Travessias Luso-Afro-Brasileiras : mobilidades de mulheres Portuguesas e a reinvenção de espaços culturais (1950 – presente)

This dissertation concerns the examination of cultural production by Portuguese immigrant women, their descendants, and Afro-Brazilian women’s in Brazil and in Mozambique, from 1950 to the present. Portuguese women have been significant, but near invisible actors in the history of Portuguese migration. Four decades of dictatorship dominated by Antonio Salazar (1933-1974) produced suffocating censorship, the torture of opponents, and an official version of the nation fabricated on a crumbling empire. Women constituted a social group that the dictatorship closely controlled, as exemplified in its dictum that their lives should revolve around family, home, and the Church. In my dissertation I examine forms and spaces of culture produced by women who left Portugal and its colonies during the Salazar regime and its aftermath, when the country confronted the fallout of its colonial wars and decolonization. I analyze cultural production - autobiographies, novels, Holy Ghost festivals, and fado music - by women of different classes compelled to flee due to political and/or economic necessity. I argue that all these forms of cultural expression construct a new form of often-ambivalent female emancipation in the diaspora. Through cultural practices women fashion their own narratives of the mobilities produced by empire and its reverberations through subsequent decades. I use methodologies based on textual analysis, archival research in Portugal and Brazil, interviews with Portuguese immigrants, ethnographic analysis, and participant observation in cultural events. In Chapters 1, I examine how novels and newspaper articles by upper-class Portuguese migrants to Brazil fashion a new form of female emancipation that is limited in its scope in terms of challenging class and race hierarchies, but that contests the patriarchy of the Portuguese dictatorship. In Chapter 2, I look at autobiographies and novels of the migration waves that resulted from the Portuguese Revolution of 1974 and the decolonization of Portuguese colonies in Africa. I examine how these works denounce colonial ideologies, while on occasion simultaneously reproducing traditional representations of power. In Chapter 3, I examine the women who are behind-the-scenes leaders in the re-creation of the Festivals of the Holy Ghost, traditionally one of the highlights of the Portuguese religious and social calendar. I analyze how women in Brazil (Florianópolis, Rio de Janeiro, and São Luís do Maranhão) construct ethnicized, racialized, and feminized cultural spaces that give them a voice in their religious communities and in the public sphere. In Chapter 4, I analyze lyrics and performances of the Portuguese traditional folk song – fado – and how female immigrants in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo have been reproducing and re-inventing them from the 1980s to the present. Women’s performances of fado, mainly at Portuguese themed restaurants, afford them visibility and economic autonomy. Despite opening up spaces for these women in the public sphere, these lyrics still transmit notions of femininity promoted by Salazar’s dictatorial regime