From Urban Press
The Emigrant, the Nation, and the State
Historian Joel Serrão drew a distinction between the colinazador of the old regime and the emigrante of the modern period. The former, in Serrão's view was an individual who abandoned his native soil "under state initiative or as part of a national enterprise." The latter left "for exclusively personal reasons independent of official solicitations and sometimes in opposition to them" (Serrão 1974, 88). While this distinction is not incorrect, it tends to de-emphasize the role of the state in the process of emigration, by contrast with its role in exploration and colonisation.
(Brettel 2003, p 10)
A vida não era caro [Life was not costly]
Mas era caro dinheiro [But money was costly]
Por isso me retirei [For this reason I went off]
Para o Rio de Janeiro [To Rio de Janeiro]
(p 15)
Migration Stories
Narrative and Life Histories in Ethnographic Research
The telling of stories is one of the practices by which people reflect, exercise agency, contest interpretations, make meanings, feel sorrow and hope, and live their lives. Story telling, the narrative presentation of self and culture...is creative social practise. Viewed through such a lens, life stories can offer scholars of humanity a compelling mode of probing both the particular and the more generalized dimensions of the way people make, experience and express their lives.
(Sarah Lamb quoted in ibid, p 24)
Portuguese Migration Stories
Often it is neither the extremely poor (who have no money for the passage and no social networks abroad) nor the richest who pioneer a migration stream, but those who have some but not great resources.
(p 43)
Return Migration, Transmigrants and Transmigration
Transnationalism was defined as a social process whereby migrants operate in social fields that transgress geographic, political, and cultural borders (Glick Schiller, Basch, and Szanton Blanc 1992b, ix; see also Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton Blanc 1994). The concept emerged from the realisation that immigrants abroad, rather than being uprooted, maintain close ties to their countries of origin, making "home and host society a single arena of social action" (Margolis 1994, 29). Transnationalism was, as Glick Schiller, Basch, and Szanton Blanc (1995, 49) argue formulated as "part of an effort to reconfigure anthropological thinking so that it will reflect current transformations in the way in which time and space [are] experienced and represented."
(p 48)
Their sense of self was firmly linked to an anticipated return [from Germany to Portugal], and there resources and ambitions were all aimed at creating the perfect "home" [there].
(Meintal 2002 cited in ibid, p 51)
Levitt describes three groups of [Dominican return migrants]; those who leave poor and with minimal education who return with negligible English, few skills, and, with the possible exception of a new home, little advancement from where they were when they left; those who return with jewelery, cars and other attributes of wealth that everyone assumes is linked to the drug trade and who engage in circular migration rather than permanent return; and a smaller and more successful group who left with more education and resources and who return with English, significant skills, and a changed social and economic status.
(2001 cited in ibid, p 52)
Emigrar para Voltar
An analytical distinction should be maintained between the goal of return and the actual return. Whereas the latter is a variable effected by such factors as the immigration policies of the receiving society, the emigration policies of the sending society, the possibilities of employment in the sending society upon return, and other economic or demographic conditions, the second is more dependent upon a series of social, cultural, and historical traditions or attitudes towards migration. In short, return migration is affected not only by the way the host society receives and accepts migrants but also by the way the migrant views both his or her own society and the host society.
(p 59)
O Brasiliero:Origins of the Ideology of Return
The race of the peasant is prolific. In youth he has ordinaryily more brothers on the fig tree than sparrows above him chirping away. As a result, since the figs cannot feed them all, it is necessary to send each one out according to the vocation and talents which God has bestowed upon him. The stupidest becomes a teacher; the most disorganised a cheif magistrate; the laziest a priest; and the cleverest goes to Brazil. The teacher dies of hunger; the preist turns fat and procreates; the magistrate mistreats everyone; and the Brazilian either establishes himself there and no one talks of him anymore or he comes back to establish himself in his own village and becomes a viscount.
(Ortigão 1944 quoted in ibid, p 60)
From Brasiliero to Frances
"It is the illusion of money which brings us here. We can live in Portugal. We have enough money to eat, but not to buy a car or a house. At the end of the year there is never anything to put aside. People know it is all an illusion, but the still live with it, and by it. There are rich people around. We see what we do not have but might have."
("informant" quoted in ibid, p 63)
Emigrar para Voltar:Emigration and Social Mobility
[Cantonisn] refers to a repressive social order that supports those in positions of power, prevents new developments that would favorably affect the peasantry, and opposes ameliorative social changes (Moore 1961, 491). Cantonism assumes a romantic view of the past to further its purposes, stressing the "organic" and "whole" nature of peasant culture... Moore further adds that this alleged attachment to the soil becomes the "subject of much praise but little action."
(p 60)
Emigration and the Church
The capitalist enterprises of northern Europe came to rely on a reserve army of foreign workers who would help satisfy the demands for cheap labor and increased production and the desire for expanding profits, without further augmentation of salaries or alterations in working conditions. Immigrant workers would accept lower salaries, longer and irregular working hours, dangerous jobs and unsatisfactory living conditions.
(p 78)
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Class, Immigrant Communities and Ethnic Identity
Perhaps the lesson is that cities are as much transformed by immigration as immigration transforms individuals who migrate.
{quote|The development of the concept of social networks (Bott 1957; Epstein 1961; Mitchell 1969; Boissevain and Mitchell 1973) with its emphasis on the individual as the nexus of an ever-expanding and ever-changing web of affiliations...moves us away from a preoccupation with geographically or sociologically static systems. It allows us to find a "sense of community" even when the members do not live in proximity.|
(p 109)}}
Ethnicity and Entrepreneurs
A variety of...individuals, whom I shall call ethnic entrepreneurs, employ ethnic symbols to establish themselves as mediators between those who share an identity and others in the society
(p 104)
Mediation occurs not only when there are visible physical boundaries between a little community and the larger community of society (for example when a rural village establishes contacts with an urban centre), but also when such boundaries are not immediately apparent (that is, they do not circumscribe a "group") or are defined in a completely different way... The ethnic entrepreneur, acting as a broker, transmits the values of the larger society (Paine 1971b) to the newcomers and expresses concern and interest in the question of their integration. Through patronage on the other hand, he furthers his own goals by his abilities to dispense favors to the immigrants.
(p 136)
