Abstract
This essay focuses on immigration in contemporary Portugal and social phenomena related to community, intercultural relations, and citizenship as represented in acclaimed cinematic and literary texts. The objects of analysis are the Brazilian film Terra estrangeira (1996) by directors Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas, the Brazilian novel Estive em Lisboa e lembrei de você (2009) by Luiz Ruffato, and the Portuguese film Viagem a Portugal (2011) by Sérgio Tréfaut.
Highlights
This essay focuses on immigration in contemporary Portugal and social phenomena related to community, intercultural relations, and citizenship as represented in acclaimed cinematic and literary texts
Such was the case throughout the history of the Portuguese empire, as well as in postcolonial Brazil, Cape Verde, and Portugal
Tens of thousands of Brazilians fled their country’s economic crisis, while large numbers of Africans fled poverty and war, and many Ukrainians left the economic precariousness of the post-Soviet era in search of new opportunities
Summary
The point of departure for Salles and Thomas’s starkly poetic and melancholic, black-and-white feature film is the collapse of the Brazilian economy in 1990 under former president Fernando Collor de Melo (he was eventually impeached in 1992). Salles considers this to be a watershed moment, for his generation, and for Brazil (Almeida 30). Estive em Lisboa Serginho, the protagonist of Luiz Ruffato’s Estive em Lisboa e lembrei de você, is a working-class Brazilian immigrant with a basic education who has never traveled on an airplane He undergoes a significant cultural adjustment to life in Portugal. He decides to hire out his wife for sex His life experience as a war victim contrasts dramatically with that of the war victors who constitute the elite of postcolonial Angola, and Serginho is shocked to hear that the Angolan elites send their children to study in Portugal, live in the best neighborhoods, drive luxury cars, wear expensive clothing, and eat in the city’s finest restaurants. She is aided by other migrants, and when she recovers, she yells out what Serginho poignantly interprets as her “desalento imigrante de quem sabe que de nada serve essa vida se a gente não pode nem mesmo aspirar ser enterrado no lugar próprio onde nasceu” [73]
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