Narrated in the female's memories: portuguese women and portuguese-african women in shifts to Brazil

Abstract

There is still much to learn about the signs of female presence on immigration in São Paulo; in the case of the Portuguese migrants, the process is complex because Portugal, until the 1970s, was constituted as a colonial metropolis. Thus, the Portuguese origin of immigrants was not from the same territory when they came to São Paulo: we consider the memories of Portuguese origin immigrants from two streams occurred in the second half of the twentieth century, coming from Portugal and from Africa. We take as reference narratives of women who came from Portugal, Mozambique and Angola, all who identified themselves as Portuguese, but with multiple experiences and memories, because these women were brought up and educated in very different social contexts. We note that these girls and women carried the marks of the traditional Portuguese education because in their displacements the model usually followed by families was the subordination of women to father or husband. But the arrival in São Paulo brought new needs to families and children, resulting in greater female integration in the labor field, formally or informally, as well as changes in the various living spaces, although for some of them this meant losses of “lifestyles” they considered better for them. To analyze the narratives of Portuguese immigrants and the subjectivities of these reports, we note that the time may allow discussion of topics that would be “prohibited” by the time they were experienced. Their voices often could only be “heard” by the researchers when the experience of crossing did not hurt so much