so-called bidonvilles—the corrugated iron slums. Paris had become, in terms of population, the second biggest Portuguese city in Europe. The men sought work in factories and in construction; the women worked in catering and domestic service. People left Portugal to join neighbours or members of their family who had already emigrated, the overwhelming majority coming from the north of Portugal or from Lisbon with hardly anyone coming from the islands or from Portugal south of the Tagus.
The bidonvilles beg comparison with the favelas of Brazil. Portuguese from the same region in Portugal grouped themselves in the same encampment: the bidonville of Conflans-Sainte Honorine, for example, was home to people from Amarante and Villa Real. It was situated at the confluence of the Seine and Oise rivers and was liable to flood. Children on their way to school had to cross a dangerous bridge and a railway line. The bidonville of Champigny-sur-Marne, one of the largest, housed 100,000 Portuguese. It originated with men recruited for highway construction who built their own town with the consent of the local mayor. At first living conditions were very poor with no electricity or running water. The river Marne served for washing facilities. Contractors seeking casual labour would come to recruit at the gates of the encampment, paying illegally low wages and working in conjunction with the local labour ‘bosses’. The only protection to be had for the workers was the fact that they were living together in the communities where the old village life of Portugal was to some extent recreated.15 From 1966 onwards the Parisian authorities began to clear the bidonvilles against the opposition of the Portuguese residents. Migrant Portuguese were now housed in apartment blocks, inevitably losing something of the communal life of the old encampments.
One striking feature of the emigration to France was the large numbers of women, often young unmarried women, who joined the exodus. Many women either came as part of whole families or married and started their own families in France. By and large the Portuguese in France were there to stay and were able to acquire French citizenship or permanent work permits.
The political and social culture of France accepts migrants who conform to the ideals of the French Republic, and Portuguese have had no difficulty settling there.
Second and third generation French Portuguese have begun to shed their traditional Portuguese identity. According to Maria do Ceu Cunha, who studied the cultural changes experienced by Portuguese in France, the first reaction of emigrants is to cling to a memory of the land they have left and to attach real value to it.
Most immigrant Portuguese had lived in the countryside in a space and time where things changed very little…. The authoritarian regime of Salazar which privileged stability, isolation and autarky, called on each and everyone to obey the old norms and had powerfully contributed to the ossification of the rural environment.
Emigration was the ‘first true upheaval they [the rural migrants] had known’. The Portuguese of the next generation, however, are torn between ‘two types of expectation—that of their family and their group of origin on the one hand and that of the host society on the other’. They seek to demystify the nostalgia for the ‘country of origin’. They question the attempts of Portugal to maintain close relations with the emigrants, for in their eyes Portugal is simply interested in the regular payment of their remittances and welcomes them only for a one-month annual visit.16
This analysis, focusing on the different perspectives of different generations, has few surprises. A similar story can be told about most diasporic and emigrant communities for whom the process of emigration is indeed a cultural revolution for the first generation but not for their children and grandchildren.
Luxembourg, Switzerland and Germany—a study in contrasts
During the 1960s Portuguese emigrants sought jobs in Luxembourg, sandwiched between France and Germany, and in 1970 an agreement signed with the Duchy allowed Portuguese families to settle permanently. The 2001 census recorded 58,657 Portuguese nationals in the country. Portuguese in Luxembourg were largely employed in low-paid construction work and in domestic cleaning. In the film História da Emigração Portuguesa: Primeiros Emigrantes, Episódio 1 made in 2006 by Jacinto Godinho, the Portuguese are described as the ‘blacks of Europe’.17 In 1970 Cape Verde was still part of Portugal, and the provisions applied to Cape Verdeans as well as Portuguese. When Cape Verde became independent, Luxembourg retained close relations with the new country, providing aid and continuing to welcome migrant workers from the islands.
Emigration to Switzerland only gathered momentum after 1980, when the slowing of demand for labour in France had greatly reduced opportunities for emigrants. Over the next thirty years Switzerland continued to admit Portuguese migrant workers until it had the largest community of Portuguese expatriates in Europe after France. By 2013, according to one estimate, there were 230,000 Portuguese in Switzerland—a 20 per cent increase since 2008. Most Portuguese sought work in French-speaking Switzerland, because the language was easier for them to learn and because some were moving from an initial residence in France. Most came with short nine-month renewable work permits, and only after 36 months could permission be granted for a family to come to join a worker. The experience for most Portuguese was that they were welcome as workers but were not encouraged to settle or to apply for nationality. In this the Swiss behaved very much as the Germans behaved towards their Gastarbeiter. Once again, although there were some educated and skilled Portuguese professionals among the migrants, the vast majority came, as Rosita Fibbi wrote, to do ‘the least prestigious and hardest jobs’. Following a pattern familiar in other European countries, Portuguese immigrants maintain a very low profile, almost to the extent of invisibility. ‘Portuguese citizens are not widely known because as a rule they have stuck to Gastarbeiter rules—that is, workers who were invited to Switzerland to work and who then left to return to their original country.’ First generation Portuguese have not, in general, sought Swiss nationality, and in this they are similar to the migrants who went to Germany.18
Alexandre Afonso, in his study of the Portuguese in Switzerland, found a number of characteristics that marked the Portuguese out from other migrants. The Portuguese, he noted, move ‘within a dense network of family and friendship relations that allowed a quick diffusion of information about job opportunities, work and living conditions’.19 The downside of this was a ‘relative isolation of Portuguese immigrants with regard to the host society’, with little intermarriage with other groups and very few naturalisations.20 Moreover the average length of stay was much shorter than that of Spanish or Italian workers, as the Portuguese ‘tend to return to their home country after a few years’.21 In fact, he says, there was a ‘specific ideology of return’ although it was noticeable that ‘most children of Portuguese emigrants do not share the return aspirations of their parents’.22 Another notable feature was the ‘low education levels of Portuguese immigrants’.23 On a distinctly positive note, the Portuguese experienced little discrimination in the workplace and most Swiss had a ‘positive or very positive image of the Portuguese’.24
There are distinct similarities between the Portuguese experience in Switzerland and Germany. Like the Swiss, the Germans never encouraged permanent Portuguese settlement. According to Andrea Klimt,
the migration to Germany of the so-called ‘guest-workers’ was tightly controlled by the state and strictly linked to employment. German law during this period carefully regulated migrants’ movements: only spouses of migrants and their underage children were allowed to enter the country; residence permits were time limited and linked to employment; and leaving Germany for more than three months meant forfeiting the possibility of reentry. Consequently, the migrants in Germany … followed jobs, not friends and family.25
The Portuguese in Germany were Gastarbeiter and the option of becoming German citizens was not open to them. Germany signed a formal agreement with Portugal in 1964, and thereafter recruitment of Portuguese workers was organised by the Bundesanstalt für Arbeitvermittlung und Arbeitsloseversicherung, though it was possible for Portuguese workers to apply directly to German employers. Official recruitment was halted in 1973. In 1974 there were 80,000 Portuguese workers in Germany and a total Portuguese population there of 120,000. A decline followed, so that by 1984 only 40,000 Portuguese worked in Germany, after which there was a gradual increase again to around 55,000 in 1996 when total numbers of workers and their families peaked at 125,000.26
After Portugal joined the European Union in 1986, it became increasingly common for Portuguese to be employed on a totally different basis. Portuguese companies would recruit and pay workers and these companies would then work as contractors in Germany. This practice grew up as a way round German regulations respecting equal pay.27
Although individual Portuguese often renewed work contracts and lived in Germany for many years, it was not with any expectation of permanence. The Portuguese often experienced the same hostility as the far more numerous Turkish migrant workers. Although they formed organisations to support each other, the emergence of a Portuguese diasporic community in Germany was not possible and there were no specifically Portuguese, as there were Turkish or Yugoslav, neighbourhoods in the cities where they worked. Even second and third generation migrants remained determined at some time to return ‘home’.
An incident, recalled for me by a Portuguese who had travelled by train to Germany at the height of the emigration, is illustrative of the way the Portuguese tried to ameliorate the unwelcoming atmosphere in Germany. The carriage was full of Portuguese migrants heading for Germany. During the night my informant fell asleep and did not wake until near the German frontier. She was astonished to see that the Portuguese had all gone and that the carriage was filled with smartly dressed blonde-haired German women. She soon realised that these women were actually her Portuguese companions of the previous evening who had donned blonde wigs and smart German clothes in order to smooth their reception at the frontier and in the labour offices. Apocryphal or not, this story contains its own truth.
Portuguese emigration to the United Kingdom
Almost all published statistics give very small numbers of Portuguese emigrants settling in the United Kingdom. In Baganha’s statistics, the United Kingdom does not feature at all; Carlos Teixeira shows numbers heading for Britain between 1966 and 1990 never rising above 783 a year, and from 1980 never even reaching three figures. Carvalho can find only three years between 1961 and 1970 when there was any emigration to the United Kingdom at all, and he estimates the numbers who went as 0.2 per cent of total Portuguese emigration.28 However, when Olga Barradas undertook her research into the education of the Portuguese community in London, she found that ‘in 1981 the Portuguese community in the United Kingdom was believed to number around 30,000 and this had doubled to 60,000 by 1997’. The Portuguese consulate in London, meanwhile, estimated the real number at around 100,000.29 The 2001 British census came up with a figure of 36,402 Portuguese in the United Kingdom, but Martin Eaton thinks there were at least 85,000 in 2005 and possibly as many as 110,000, while the Portuguese consulate speculated that the real numbers at that time were nearer a quarter of a million.30 Somehow large numbers of Portuguese had arrived, escaping the watchful eye of the statisticians.
The ‘invisibility’ of this Portuguese community was not just a matter of their absence from the statistics. As Olga Barradas observed, they ‘are referred to in almost no English publications before the 1980s’. She also found that, with regard to school drop-out rates, ‘there are no official data on these topics’ and she concluded, ‘Portuguese children in schools in Britain remain a silent and hidden minority. So far no studies are available recognising the existence of Portuguese children….’31 Yet there are significant concentrations of Portuguese in the Ladbroke Grove and Stockwell areas of London where there are Portuguese shops, cafes, restaurants and clubs, and there are significant Portuguese communities in Northern Ireland, Norfolk, the Bournemouth conurbation, the Channel Islands and elsewhere.
It seems that from the 1950s there was a clandestine immigration, mostly from Madeira, of Portuguese taking up low-paid work as cleaners and labourers. One of the most significant areas of immigration was the Channel Islands, where unskilled labour was needed in agriculture and the hotel industry. The Jersey authorities recruited immigrant workers directly from Madeira, apparently because it was possible to find workers who already had experience of tourism and catering.32 At first most workers came with six-month or twelve-month work permits but it is clear that many remained, renewing their permits on a regular basis. In 1975 there were around 2,000 Portuguese on the island and by 2001 this had risen to 5,500, constituting between 6 and 7 per cent of the island’s population. The presence of such a large Portuguese community is all the more remarkable as residence in Jersey is considered highly desirable because of its low rates of taxation, and permission to reside in the island is jealously controlled by the authorities.
As with Portuguese communities elsewhere in the United Kingdom, this substantial minority is largely invisible. ‘Although the Portuguese are now the second largest migrant community on Jersey … they are not mentioned in any of the tourist guides, or social, political or historical writings on the Island’,33 and Jaine Beswick has commented, ‘Portuguese emigration to the Island is not discussed, if alluded to at all in figures’.34 This ‘invisibility’ is largely the result of a trait common in most Portuguese diasporic communities: the desire of the immigrants not to attract the attention of the authorities and to exist below the radar of public consciousness. This is no doubt a cultural trait inherited from a peasant background where evasion of taxes, feudal dues, conscription and the attention of the authorities in general was deep in the DNA of the community. It also relates more directly to the fact that so many migrants did not have ‘papers’ or were overstaying the terms of their work permits.
Nevertheless the Portuguese community itself, and more recently the Jersey authorities, have tried to make provision for this community.
There is a Portuguese club; a Portuguese travel and employment agency; a Portuguese football team in the Jersey football league; a special service in the main Catholic Church in Portuguese and lessons for confirmation in Portuguese. Moreover, the Jersey government [now] offers information in Portuguese, as does the hospital and the Citizens Advice Bureau … the after-school club … was created to allow children with a Portuguese background to be able to take qualifications in the Portuguese language at GCSE level.35
To this description can be added the existence of a Portuguese language press and a Portuguese Consul who presides in an avuncular manner over the expatriate community. However, as elsewhere in the Portuguese diaspora, educational achievement is conspicuous by its absence and the island’s colleges have struggled to maintain the teaching of Portuguese language at secondary level.
Following Portugal’s accession to the European Union, Portuguese workers arrived to fill relatively low-paid and low-status agricultural jobs in East Anglia and Northern Ireland where substantial communities of Portuguese grew up. In 2008 the Portuguese community in Northern Ireland was estimated to be 3,618, mostly to be ‘found in small but highly concentrated clusters’ in the small market towns of mid-Ulster.36 The Portuguese had mostly been recruited by agencies in Portugal to work in the food processing industry. Portuguese were also recruited in large numbers to work in food processing in Norfolk, where by 2007 the local authorities estimated there were 8,000 Portuguese working in the Thetford area alone. According to José Carlos Pina Almeida and David Corkill, the term ‘3P migrants (referring to their predominant activities: picking, plucking and packing) is usually applied to the whole Lusophone group’.37
Many of the workers are temporary migrants who have come without bringing their families, and most intend at some stage to return to Portugal. However, conditions typical of the twenty-first century have added new dimensions to this traditional pattern. Among the ‘Portuguese’ taking advantage of the free movement of labour within the European Union are Cape Verdeans, Brazilians and Portuguese-speaking Africans—an interesting return to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century custom of people with no direct connection with Portugal assuming a Portuguese identity. It also seems that the menial work of the ‘3P migrants’ is now being shared by Portuguese with good secondary education and even university degrees, so meagre are the opportunities in Portugal itself—worse, apparently, than they ever were in the days of the Salazar dictatorship.38
The Portuguese diaspora in multicultural modern cities
The Portuguese established permanently or semi-permanently in London and Paris form part of a vast multicultural population drawn from every part of the world. London has substantial communities from virtually every major ethnic group and nationality. Typically these communities exist at two levels. At one level the educated and professionally qualified seek well-paid jobs in the modern sector of the economy, forming an international elite of high status. These are the modern version of the estrangeirados of an earlier century. At the same time there are the immigrants, from the same countries of origin, filling low-paid jobs in industry, agriculture and the service sector, employed as domestics, cleaners, waiters and cafe owners.
The Portuguese community illustrates this tendency perfectly. In London educated and professionally qualified Portuguese are to be found working in the arts as painters, musicians and actors, and in banking, in medicine, in the university sector, as teachers or as players and managers in the world of professional football. Glittering gatherings of these estrangeirados assemble at the Portuguese embassy in Belgrave Square on 10 June to celebrate Portugal’s national day. To these gatherings the tens of thousands of poorer Portuguese immigrants are not invited. They have their own local festas and clubs, but there is little meeting between them and the diaspora of the educated.
Although all emigrant groups face similar problems of cultural and linguistic adaptation, the Portuguese stand out as among the least successful in academic achievement. This lack of educational ambition has already been noted in Jersey. In 2000, Portuguese children in the London Borough of Lambeth were amongst the bottom six ethnic groups in terms of their academic attainments.39
In multicultural London the various communities of the Portuguese diaspora have come together again in one city. London has communities of Cape Verdeans, Angolans, Brazilians, Mozambicans, Guineans and Timorese—united by their common official language, and many assuming a Portuguese identity in order to profit by the freedom of movement within the European Union. There is also a Goan community, part of the Asian Portuguese diaspora, the descendants of Portuguese Indians who left Goa when it was taken over by India or who were forced out of East Africa, which had been their first point of settlement, by Idi Amin. There are also Macaonese and Portuguese-speaking Ismailis who left Mozambique in the 1970s.
This modern Lusophone community has been compared to gypsies. Its members are highly mobile, moving from one part of Europe to another in search of work. Almeida and Corkill cite the example of ‘Antónia, who is 39 years old, was born in Cape Verde and went to Portugal with her parents when she was nine. She has family in Luxembourg, Italy and France.’ The Portuguese consulate with its Portuguese language programmes is the only way in which this mixture of Portuguese, former Portuguese or Portuguese-speaking communities can be brought together, but this, like the cultural programmes of the Gulbenkian Foundation and the Instituto Camões, is under financial pressure. Portugal, the mother country, the linguistic homeland, the ultimate point of reference for so many people in the world, is perilously small and frail to support such a burden.