Radical Experiences of Portuguese Social Workers in the Vanguard of the 1974 Revolution

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the contribution of social workers to the Portuguese democratic transition in the 1970s. Their involvement in urban social mobilizations and in the cooperative movement will offer a perspective on the participation of social workers alongside the Revolutionary process and how they, through engaging with social mobilization, grass-roots initiatives and socio-political activism deployed practices consistent with radical social work frames. It is argued that the Revolution provided the structural conditions for social workers to engage with radical practice and that their intervention constituted a form of agency for socio-political transformation while influencing professional self-representations and professional agency.

KEYWORDS:

• Revolution
• radical social work
• social movements
• agrarian reform
• Portugal

Notes

¹ By seizing power in the dawn of 25 April, mid-rank military officers ended one of the longest lasting dictatorships of Western Europe, instated in 1926.

² This was the State’s organism responsible for administering social protection services and general welfare policies (Cardoso, 2013) assuming later to designation of Social Security.

³ According to Pereira (2016), the Latin-American Reconceptualization Movement can be seen as an expression of the radicalization trend that was starting to take form in the Anglo-Saxon countries.

⁴ Urban struggles was the term Downs (1980) used to coin the massive social mobilizations and urban uprisings around the housing question in Portugal.

⁵ SAAL, the Portuguese acronym that stands for Mobile Local Support Service.

⁶ Interview social worker, HDF/SAAL.

⁷ As recalled by the main coordinator, Maria Proença, in an earlier study (Andrade, 1992) andacknowledged by one of our interviewees (interview social worker, HDF/SAAL).

⁸ In the following two weeks, 2000 homes were occupied (Andrade, 1992; Downs, 1980).

⁹ Teotonio Pereira was a distinguished architect involved with the progressive catholic movement in the opposition to the dictatorship.

¹⁰ Interview social worker, HDF/SAAL.

¹¹ Interview social worker, HDF/SAAL.

¹² Interview social worker, HDF/SAAL.

¹³ Interview social worker, HDF/SAAL.

¹⁴ Other bairros had social workers involved in the organization of residents’ associations since the late 1960s, like in some Porto neighborhoods (Queirós, 2015; Sancho, 1970).

¹⁵ Interview social worker, IFAS, Setúbal.

¹⁶ Interview social worker, HDF/SAAL.

¹⁷ Interview social worker, professor/internship supervisor.

¹⁸ The role of social workers in support of the architects’ communication with their “clients” under the SAAL initiative was clearly explained by Gonçalo Byrne (2014), Andrade (1992) and Queirós (2015).

¹⁹ Interview social worker, HDF/SAAL.

²⁰ Interview social worker, HDF/SAAL.

²¹ Interview social worker, professor/internship supervisor.

²² Interview social worker, IFAS, Setúbal.

²³ The connection between radical social work and community work has been extensively reported in the literature (Ferguson & Woodward, 2009; Jones & Mayo, 1974; Mayo, 1975; Turbett, 2014).

²⁴ Interview social worker, professor/internship supervisor.

²⁵ Interview social worker, HDF/SAAL.

²⁶ Interview social worker, HDF/SAAL.

²⁷ Interview social worker, GTH. Regarding the acrimony between SAAL’s social workers and the municipality’s see Alves (2001).

²⁸ Counter-revolutionary coup occurred in 1975 that put an end to the radical left-wing trend of the Revolution. It represented the victory of the moderate and right-wing political forces and the start of the political normalization process (Rezola, 2008).

²⁹ Interview social worker, HDF/SAAL.

³⁰ Interview social worker, HDF/SAAL.

³¹ Figures compiled by Pereira (2014). The overall number of social workers involved is difficult to determine, since the reports and documental information does not discriminate the specific professional background of all the team elements.

³² Interview social worker, Torre Bela cooperative.

³³ Interview social worker, Torre Bela cooperative.

³⁴ Another major factor that contributed to turn the Torre Bela occupation into a symbol of the Revolution was the homonymous film shot by German director Thomas Harlan. This cinematic documentary recorded the whole process, exposing the complexity and tensions surrounding the social and political relations, the forging of political alliances, and the paradoxes that dominated the revolutionary process.

³⁵ Interview social worker, Torre Bela cooperative.

³⁶ Interview social worker, Torre Bela cooperative.

³⁷ Interview social worker, Torre Bela cooperative.

³⁸ Interview social worker, Torre Bela cooperative.

³⁹ Healy (2000, p. 72) states that critical and radical social work literature have been signaling what looks like to be an apparent incompatibility between class and professional statuses and the process of radical social intervention, based on the concept that “the vested interest of professional social workers in the maintenance of the status quo compromises their capacity to commit to social transformation”.

⁴⁰ Drawing from De Maria’s (1992, p. 146) conception of radical social work as a process that elapses the discovery of the problems’ structural causes, and moves onto a practice aimed at overturning them.

⁴¹ We should also keep in mind that, from the first years of the decade, social work trade unionism was vivid (Ferreira, Couto, & Fernandes, 1992). Two of the interviewees whose testimony was used in this article held executive functions in the social workers’ union at least until 1975.

⁴² Paradoxically, in their discourse, the feeling of professional degrading emerged later, in the mid-1990s, as more technically bureaucratic practice limited their capacity to propose and participate in structural intervention.

⁴³ See the case of the CERCI cooperatives, created to provide services for the disabled (Negreiros et al., 1992; Silva, 2016).

⁴⁴ Note that Statham (1978) already claimed that the radical agenda did not benefit from acts of casuistic rebel heroism detached from the Social Work institutional settings and networks.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by national funds, through the FCT – Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology under the project UID/SOC/04011/2019.