The Portuguese in Canada: Diasporic Challenges and Adjustment (review)

At nearly 500,000 strong, the Portuguese-Canadian community today remains woefully understudied by academics and policy makers. Few new works have arisen since 2001, when a bibliography by Mulholand, of diversity-specific dissertations, showed that only 16 out of 1,500 graduate theses had been conducted on this group.

In this regard, Teixeira and Da Rosa’s second-edition edited volume of The Portuguese in Canada represents the editors’ attempt at improving this situation and is an update of their similarly-entitled year 2000 work. The aims of this book are as similarly ambitious as those in their earlier edition: To write “…about the Portuguese in Canada: Their history, problems, aspirations and challenges, and their impact on the receiving society” (3) and “…to examine the Portuguese presence in Canada comprehensively, from the early Portuguese explorers…to the state of contemporary Portuguese immigrant communities in Canada” (12). The strengths and weaknesses of this book in meeting these lofty goals, are reflective of some of the limitations of such edited volumes.

Thematically, the volume contains fifteen articles from a variety of disciplines, which are divided into five parts: The first section presents a historical and geographical introduction to Portuguese-Canadians and the Portuguese Diaspora; the second explores the history, iconography and impact of the White Fleet in Newfoundland; the third discusses specific social and political issues of Portuguese-Canadian immigrants; the fourth relates social geographical studies of three different Luso-Canadian communities; and a final section deals with cultural issues, with Portuguese-Canadian literature, and discusses the present and future of this group.

The strength of the volume lies in the eclectic nature of its articles, which come from a wide variety of disciplines (i.e., History, Geography, Sociology, Anthropology, Literary Criticism, etcetera). Most of these are also authored by a number of well-respected Luso-Canadian and Luso-American thinkers. A particular strength is the inclusion of articles dealing with the Portuguese White Fleet, as this is a little-documented aspect of Canadian history, in which the Portuguese have had a significant impact.

A number of individual articles also deserve special mention for the way in which they situate their subject-matter firmly within current Canadian theoretical, academic and policy issues:

First, there is Susana Miranda’s article on the much ignored, but significant, topic of immigrant office cleaners; one of the most shameful examples of economic exploitation in the Canadian immigrant reality. Miranda places the struggle of her Portuguese women firmly in the perspective of the emerging neo-liberal agenda.

Second, is Luis Aguiar’s examination of the sad case of Hélder Marques, a young man suffering from AIDS and schizophrenia, and the Canadian government’s reprehensible attempt to deport him to Portugal. Marques had immigrated to Canada as an infant, but never acquired his Canadian citizenship, before being convicted of a series of petty crimes. Aguiar documents the unprecedented manner in which this case managed to marshal what was formerly seen as a passive community, and also comments on relevant policy issues.

Also of mention is Irene Bloemraad’s excellent article, Invisible No More? This article attempts to illustrate how the higher citizenship and electoral participation of the Portuguese in Canada, versus those in the United States, can be attributed to differences in the integration policies and political structures between the two nations.

Finally, there is Isabel Patim’s noteworthy discussion on how Portuguese-Canadian literature fits within the overall cannon of Canadian literature.

Unfortunately, many of the remaining articles in this volume never achieve this level of contextualization or analysis and fail to discuss the wider theoretical or policy implications of their subject-matter. These works leave unanswered the question of what insights the study of the Portuguese-Canadian community—a group that, after nearly 60 years in Canada, continues to be largely marginalized from the mainstream of Canadian life in educational, cultural and political...