Abstract

DIAS, Nuno. Remigration and Returnees: State and History in the Formation of Post-colonial Ethnicities in Portugal. CIDADES [online]. 2013, n.27, pp.39-49. ISSN 2182-3030.  https://doi.org/10.7749/citiescommunitiesterritories.dec2013.027.art03.

A significant part of the field of migration studies has been built around a debate, not merely academic, over distinct political models of the incorporation of migrants in host societies. However, the main analytical proposals (whether they are more close to the assimilationist, to the multiculturalist or even to the more recent interculturalist perspective) tend to focus, broadly, on the assessment of certain characteristics and skills of the migrant and on an expected value of those features to evaluate and even predict its trajectories. But the need to find sociologically relevant variables that can adjust to common sense stereotypes about the imagined regularities of national categories of migrants, sometimes enunciated as (homogeneous) communities, and that often make its way into academic conclusions, has hampered analysis that try to study the impact of structural measures (or the lack of) over migrant populations.  The objective of this article is to consider the role of the State, as the main agent designing the framework that will determine the conditions according to which migrants will be allowed to incorporate themselves, and its consequences to the development or dilution of group and ethnic identities. To accomplish this problematization we will resort to the coinciding trajectories of two populations that ‘arrived’ in Portugal at the same time: the population that became known as the ‘returnees’; and the Indian origin migrants that were settled in Mozambique until its independency. Simultaneously, we reclaim the idea of the emergence and consolidation of the Welfare State in Portugal as a consequence of the public policies aimed at facilitate the reincorporation of the white population that was returning from the liberated colonies.

Keywords : Ethnicity; Remigration; Returnees; Welfare State.

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