Portuguese across the Atlantic of the century XIX to XXI: migration policies, the sense of identity and its transformations

Abstract

For three centuries, Brazil was a colony of Portugal, and from the nineteenth century, Portuguese people began to contribute in the former colony as immigrants seeking better working conditions, encouraged, among other European groups, by those who aimed at lightening the Brazilian ‘race’. This flow was accentuated after 1870, when the coffee culture has spread around the so-called “West” of the state of São Paulo. They began to work along with settlers from other ethnic groups, which led to the development of an ambiguous sense of identity, as they were isolated in relation to the country of origin. In the twentieth century the situation was reversed: the coffee crisis in 1929 and the outbreak of the processes of urbanization and industrialization in the adoption country as well as restrictions on immigration from the new dictatorial government led to a very noticeable change much in the way of work (from rural workers they moved to traders, mainly) as of identity expression, which tended to fluctuate according to the various migratory currents of the twentieth and early twenty-first