European Spaces: Portuguese Migrants' Notions of Home and Belonging

Diaspora 9:2 2000 European Spaces: Portuguese Migrants' Notions of Home and Belonging Andrea Klimt University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth Movement, dislocation, and contingent, multilocal forms of belonging are increasingly prevalent and normalized ways of life. Ethnographers of transnationalism are documenting the various ways in which people connect the complex geographies oftheir lives and attempt to forge meaningful identities within multiple and protracted disjunctures. According to this literature, mobility, travel, transience, and liminality are the common themes of latetwentieth -century existence (Appadurai; Clifford; Glick-Schiller, Basch, and Szanton Blanc; Pries, "New Migration"); the notion of "home" is increasingly uncoupled from the location of daily life (Amit-Talai; Berking; Goldring; Olwig; Rapport and Dawson, "Home"; Smith); and citizenship is not the only status through which people acquire social and political rights or national identities (Kearney; Soysal). Recent explorations of transnational migration have expanded traditional conceptualizations of the subject and site of anthropological research in order to capture the complex experiences of these on-going global interconnections (see, e.g., Rouse; Mountz and Wright). These efforts have successfully challenged assumptions that movement is unidirectional, that migration is a circumscribed and temporary event in individuals' lives, and that daily lives and imagined futures are always firmly anchored in a single location (see Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton Blanc; Pries, Migration; Rapport and Dawson, Migrants). The following analysis of identity formation among the Portuguese in Germany contributes to our understanding oftransnational existences by expanding the usual temporal frame of reference and exploring how narratives of belonging change over time. How, in other words, do migrants make sense of their individual and collective place in the world as the political and economic conditions framing their experience change over the course of their lives? The question ofhow dislocation is handled over time needs more ethnographic attention because the tendency in explorations of transnational life is still to focus on "slice-of-time" depictions. For example, the recent work of Anne-Marie Fortier on the Italian experience in London and of Alison Mountz and Richard Wright on 259 Diaspora 9:2 2000 the lives of Mexicans in upper New York state present wonderfully vibrant analyses of how lives, identities, and communities are organized across transnational space. But they do not provide an account of how these forms of transnational life have changed over time in relation to overarching shifts in the politics of national belonging. Following Stuart Hall's suggestion that identities are always in the making, this analysis aims to follow the contours of change among the Portuguese in Germany. The deterritorialized population under consideration here must contend not only with the national borders they have already crossed but with the borders that are continually shifting around them. In many ways the Portuguese in Germany provide a strategic research site in which to think on the relation between identity and changes in the parameters and meanings of national spaces. The migrants who came north in the late 1960s have had to make sense of three decades of protracted liminality. They lived and worked in a country that resolutely rejected the incorporation of non-ethnic Germans into the national polity. Then, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of the two Germanies, the Portuguese had to resituate themselves within a suddenly larger and dramatically more turbulent Germany. The first generation ofmigrants and their children have also been immersed in another transformation, more gradual, yet just as momentous. With Portugal's admission into the European Union in 1986 and acquisition of full membership in 1992, the Portuguese, including those in Germany, have officially become "European." Another shift affecting the lives of the Portuguese in Germany has been the progressive ideological and legal uncoupling by the Portuguese state of geographic residence from national belonging and the increasing incorporation of the members of its far-flung diaspora into definitions of the nation (Feldman-Bianco). These major changes—the shifting and highly contested parameters of "Germanness," the growing scope and salience of "Europeanness," and the increasing deterritorialization of "Portugueseness"—have all had very significant effects on how the Portuguese in Germany conceptualize who they are and where they belong. The resulting story, like many ofthe recent studies, undermines images...