Introduction: framing circulations of people and things

The current article draws on the international project¹Atlantic Crossings, a collaborative research of Portuguese and Brazilian universities that, for three years (2012-15), explored the present-day movements of people and things between four major cities: Lisbon, Porto, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro. More specifically, Atlantic Crossings investigated the bilateral migration flows of Portuguese and Brazilian families in the turbulent context of the last international financial crisis through a particular lens - the ways movement resonates and materializes in everyday domestic objects and consumption practices. The article discusses two interconnected features of contemporary migration and consumption practices. The first results from the impacts of movement and displacement regarding both people and things. The second explores the significance of materiality as a setting for the production, negotiation, and stabilization of social identity in a new location.

Atlantic Crossings sought to find answers for the following questions:

With this line of questioning in mind, the project addressed the complex debate of contemporary circulations of people and their relationships with materiality and consumption practices, while promoting a comprehensive discussion of contemporary identity matters.

As becomes apparent by the visibility and intensity of the discussions it generates, human migration is a vital cross‐cutting issue that constitutes an internal and external fracturing topic, globally mediatized and significantly debated. The divisions that human migration creates are deep-rooted, and although migrants around the globe share common experiences of disruption and strangeness, migration itself is a complex and diverse phenomenon (^{Brettell, 2008}) that needs further examination in order to integrate it more fully into a holistic understanding of contemporary collective life (^{Castles, 2010}).

Contemporary migrations present great diversity regarding the intensity and directions of flows, the social and cultural backgrounds and the sociographic profiles of those who migrate, the push and pull factors at play, and the legal and institutional apparatuses that frame them. However, this diversity unfolds within increasingly universal relationships of power that translate the existence of global structures of common difference (^{Wilk, 2005}). Movement creates integrated systems, which can be observed on a range of scales (^{Brettell, 2008}; ^{Glick Schiller, 2013}): individual, family, community, national, and the constellation of countries linked by migration flows. People and their practices are therefore part of multiple spatial networks and temporal linkages that need to be acknowledged and explored in migration studies. To be sure, migration experiences are grounded on detail: who travels and who stays, when, how, and the circumstances under which travel takes place; what historic, economic, political, and cultural conditions mark the contexts and trajectories of migration, and how these contexts affect personal biographies over time; how are relationships and networks of belonging managed and displayed by both those who moved and those who stayed behind.

The transnational turn (^{Vertovec, 2007}) introduced significant changes in the debate about the articulation of the multiple dimensions of migration. It pulled research away from the approaches that portrayed migrants as passive reactors of a larger and more complex social process and instead focused on their lived experiences. Previous research (^{Vigh, 2009}; ^{Benson, 2009}; ­^{Salazar, 2011}), including the project in which this article is rooted, calls attention to the importance of exploring the disconnections between the ideal and the actual experiences in contexts of migration. This line of research promotes an approach that seeks to tackle and compare the imaginaries and expectations of migrants with their narratives of concrete daily life experiences. In one way or another, most forms of migration are related to aspirations of a “better life”. Hence, imaginaries, that is, culturally shared and socially transmitted representational assemblages that interact with people’s imaginings and expectations (^{Salazar, 2011}), are used as meaning making devices and play a significant part in most migrations.

Material culture in general, and domestic material culture in particular have proved to be especially productive in accessing and exploring migration experiences. Migrations are necessarily embedded in materiality. When people circulate, things circulate with them, offering significant opportunities to negotiate both inclusion and exclusion in new settings. Movement, diversity, and co-presence are inscribed in the material environment of cities, neighborhoods, streets, and homes through a range of complicated processes that render some movements invisible while highlighting the presence of others.

Anthropology has always paid attention to the objects and food that different cultures produce and consume. Material culture was long understood not only as a productive tool to tackle the original aspects of each culture and compare it to other cultures, but also as a means to produce cultural and social relationships. While observing human gatherings to exchange things and establish their value, meaning, and usefulness, anthropologists recognized that their ability to express power, alliance, submission, respect, etc. was key to objectifying and stabilizing social positions and regulating social life. In industrial societies anthropology progressively shifted its attention from this perspective to one focused mainly on production (its techniques, politics, and impacts) and consumption assumed a progressively more discrete position in the study of material culture. This picture underwent a major shift in the 1980s, when consumption resumed its position as a field of meaningful practice.

Prioritizing consumption again in addressing contemporary material culture resulted from a progressive exercise taking into account a varied set of theoretical moves. Contributions such as those of ^{Bourdieu (1979}), ^{Douglas and Isherwood (1979}), ^{Appadurai (1986}), and ^{Miller (1987}) promoted a theoretical framework that, by emphasizing the expressive and constitutive abilities of materiality, described the relationships between people and things as a particular form of social relationship, and validated the theoretical principle of the active consumer, i.e., the ability of people to strategically appropriate objects and food in order to produce meanings and structure certain dimensions of their social lives.

To consume - that is, to relate to the things that integrate and circulate through the different contexts that frame peoples’ everyday experiences - thus implies much more than scrutinizing the processes of choice and shopping. It also involves analyzing what happens when things leave the sphere of the market and enter the private domains of family or individual life. Domesticating (^{Miller, 2008}) the contemporary material world is a complex task that is mediated by the specificities of the spatial, historical, and cultural contexts in which it occurs, and relates to a creative process of use and reuse of things, whose meanings are often adjusted as a consequence of those same processes (^{Appadurai, 1986}; ^{Kopytoff, 1986}; ^{Miller, 1998}).

Through their subjection to different appropriations and regimes of value, items of consumption also have an important role to play in this process. Far from being “neutral entities” they are responsible for the co-production of the contexts they “inhabit” (^{Silverstone et al., 1992}). Things (food included) and people work, with different intensities (Miller, 2002), toward the materialization of life projects, sentiments, relationships, and views of the world held by their owners, jointly contributing to the production of (micro) universes of meaning that are essential to understanding one’s place in the world, as opposed to the infinity of places occupied by others. Hence, materiality is one of the most distinctive and constitutive aspects of contemporary life and is important in the discussion of significant themes such as cultural production and reproduction, aspirations, social positioning, belonging, identity, and innovation.

The significance of food in mediating relationships, participating in the constitution of identities, marking cultural belongings, and expressing class, gender, or ethnic divisions has received considerable attention within the social sciences (^{Wilk, 2006}). There is, however, still much to be discussed about the way in which food - such a stable pillar of identity - operates on the unstable terrain of permanent and intense fluxes of food, things, and people, i.e. the difficult conundrum of stability and change, of borrowing and diffusion (^{Wilk, 1999}, p. 243), as well as what its contribution may be to generating more diversity and new cultural, economic, and political boundaries. Food is a powerful tool to explore the creative work of producing and reproducing culture, because reflects both change and continuity. Due to its sensuous nature and its capacity to act as a powerful mnemonic, food has great potential as a means for remembering past and present contexts of belonging, deliberately or otherwise (^{Sutton, 2001}). Also, it has the ability to encode and decode memory (^{Mintz, 1985}), as well as to appropriate and make use of one’s own cultural frame as well as the cultural frames of others. Hence, food is important grist to the mill of future-creating (^{Janowski, 2012}), since it provides the possibility for memories of the past to construct, not only the present, but also the future.

The Atlantic Crossings project followed an ethnographic approach comprising multiple data gathering and analysis techniques.² This article presents and discusses but a small part of the data collected during the last stage of the research - i. e., only to that pertaining to the Portuguese families who migrated to Brazil and were at the time of the research based in Rio de Janeiro. These families were selected from a broader group of recent Portuguese migrants in Brazil. The intensive ethnographic fieldwork carried out with them involved biographical interviews, home visits, preparation of family meals, shopping excursions, and socialization events, as well as the collection of pictures of their domestic material culture in general and food and foodways in particular.

Being a Portuguese migrant in Rio: old routes, new positioning strategies

From 2008 to 2016, Portugal experienced a severe economic recession, which had a strong impact on the migration movements in and out of the country. Portuguese migration history goes back to the beginning of the colonial project.³ In the 15^th century, large contingents of mainland population left the continent and established themselves in Madeira and the Azores. Later, Portuguese and European settlers migrated to the Portuguese African territories, to India, and to Brazil, which became the most prominent destination for the Portuguese in the beginning of the 20^th century.

During the last century Brazil was a solid destination for many Portuguese, mostly from the working class, seeking better life conditions. After the revolution of 1974, Brazil received another significant Portuguese migration wave which, unlike the previous ones, mainly involved people from the middle classes and elites, coming from the former colonies and the continental homeland, who had favored the Dictatorship. In the 1990s Brazil received a new wave of Portuguese emigration, this time due to Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s administrative policy of privatization. More recently the Brazilian economy has experienced a boost as the country has received intense media attention, not only because of its economic growth, but also because of two major global events: The Football World Cup (2014) and the Olympics (2016).

This favorable economic period in Brazil coincided with a severe global crisis that had especially negative effects in Portugal. As of 2010, the second phase of the financial crisis, now asymmetric rather than global, deeply affected the Portuguese economy (^{Pires et al., 2020}, p. 18). Crisis and austerity-oriented policies as responses to the crisis greatly affected the number of exits, once again due to the combination of a deterioration of living conditions (the crisis) and the perception of a lack of voice in responding to this deterioration (policies) (ibid. 2020, p. 18). According to Pires et al. (2020, p. 18), since that crisis was asymmetric (that is, that the economic crisis affected mostly countries located mainly in the southern periphery of Europe), migration from the south to the north of Europe and to other non-European destinations became particularly visible. The years of 2010 and 2013 witnessed the highest growth in Portuguese emigration since the 1960s and ‘70s. In 2013, the new emigration cycle reached its culmination, with around 120,000 departures in a single year. It is necessary to go back to 1973 to find values of this order of magnitude for emigration.

The Portuguese media quickly began to depict Brazil as an important alternative for the thousands of Portuguese that opted - or were forced - to emigrate due to unemployment, financial problems, and increasing social and politic instability. However, according to several official reports from Observatório da Emigração (^{Pires et al., 2014}), Brazil received only 1% of the Portuguese people who decided to migrate, with the great majority (80-85%) of the overall contingent choosing European destinations. This is not a new trend. According to Pires et al. (2020, p. 15), the present-day significance of Europe as a migration destination for the Portuguese results directly from the country’s peripheral position in the European Union. In 2010/11, more than 1.1 million Portuguese resided elsewhere in the EU and EFTA countries (ibid., 2020, p. 15). Conversely, other major destinations such as Brazil, Venezuela, the USA, and Canada saw a fall of arrivals (ibid., 2020, p. 15).

Even if some of their statistical data on entries and exits seem to be incomplete and/or contradictory, the Brazilian Federal Police claim that the number of Portuguese who entered the country during 2001 was less than 700. The figures increased moderately over the next 7 years and in 2009 the situation clearly changed, with more than 3,000 Portuguese entering the country. This trend reached a peak of 5,700 people in 2013 and slowly decreased from then on to the present-day. This change was caused by the rise of political and economic instability in Brazil, which has been affecting the country since 2014 (^{Rosales and Machado, 2019}) to the present-day. Today the Portuguese are still the largest community of residents in Brazil who were born outside the country (making up 23% of the total population born outside of Brazil in 2010). Most of the 137,973,000 individuals within this category reside in São Paulo (47%) and Rio de Janeiro (37%) and arrived in these cities before 1970.

The people interviewed by the Atlantic Crossings team do not constitute a representative sample of all recent Portuguese migrants in Brazil. However, and even though representativeness was never a goal, the different social, economic, and legal statuses of the subjects approached during fieldwork was visible from the start and, therefore, taken into account during the selection stage. The first significant aspect of the recent Portuguese migration flow to Brazil is its apparent irrelevance, both when compared to alternative Portuguese migratory movements toward other destinations in the same period⁴ and with movements toward the same territory⁵ in previous historical periods. Most of the newcomers are young (24-39), join nuclear household units, and approximately half of these households include children, often of young age. In line with the general trend presented by the Portuguese population residing in Europe, most of the households with children have no more than one child. Most of the subjects work in the tertiary sector and hold highly skilled jobs in science, teaching, architecture, the arts, and management.

The second noteworthy aspect is that this recent group of Portuguese migrants has, on average, much higher academic qualifications than the earlier Portuguese migratory contingents who arrived in the country during the twentieth century. The number of male and female individuals with complete and incomplete higher education is considerable, and again in line with the Portuguese present-day reality, which represents a significant improvement in terms of academic training. This fact clearly influences the group’s positioning strategies in the Brazilian labor market in regard to the functions they are entitled to perform and the level of salaries expected, as well as in regard to the level of professional autonomy they consider adequate. Hence, the number of recent Portuguese migrants occupying senior and junior leadership and management positions in the public and private sectors is, according to official data⁶, significant and again in contrast with the positions held by the earlier Portuguese working class migratory contingents. Finally, it is important to mention that the employment rate of this group varies significantly according to gender. Despite having, has their husbands do, relatively high qualifications, the number of women who are not employed is considerable, which might be partially explained by the fact that many of these women entered the country as spouses of holders of a valid working visa, which does not grant them the legal right to work in Brazil.

Most (70%) of the 25 families who participated in the ethnography in Rio de Janeiro had visited the city as tourists and/or as exchange students in the past. These previous, very positive, experiences in Rio greatly influenced their decision to migrate and are used by the subjects to somehow legitimize their discourses about the city and Rio’s lifestyle - a wonderful, exotic, sensuous city, where a loose, close to nature, daily-life is the norm. Although Rio’s spectacular natural beauty and loose lifestyle are pointed out as the most significant reasons for selecting the city as migration destination, all families also mention the good economic situation the city was experiencing at the time and the job opportunities the World Cup and Olympics had created. It is worth mentioning that the cultural and historical links between Portugal and Brazil, even if acknowledged by most subjects, were apparently less significant criteria then the good economic moment and the high international visibility the city was experiencing at the moment.

It is also worth noting that all subjects declared not having previous migration experiences in their families - neither to Brazil nor to other world destinations, which makes them first-generation migrants and influences the weight of pre-existing migration networks based on kinship. This fact also reinforces the originality of this specific migrant contingent vis-à-vis other recent Portuguese migration contingents who elected European destinations during the same period.

Perhaps due to their original profile, the group’s position concerning migration, in general, and their migration experience in particular are non-coincident. Most subjects share a negative representation of migration in general, mentioning that it as a solution to escape poverty, conflict, etc. This negative portrayal is in clear contrast with how their own movement is described: a personal growing experience; an adventure, a natural decision to make, given the negative situation Portugal was facing at the time. It is therefore with no surprise that we find that the group does not identify with the term “migrant” but rather with the term “expat” or “world citizen”:

We thought it was better to migrate before something happened to us. But we are not migrants (…) we are different from the Portuguese people who have migrated to Brazil in the twentieth century. [a]

We are expats; we value growth personal experiences and internationalization; we are developing our autonomy, our adulthood. [b]

Hence, the decision to leave Portugal resulted, according to the subjects, not directly from the economic situation the country was facing, but from a personal resolution. However, this fact does not prevent the subjects’ discourses about the Portuguese economic and social situation at the time from being openly critical. Most feel that even if their lives were far from being problematic, Portugal has betrayed them somehow, in failing to promote the necessary means to consolidate their position in the middle-class. In their view the crisis brought even more instability to an already small and fragile job market and although none of them were experiencing economic difficulties or unemployment, the uncertainty about the future was crucial in their decision. Hence, migrating from Portugal to Brazil is not, as it was for most migrants in previous migration waves, an absolute need, but rather is described as preventive, i.e. a conservative resolution given the instability caused by the financial crisis.

Domestic life: the ambiguities of food preparation and consumption

As we have seen, Rio was generally depicted as a great location to live, but also presents its challenges. The first is closely related with an overall negative representation of the Brazilian society, which is mostly defined as corrupted, chaotic, violent, and illiterate. The second results from the fact of Rio being a city of great contrasts, and its grandness is basically located in one of the city’s many “zones” (districts) - the zona sul. All families elected the best neighborhoods of the zona sul in which to reside. Zona sul (specifically the neighborhoods of Copacabana, Leblon, and Ipanema) is described as safer, cleaner, and more beautiful than the rest of Rio. This option had a significant impact in both their personal life and financial situation, as well as in the daily lives of their families. In fact, most families struggle to pay the housing rents and other expenses of the often very small apartments they live in. And even if this situation falls far short of their aspirations, none has ever considered the option of moving to a less expensive location because it would deeply affect both the relationship they have with the city and, most importantly, the possibility to materialize their aspirations of living a good life in Brazil.

Most homes, even if located in the right neighborhood, do not correspond to the home they dreamed about before emigrating. The high prices of housing in the southern part of the city, as well as the high demand in the market, forced most families to compromise. c and d, for example, describe their small home as somehow oppressive, due to the lack of light and proximity to other large buildings. It is also worth noting that most houses are not located on the sea front, nor on the best avenues. Furthermore, the zona sul also faced at the time a great traffic problem, since the public transport system was almost non-existent. Today, due to the 2016 Olympic Games, the situation has improved considerably, but at the time of our interviews all families complained about the long hours they spent commuting to and from work in the city center.

The families’ ambivalent feelings about their homes necessarily affect their domestic material culture and consumption practices. Home making in contexts of circulation is often a gradual and conflicting process (^{Rosales, 2015}) resulting from multiple ongoing negotiations between the house, as material entity, and the objects and the people that inhabit it. In spite of the fact that all families described fairly original strategies when dealing with the task of homemaking, modest spatial dimensions were pointed out as a significant topic by most informants.

From the wide range of domestic material culture and consumption practices the Atlantic Crossings project has explored, food and foodstuff emerged as a very prominent topic. The centrality attributed to food in contexts of migration is well documented. However, in this case, the relevance of food is even more accentuated by the particular aspects discussed above, which characterize these families’ migrant trajectories. To be sure, the fact that all families had recently arrived in Rio (in combination with the problems most of them faced regarding work, legal status, and housing) promotes a particularly complex and ambiguous relationship with domestic material culture and consumption practices. Due to its material specificities, food gains great visibility and aptitude for exploring identity and positioning strategies in the new context of residence, as well as for dealing with the aspirations that migration necessarily entails. This aspect is even further highlighted, as we will see, when we address the movement of things across the Atlantic and the role materiality played in managing their transnational relationships and belongings.

The first significant aspect emerging from fieldwork is closely related to the impacts and transformations migration necessarily entails in consumption practices in general, and food in particular. All families mentioned that their food shopping routines underwent major adjustments. New items such as tropical fruits, diverse greens, cream cheese, sugarcane juice, coconut milk, tapioca, and manioc entered the families’ shopping baskets for the first time when they arrived in Rio and are now part of their cooking routines. These products coexist with a wide variety of other food items that the families buy at Portuguese stores, as well as in stores and markets that sell Portuguese products, some of them located at a considerable distance from the zona sul, such as codfish, pork, bread, olive oil, and wine. It is also worth noting that most families mentioned that organic and imported products in Brazil were far more expensive than in Portugal and often of poorer quality. In fact, the quality and especially the freshness of Brazilian products, the hygiene standards of most Brazilian supermarkets and stores, and the policies of food safety and quality control of the Brazilian authorities are often questioned by the Portuguese families who emphatically expressed their concerns during fieldwork.

Food preparation and food consumption also saw major adjustments. Most families seemed to adopt new culinary practices while maintaining key Portuguese traditions. The most visible aspect of the families’ new culinary practices is its diversity. Ranging from traditional feijoada, to juice diets and green salads, the incorporation of new food practices seems to be closely related with the different perspectives developed to evaluate and incorporate food. Some families consider Brazilian food, in all its diversity, to be rather extreme and unhealthy, while others describe the advantages of some of the Brazilian food practices:

Traditional Brazilian food is highly caloric and fat. Of course, only poor people and working-class people eat those kinds of things. We can’t possibly eat them. Now the middle classes, that’s another matter. They are totally obsessed with their image and they have all those juices, salads, I find it really sick! It is all very extreme and therefore it is also not good for you. We are much more balanced and conscious in Europe. [f]

I am much better now. I’ve learned how to prepare healthy, vegetarian food. I love these juice diets they have here in Rio and the way Brazilians take care of their bodies and of their health. I lost weight and we are all very happy with the change. [g]

Note too that migrating to Rio is also considered an opportunity to incorporate other cultural culinary traditions. The cosmopolitanism of Rio’s “culinary-scape” is highly appreciated and in tune with the cosmopolitanism of this migrant group.

It really is interesting to have all these possibilities and diverse culinary traditions in our neighborhood. There are all sorts of restaurants: Japanese, Thai, Lebanese, Italian. All of very good quality. We have them in Portugal as well but here they are somehow more ingrained in the city’s scape. And of course there are also great Brazilian chefs and great Brazilian restaurants to try. [i]

What we miss the most about Portugal is our food. This sentence translates the second pertinent aspect emerging from the field, an aspect that illustrates so well the significance of food in migration contexts. Food, in general, and specific items such as fresh fish (from cold waters - especially cod), bread, chorizos and other sausages, ham, olive oil, beer, and wine are emphasized by most families as the things they miss the most about their home country. The centrality of food as a key element of connection with the families’ context of origin becomes even more reinforced by the intense and continuous movement of things across the Atlantic and the role these things play in sustaining transnational relationships and materializing aspirations and belongings:

From Portugal I usually bring wine, olive oil, sausages, coffee, even basmati rice. [a]

Bread, for example, I brought bread, because bread is vital to me. Bread here is awful and I miss Portuguese bread very much, because I really like it and I could never find it in Rio, even in Portuguese bakeries… the quality just isn’t the same. [b]

Food is by far the item that circulates the most between Portugal and Brazil. Families carry as much food as they can when they travel and ask their relatives for specific items to be sent to them regularly. These items include the above-mentioned bread, chorizos, olive oil, and wine, but also some pastries and jams. It is interesting to note that this strong relationship with the Portuguese food heritage does not collide, according to the families, with their open criticism about Portugal and, in their own words, proclaimed detachment from all Portuguese things as a sign of their cosmopolitanism.

I am Portuguese, I love being Portuguese, but I don’t consider myself a Portuguese from Portugal. I am a Portuguese from the world, right? I do not like codfish, I do not like leitão⁷, I hate torresmos⁸, I am not traditional at all… [h].

The third aspect emerging from the field is directly related to the families’ socialization practices. It is with no surprise that we confirm the centrality of food as a socialization tool in this particular migration, as is the case in most others. However, the presence of food in moments of socialization emerges in different ways, calling attention once more to the complexity of this migrant group’s positioning strategies and policy of belonging.

I miss family dinners and gatherings with friends. Here in Rio people tend to go out for a beer after work… which is also good, but I miss the intimacy of dinning at home with family and friends. [c]

We gathered a group of friends and prepared a Portuguese lunch. We cooked some of the stuff I had brought from Portugal - chorizo, codfish pastries, rice with beans. We were almost all Portuguese and it was fantastic… I tasted a piece of chorizo and I almost cried… [d]

I use meals to gather people. Cooking for others is a great way of building and maintaining relationships… [e]

All families state that their food knowledge is profoundly influenced by their personal experiences and backgrounds and that food is a favored way to relate to their past and present in a more intimate and sensorial way. Moreover, food is also considered a key ingredient for building a proper home, that is, a home that is presentable and considered suitable to host conviviality activities in a migration context and in developing networking strategies. These home gatherings are seen as occasions to promote and embrace the Portuguese culture and being able to express the families’ relationship with their origin in a way that does not compromise their cosmopolitanism, nor collides with their openly critical stances concerning the country’s economic, social, and political situation:

It is important to show to both our Brazilian and Portuguese friends that we are open to their culture and, at the same time, that we keep some of our most valued traditions. If we want to be seen as people of culture, as true cosmopolitans, we need to show them that we can make sense of and treasure many different things at the same time. And this needs to be true both at home and outside. [f]

Conclusions

Crossing the Atlantic toward Brazil is one of the most ancient and complex routes of Portugal’s long history of migration. These circulations of people made Brazil, in general, and Rio de Janeiro, in particular, an important destination for Portuguese of diverse social and cultural backgrounds, depending on the historical backdrop at the time of departure. Unlike other major waves of the twentieth century, the most recent migration wave was formed mostly of fairly young and highly skilled people who decided to migrate due to the financial crisis Portugal faced in the last decade.

Far from what occurred in other periods, recent trends in Portuguese emigration did not elect Brazil or Rio de Janeiro as major destinations. However, the migratory presence of the Portuguese in Rio is strong as a result of previous migration movements, and the city is the home to a high-profile, consolidated, and well-organized Portuguese community that manages its relations with both the Brazilian and Portuguese states, societies, and cultures. Like the majority of the other Portuguese communities spread around the globe that have abandoned the country to escape poverty, this community includes people who belong, or belonged in the past, to the Portuguese working classes, with little or no formal education and many coming from rural contexts. As we have seen, this picture clearly contrasts with the self-image portrayed by the new migrants arriving at Cidade Maravilhosa.

The subjects who contributed to this research not only do not identify with the other Portuguese migrants, but even resist defining themselves as migrants. Mostly coming from the Portuguese recent middle-class, this group presents a social profile and a background in clear contrast with most of previous migrant groups with whom, in their view, they hold little in common. Their ways of living in Rio are influenced by the Brazilian upper middle-class lifestyles and their strategies of detachment from the other Portuguese structures their positioning strategies is the Carioca context. However, the families’ project of cosmopolitanism entails a fair number of problematic contradictions. Many of the consumption patterns of Rio’s upper middle classes are out of reach for this group and the difficulties experienced with housing, traffic, schooling, and finding permanent and well paid positions illustrate it well. The families were forced, as happens in many other migration experiences, to reconfigure their aspirations and negotiate a position in the social context that could suit them and neutralize the tension experienced.

As in other very diverse migration contexts, domestic material culture and consumption practices, in general, and food and foodways, in particular, are significant resources to materialize the group’s Portuguese expats project and explore its identity ambivalences. This lifestyle project, formed by a complex and often contradictory grid of aspirations and belongings, resources, and limitations, unfolds into daily food routines and practices that materialize the complexity of migration. Food simultaneously incorporates the positive changes introduced by migration, objectifies the dangers and potentially polluting elements of an unknown environment, bridges a great diversity of social gaps (from friends and family at origin, to significant strangers at destination), forms and stabilizes new networks of support, promotes sociability, and contributes to the promotion of a new way of being Portuguese in Brazil.