Reconstructing multiple identities: portuguese and afro-portuguese immigrantes in São Paolo

Abstract

In the 1970s and 1980s, migratory flows of Portuguese and luso-Africans from old Portuguese African colonies towards to São Paulo were the result of the pressures of difficult and complex African and Portuguese politics. Three very different cultural experiences were in play: that of the portuguese colony, the african context, and the Brazilian character of the destination, Sao Paulo. This paper explores the migrant's complex displacement experiences, the insertion of the migrant into the new context and the conflicts of identity that this migratory process entailed. We concentrate on the recent past, which has not been extensively researched. We use a method we call "summarized life-histories", which seemed appropriate, as we didn?t know what the immigrants would tell us. We present a number of specific cases to exemplify our analysis. Through them, we can see that memories refer to events, people and places from the three continents, through the conscious and unconscious construction of multiple identities.