For the good of the family: migratory strategies and affective language in Portuguese migrant letters, 1870s–1920s

Abstract

Labor migration was a common strategy for Portuguese families at the turn of the twentieth century. Correspondence provided a vehicle to keep families connected and a space to sustain and recreate their relationships and emotional bonds. This article analyzes the language of call letters, a particular type of family letter written by migrant men to call their wives and children to join them abroad. In particular, it examines the ways in which migrant husbands and their wives adapted to living in transnational households and to changing roles at home and abroad. It shows how family strategies of migration were discussed within narrative frameworks of family and marital love and duty, by making use of a variety of arguments that combined discourses of both material and emotional well-being. The discussion is based on the narrative patterns, recurrent themes, and argumentative strategies of a corpus of over 2200 letters. Discussions of marital duty, loyalty, and reciprocity contributed to a language of affect built on narratives of responsibility and dependability that reinforced the idea of migration as a family project.

Keywords:

• Affect
• letters
• language
• migration
• Portugal
• transnational families

Acknowledgements

Research, analysis, and writing for this article have been generously supported by the following institutions and programs: Dickinson College’s Research and Development Committee and the Kalaris Family Fellowship; Central Pennsylvania Consortium–Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grant; the EURIAS Fellowship Program, co-funded by the EU Marie Curie Actions, under the 7th Framework Programme; and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Notes

1. The gross emigration ratio was 0.52 for the years 1890 to 1920; and net emigration ratios were 0.56 for 1900–1911, 0.67 for 1911–1920, and 0.58 for 1920–1930. After 1930, the negative influence of the global economic crisis of 1930 and World War II produced a visible decline in international mobility and net emigration ratios plummeted. High levels of emigration resumed in the postwar period, reaching 0.68 for 1950–1960. This time, destinations in northern Europe, particularly France, attracted the bulk of Portuguese emigrants. See Bandeira (1996, pp. 151–153).

2. All translations are mine.

3. Call letters were also required by some countries of immigration in case of older migrants or when restrictions and quotas were required in the 1920s and 1930s; these letters were intended to show proof of family sponsorship and sometimes employment. In the case of Brazil, call letters of this type are archived in São Paulo’s immigrant archive. See Croci (2012) and Matos (2013).

4. The letters come from passport application dossiers in the following Portuguese district/regional archives: Braga, Castelo Branco, Coimbra, Faro, Leiria, Lisboa, Madeira, Porto, Viseu, and Viana do Castelo. These are all the regional archives in which call letters exist. I have also conducted research in several other archives which did not yield any letters. In some regional archives passport request dossiers have not survived (for example, in Aveiro); or they have survived but without letters (for example, in Angra do Heroísmo, in the Azores); or else the surviving dossiers belong to a period when formal authorizations replaced personal letters as a form of consent – usually after 1922 (for example, in Guarda). Research in these archives extended for many years during which I examined an estimated 100,000 passport dossiers. I wish to express my heartfelt gratitude to the many archivists who facilitated this research. Passport dossiers are organized in different ways in different archives, so selection criteria varied among them (sometimes I looked at complete years, sometimes at complete series of boxes, sometimes at specific ranges of years by smaller administrative divisions, etc.). The objective was to cast a wide net in order to identify dossiers with letters from a variety of years from the 1870s to the 1920s. The breakdown of the letters in the corpus by regional archive is as follows: Braga (294), Castelo Branco (1), Coimbra (475), Faro (408), Leiria (1), Lisboa (89), Madeira (19), Porto (428), Viseu (344), and Viana do Castelo (151); total: 2210. The distribution of letters in the corpus by country or region of origin is as follows (in decreasing order): Brazil (76.6%), Argentina (8.8%), United States (4.8%), Portuguese Africa (3.6%), Gibraltar (2.7%), France (0.6%), Spain (0.5%), and other (2.4%). All selected letters were transcribed and later annotated for content analysis using qualitative data analysis software (MaxQDA). The identifying numbers in the letters correspond to the number in the corpus.

5. Since these letters were used as cartas de chamada (call letters) and arrangements for the trip appear very frequently in them, it could be possible that money appears as a more frequent topic than in other letters exchanged by migrant families. The evidence presented by Monteiro (1985) in his analysis of the correspondence of a couple separated by migration, however, suggests otherwise. Money appears as frequently as a topic of discussion, especially in letters sent by the husband (see pp. 150–156).

6. Letter 77, António to his wife Maria Augusta, Manaus, Brazil, 3/3/1898, Arquivo Distrital de Viana do Castelo (hereafter ADVC), Governo Civil, Processos de passaporte [Passport Applications], box 2383 file 23, 30/4/1898. Since all letters come from passport applications handled by the Civil Government, I have omitted this information in the rest of the notes. Variations in archival citation format reflect variations in each archive’s classification system at the time of research.

7. Letter 521, José to his wife Maria da Piedade, Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil, 12/2/1910, Arquivo Distrital de Coimbra (hereafter ADC), IID/GC/ILFS/9/1/567, file 1284, 14/6/1910.

8. Letter 1141, Manuel to his wife Lucinda, São António do Monte, Minas Gerais, Brazil,7/11/1911, Arquivo Distrital do Porto (hereafter ADP), dossier 1747, file 293, 25/01/1912.

9. Letter 832, Manuel to his wife Maria Clara, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 5/12/1911, ADP, dossier 1748, file 43, 6/1/1912.

10. Letter 1202, Domingos to his wife Maria Fernanda, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 3/12/1907, ADP, dossier 1673, file 598, 15/01/1908.

11. Letter 21, Albino to his wife Maria Joaquina, Pará, Brazil, 25/5/1903, Arquivo Distrital de Viseu (hereafter ADV), box 2044, file 81, 20/7/1903.

12. Letter 1202, Domingos to his wife Maria Fernanda, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 3/12/1907, ADP, dossier 1673, file 598, 15/01/1908.

13. Letter 1152, José to his wife Margarida, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 27/6/1917, ADP, dossier 1840, file 1091, 11/08/1917.

14. Letter 1701, Júlio to his wife Maria, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 20/1/1909, Arquivo Distrital de Braga (hereafter ADB), file 3291, 15/7/1909; Letter 216, Miguel to his son Manuel, Rio de Janeiro, 9/10/1913, ADV, box 2057, file 24, 23/12/1903.

15. Letter 1770, António to his father (name unknown), France, 23/9/1919, ADB, file 25578, 8/10/1919.

16. Letter 223, Anacleto to his wife Julieta, São Paulo, Brazil, 15/2/1919, ADV, box 2430, file 728, 22/5/1919; Letter 447, Augusto to his daughter Elvira, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 23/6/1915, ADC, IID/GC/ILFS/9/5/675, file 421, 13/9/1915; Letter 730, Hipólito to his mother (name unknown), São Paulo, Brazil, 30/10/1912, ADC, IID/GC/ILFS/9/4/633, file 5387, 4/12/1912.

17. Letter 2132, António to his wife Amélia, Plymouth, Mass., USA, 22/4/1918, Arquivo Distrital de Lisboa/Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (hereafter ADL), N.T. 1016, N.R. 1628 A, June 1918.

18. Letter 653, João to his wife Florinda, São Paulo, Brazil, 18/9/1917, ADC, IID/GC/ILFS/10/1/690, file 490, 10/11/1917.

19. Letter 551, António to his wife Margarida, Santos, São Paulo, Brazil, 8/10/1910, ADC, IID/GC/ILFS/9/2/580, file 292, 27/1/1911.

20. Letter 677, José Augusto to his wife Maria, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2/10/1898, ADC, IID/GC/ILFS/8/1/400, file 1832, 10/12/1898.

21. Letter 150, José to his wife Maria do Carmo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 25/9/1916, ADV, box 2440, file 89, 8/11/1916; Letter 1283, José to his wife Maria da Conceição, [Buenos Aires], Argentina, 20/7/1917, Arquivo Distrital de Faro (hereafter ADF), box 631, dossier 1, 9/11/1917.

22. Letter 1061, Bernardino to his cousin (name unknown), São Paulo, Brazil, 15/11/1915, ADP, dossier 1819, file 1143, 28/12/1915.

23. Letter 377, Luiz to his wife Felismina, Coimbra, Minas Gerais, Brazil, 20/7/1900, ADC, IID/GC/ILFS/8/1/418, file 963.

24. Letter 925, Custódio to his uncle Valentim, Espírito Santo do Pinhal, São Paulo, Brazil, 1/8/1905, ADP, dossier 1649, file 310, 29/01/1905.

25. Letter 1942, Domingos to his wife Teresa, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 23/3/1919, ADB, file 18560, 9/19/1919.

26. Letter 1727, João to his compadre (name unknown), Juqueri [Franco da Rocha], São Paulo, Brazil, 12/7/1902, ADB, file 12306, 08/28/1903.

27. Letter 1330, João to his son João, Scotia, Cal., USA, 7/8/1919, ADF, box M1040, dossier 1, file 275, 10/10/1919.

28. Letter 1883, João to his wife Maria dos Prazeres, Barbacena, Minas Gerais, Brazil, 10/3/1892, ADB, file 26638, 8/9/1892.

29. Letter 1316, José Joaquim to his wife Maria, Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, 1/7/1898, ADF, uncatalogued, file 62, 10/9/1898.

30. Letter 2017, Manuel to his wife Beatriz, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 18/3/1916, ADVC, file number unknown, 13/06/1916.

31. Letter 1237, Joaquim to his wife Glória, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 19/1/1909, ADP, dossier 1695, file 494, 19/02/1909; Letter 1594, Manuel to his wife Alice, Provincetown, Mass., USA, 29/11/1914, ADF, box 604, dossier 1, 17/12/1914.

32. Letter 544, José to his wife Miquelina, Fazenda do Turbo, São Paulo, Brazil, 19/8/1910, ADC, IID/GC/ILFS/9/2/576, file 2767, 26/11/1910.

33. Letter 680, Augusto to his wife Maria da Assunção, [Guariba], São Paulo, Brazil, 1/1/1899, ADC, IID/GC/ILFS/8/1/404, file 521, 11/3/1899.

34. Letter 528, Francisco to his wife Ana, Brazil, date unknown, ADC, IID/GC/ILFS/9/2/571, file 2178, 14/10/1910.

35. Letter 1625, António to his wife Maria Francisca, Casablanca, Morocco, 28/5/1921, ADF, box 613, dossier 1, file 294; Letter 1348, Manuel to his wife Maria Francisca, Córdoba, Argentina, 22/8/1916, ADF, box 169, dossier 1, file number unknown.

36. Letter 642, António to his wife Ana Maria, Santos, Brasil, 22/2/1917, ADC, IID/GC/ILFS/10/1/688, file 194, 7/4/1917; Letter 1203, António to his wife Brígida, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 17/11/1916, ADP, dossier 1833, file 1051, 9/01/1917.

37. Letter 893, José to his wife Joana, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 23/10/1907, ADP, dossier 1658, file 239 or 241, 10/12/1907.

38. Letter 1670, Albino to his wife Clotilde, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 16/2/1914, ADB, file 917, 10/5/1914; Letter 622, Manuel to his wife Maria, Inhangapi, Pará, Brazil, 15/7/1897, ADC, IID/GC/ILFS/7/5/385, file 779, 25/8/1897.

39. Letter 669, Francisco to his wife Eduarda, São Paulo, Brazil, 6/12/1897, ADC, IID/GC/ILFS/7/5/390, file 282, 24/3/1898.

40. Letter 2016, José Maria to his wife Ana Rosa, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 27/5/1916, ADVC, file 336, 27/06/1916.

41. Letter 806, António to his wife (name unknown), Brazil, date unknown, ADC, IID/GC/ILFS/7/2/290 file 549, 27/6/1890.

42. Letter 1480, Veríssimo to his wife Mariana, place unknown, Argentina, 13/10/1910, ADF, box 138, 15/12/1910.

43. Letter 876, Elias to his wife Maria, Tijuca, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 28/12/1917, ADP, dossier 1846, file 1125, 16/03/1918.

44. Letter 354, José Maria to his wife Emília, [Fazenda dos Carmos, São Paulo], Brazil, 4/12/1899, ADC, IID/GC/ILFS/8/1/412, file 241, 16/3/1900.

45. Letter 753, Alfredo to his wife Elisa, Pernambuco, Brazil, 20/9/1918, ADC, IID/GC/ILFS/10/1/698 file 90, 4/2/1919.

46. Letter 656, António to his wife Encarnação, [Boston, Mass.], USA, 26/11/1917, ADC, IID/GC/ILFS/10/1/692 file 5, 8/1/1918.

47. Letter 1870, Francisco to his wife Emília, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 11/4/1909, ADB, file 22634, 4/9/1909.

48. Letter 743, José Maria to his wife Maria dos Anjos, Viradouro, São Paulo, Brazil, 21/12/1893 [?], ADC, IID/GC/ILFS/9/5/661, file 251, 7/2/1914.

49. Letter 868, João to his wife Emília, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 25/9/1906, ADP, dossier 1671, file 1119, 16/11/1907; Letter 2, António to his wife Margarida, São Paulo, Brazil, 9/10/1899, ADV, box 2049, file 134, 24/2/1900.

50. Letter 2010, Luís to his wife Maria, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 5/10/1890, ADVC, file 670, 10/11/1890; Letter 2094, Manuel to his wife Maria, [Lourenço Marques], Mozambique, date unknown, file 360, 11/09/1902; Letter 555, Sebastião to his wife Maria Augusta, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 20/12/1910, ADC, IID/GC/ILFS/9/2/580, file 341, 2/2/1911.

51. Letter 814, Joaquim to his wife Maria Guia, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1/7/1918, ADC, ID/GC/ILFS/10/1/695, file 387, 27/09/1918.

52. Letter 2015, João to his wife Carminda, Ramallo, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 12/4/1916, ADVC, file 322, 30/05/1916.

53. Letter 692, from João to his wife Maria do Rosário, Sabará, Minas Gerais, Brazil, 20/11/1907, ADC, IID/GC/ILFS/8/5/529, file 851, 17/3/1908.

54. Letter 1210, Joaquim to his wife Lucinda, São Paulo, Brazil, 14/1/1917, ADP, dossier, 1835, file 228, 19/03/1917.

55. Letter 1483, Francisco to his wife Ana, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 12/12/1893, ADF, uncatalogued, file 1, 12/1/1893.

56. Letter 1311, Joaquim to his wife Maria Paulina, Espírito Santo do Rio do Peixe, São Paulo, Brasil, 28/5/1895, ADF, uncatalogued, file 9, 12/12/1896.

57. Letter 1313, José to his wife Maria, place unknown, Brazil, 4/6/1907, ADF, uncatalogued, file 3, 4/1/1908.

58. Letter 1930, Eduardo to his wife Rosa, Bagé, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, 30/7/1911, ADB, file 17808, 1/9/1911; Letter 199, João to his wife Maria da Conceição, New Bedford, Mass., USA, 5/5/1915, ADV, box 2522, file 46, 3/7/1915.

59. Letter 1877, Manuel to his wife Angelina, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 6/8/1913, ADB, file 23049, 29/11/1913.

60. Letter 1873, Abílio to his wife Maria Francisca, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 14/11/1911, ADB, file 22835, 12/4/1912.

61. Letter 843, Mário to his wife Margarida, Manaus, Brazil, 22/11/1910, ADP, dossier 1754, file 898, 23/04/1912.

62. Letter 863, Francisco to his wife Maria, Neves, Brazil, 22/8/1907, ADP, dossier 1666, file 362, 11/10/1907.

63. Letter 938, from Júlio to wife Maria Conceição, Manaus, Brazil, 25/1/1910, ADP, dossier 1710, file 252, 23/02/1910.

64. Letter 2093, Silvestre to his wife Maria, Descampado, São Paulo, Brazil, 27/4/1902, ADVC, file 370, 15/09/1902.

65. Letter 886, José to his wife Carlota, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 11/1/1909, ADP, dossier 1696, file 893, 8/03/1909.

66. Letter 848, Eduardo to his wife Rosalina, Rio de Janeiro, 12/6/1912, ADP, dossier 1762, file 563, 19/08/1912; Letter 1928, Manuel to his wife Carolina, Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 31/7/1903, ADB, file 17349, 28/8/1903; Letter 1909, Joaquim to his wife Angélica, Silvestre Ferraz [Carmo de Minas], Minas Gerais, Brazil, 6/10/1916, ADB, file 10960, 11/27/1916.