This Pilgrim Nation: The Making of the Portuguese Diaspora in Postwar North America by Gilberto Fernandes (review)

Our understanding of the Portuguese in Canada and the United States remains surprisingly scant. This is disappointing for a large post-war immigration wave interwoven with the civil rights movements, the shift away from Anglo-Saxon immigration sources, the emergence of multiculturalism, identity politics, and the decline of Fordism, to name just a few of the most significant socio-political developments in the latter half of the twentieth century. As a result, the Portuguese experience remains largely invisible on both sides of the border, making the Portuguese the forgotten immigrants. This Pilgrim Nation, therefore, is a welcome addition. While it adds to our understanding of the Portuguese, it is ironic that its starting point and overall focus is the "O Estado Novo" of 1933–1974, the Portuguese fascist regime's top-down forceful connections between the "homeland" and expatriate communities in the New England states, the New York metropolitan area, Montreal, and Toronto. Gilberto Fernandes discusses the communities mostly in regard to their relationship, acceptance, and sometime resistance, to the Estado Novo's determination to establish a diasporic identity from above and across from the 1950s to the 1970s.

The diasporic identity stems from notions of "nationhood," embedded in discourses shifting from Portugal's colonial legacy to a modern nation integrating into the emerging global economy, and rooted in emerging transnationalism practices by communities identifying with both their country of residence and their country of origin. In other words, these were the discourses of an imperial, "historically white" nation that was also promoting openness to the Other via references to lusotropocalist ideas about Portuguese benevolent colonialism and intermixing and intermarriage between Portuguese settlers and local populations. At the ground level, these discourses unfolded in communities that sought to locate and identify themselves in "Portugueseness" and ascension into North American whiteness, or, when convenient, defining themselves as "American" in the changing context of the identity politics in the United States. This theme of "situational identity" is less evident in Canada, or at least much less explored by the author. These ideological constructions were accompanied by economic pursuits evident in the tit-for-tat of promoting the benefits of remittances in exchange for voting rights in national elections in the "homeland."

Policy initiatives, official visits by state diplomats, and cultural promotion, surveilled and overseen by state agents and secret police goons, grounded these shifting discourses and articulated the Portuguese diaspora at "the intersection of home nation, host nation, and migrant communities" (5). Instructed by the fascist regime, these state servants imposed, surveilled, and protected a certain kind of diasporic identity tied to the mainland and developed in cahoots with local Portuguese elites. The latter participated in the unfolding of government views, protecting themselves from opposition while ignoring the views of the working-class Portuguese in Canada and the United States whom it saw as uneducated and unsophisticated in taste and political matters. This is one of the strengths and, at the same time, weaknesses of the book. It focuses on the relationships between agents of the Portuguese government and the elites in the local communities in the United States and Canada. Fernandes does an excellent job in demonstrating the working of these relationships and their policing. Less well demonstrated are the views of the working-class Portuguese and Azorean in the United States and Canada regarding the imposition of a diasporic Portugueseness centred on repeated inventions of "national projects." Fernandes argues that the Portuguese case is an example of stitching together "transnational imagined communities" and showing "how nation states can reframe the collective imagination of its domestic and expatriate citizenry along diasporic lines in order to reassert their sovereignty and geopolitical clout in a context of accelerated globalization" (6). This interpretation adds to our understanding of "imagined communities" as not only geographically specific, but as increasingly unbounded and flexible in formation and internal dynamics. And...