Introduction

According to a Portuguese Immigration and Borders Service report for 2022, Brazilians “remain the main foreign resident community, accounting for 30.7% of the total.” (SEF 2022) This very significant percentage has been rising since the 1990s, with several waves of Brazilians migrating to Portugal between then and today. It is a diversified immigration, sometimes more focused on workers with low levels of education and qualifications, sometimes combining this profile with that of students, specialized workers with higher incomes, and even retirees with stable resources (Fernandes, Peixoto & Oltramari 2021). This immigration of middle- and upper-class people is reflected in the mainly positive representations of Brazilian immigration by the Portuguese (França & Padilla 2018), although cases of xenophobia are constantly in the news and are denounced in social networks. In relation to Brazilian women in particular, stigmas and prejudices remain “the result of mechanisms of sexualization, coloniality and racialization that constructed Brazilian women as exotic and sexually available bodies” (França & Padilla 2018, 3; França & Padilha 2025).

I begin with these considerations because it is important to be aware that while today Brazilians make up the largest group of foreigners migrating to Portugal, it was once the Portuguese who represented the majority of foreigners migrating to Brazil. Likewise, just as the profile of today’s immigrants has various social markers—including social class, which is reflected in the different levels of professional training, schooling, income, and social insertion—this heterogeneity also existed in the profile of the Portuguese immigrants who previously arrived in Brazil, with multiple experiences and affiliations. In the Amazon of the 1800s, Portuguese merchants, owners of rubber-trading¹ or export firms, bank directors, trade association members, and members of literary and philanthropic institutions might have been more visible in the Brazilian and Portuguese newspapers, but it was the thousands of men and women who worked in rubber extraction, at the ovens in the bakeries, at the counters in the dry and wet stores, in the sale of water and milk, and in the domestic services of washing, cooking, and breastfeeding, who made up the vast majority of the immigrant population from the second half of the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Despite the specificities, contexts, consequences, and prejudices of class, race, and gender relating to the migratory experiences of the present and the past, it is important to explore this avenue and combine more elements to think sociologically about immigration, remembering its different spaces and temporalities and going back over practices, difficulties, and forms of support to better understand the processes of displacement and their challenges.

In this article, I analyze Portuguese immigration to the Brazilian Amazon—in particular, the state of Pará—in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. I combine a quantitative approach to the migratory flow, migratory profile, and marriages, with a micro-social approach to living and working practices, social support networks, and representations of age and marriage. The discussion is presented from the perspective of the social markers of difference (class, gender, and generation) of the immigrants because, despite their shared nationality, they were not a homogeneous population, and neither are they a homogenous group today; they occupy different social positions and experience more-or-less asymmetrical relations of power according to those social markers.

To carry out the analysis, I worked with passport records for the period 1850–1930 from the district of Porto, the main place of origin of those who migrated to Pará or other parts of Brazil.² I also used the immigrant registration books kept by the Portuguese Consulate in Pará from 1834 to 1930.³ In addition, I consulted official letters, newspapers published in Pará, and criminal proceedings. These documents allowed me to cross-reference the quantitative and serial analysis with the individual stories of people in various social positions, in a game of scales that is typical of micro-history and its possibilities for dialog between the broader socio-economic structures and people’s individual experiences and capillary networks of social interaction.

Immigration, colonization, and flow

Modern international migration was driven by the industrialization of Europe, the globalization of the market, and the massive flows of capital, raw materials, and goods. The movement of people in this period had a marked influence on the demographic profile of European countries, since displacements were recurrent not only in industrialized countries (such as England, where the percentage of outflows peaked at above 41% in relation to its total population) but also in countries with a pre-capitalist economy (such as Portugal, where the percentage of displacements reached 30%) (Massey 2003, 2). A large part of this population went to the Americas, in particular the United States, Argentina, and Brazil. Several Brazilian states received an inflow of people, especially Rio de Janeiro, the country’s capital at the time. However, along the migratory routes were other states, including those in the north of the country, in the area of the Brazilian Amazon where Pará is located.

It is always important to point out that the state of Pará, since the colonial period, was part of the Portuguese colonization process; it was a target of the metropolis’s migratory colonization policies, which were responsible for the arrival of individuals and families from the mainland and the Azores Islands (Vieira Júnior 2017). Whether under the tutelage of institutional policies, through initiatives of private agents or business owners, or even through individuals and families, population movements were constant in the state, stimulated by the inclusion of Pará on the global trade route as a result of the export of spices and cocoa. Many of these immigrants settled in the state and were fundamental in setting up social support networks for future immigrants—especially those who came to work in the services and commerce sectors, even after Brazil gained independence in 1822.

It must also be mentioned that, in addition to the immigration of free or semi-free workers, the state of Pará witnessed the forced migration of enslaved Africans from two areas: Bantu Africa, with enslaved people coming from the ports of Benguela, Luanda, Loango, and Angola; and the Senegambia area, through the ports of Cacheu and Bissau. These port names, as Diego Pereira Santos points out, “often ended up being given to the slaves, [and] correspond to the ports of embarkation/procedure, and are therefore, meta-ethnic, not translating into self-identification in Africa”.⁴ These people migrated by force, having been traded by companies and private individuals, from the eighteenth century until 1888, when legal slavery was abolished in Brazil. The end of slavery resulted in an increased search for a free labor force, preferably made up of white and European populations who fit the characteristics of the ideology of “whitening”—which was based on the country’s ideal of modernity and civilization, associated with the whitening of its population and was propagated by the intellectual and economic elite (Schwarcz 1993).

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the state of Pará experienced intense economic growth linked to the exploitation of rubber, a substance that had more market value thanks to new vulcanization technology making it useful in the manufacture of strategic products, including tires. The demand in the international market, the growth of rubber exports, and the higher liquidity of the state of Pará were important factors in the increased flow of migrants that took place in the state and throughout the Brazilian Amazon as a whole.

To attract European immigrants, who were migrating in droves to America and Brazil in the second half of the nineteenth century, the Brazilian states, including Pará, began to create public policies to form colonization centers and to offer land and work through advertisements that were circulated outside the country. In parallel with these state policies, travel agencies and private agents facilitated and controlled the obtaining of passports that made immigration possible and placed the workers in private estates, colonial centers, and, in the case of Pará, in rubber extraction areas, all of which were located in the interior of the state. The precarious infrastructure in these areas made it difficult to access the means of production, sanitation facilities, and healthcare. Faced with these adverse conditions, many immigrants preferred to remain in the capital, Belém, where they worked mainly in the tertiary services sector (as discussed later).

Although the Portuguese made up the largest share of the free immigrants who settled in the state capital, other nationalities were also present, especially Spaniards and, to a lesser extent, Italians, English, French, Turkish-Arabs and Turkish-Asians (as the Syrians and Lebanese were referred to in the official statistics), Americans, Germans, and Japanese. To provide some idea of the difference between the Portuguese presence and that of the other nationalities mentioned above, the statistics in the demographic population censuses of 1872 and 1920 on the presence of foreigners in the state of Pará show that there were 4,463 Portuguese in 1872, which had risen to 14,211 by 1920. This is followed by the presence of Spaniards, with 158 people in 1872 and 3,355 by 1920. Italians were the third-largest group to arrive in the state, with 37 people in the 1872 census and 3,355 in the 1920 census (Emmi 2009, 265).⁵

The intense Portuguese immigration to Brazil and to the state of Pará in the second half of the nineteenth century is directly related to the fact that Portugal was a dependent country in an unequal position in the expansion of European capitalism. Portugal lived with the “failure of the respective national markets to absorb the enormous mass of peasants that the breakdown of the Old Regime and the development of capitalist relations in the countryside had freed” (Pereira 2002, 18). In turn, in the destination countries there was a need for hired labor to replace slave labor, in addition to an expansion of markets and services—similar to the situation in Pará with the development of the rubber economy.

As mentioned previously, most of the Portuguese immigration was to Rio de Janeiro (the capital of Brazil at the time) and, at the end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, to São Paulo, a state whose coffee-oriented economy led to intense economic liquidity. Nevertheless, at the end of the nineteenth century, the state of Pará was in second place as a destination for Portuguese men and women.

To analyze the flow of Portuguese men and women arriving in the state of Pará, several researchers from the Population, Family and Migration in the Amazon Research Group (RUMA) based at the Federal University, Pará State (UFPA) surveyed the passport records of Portuguese districts known in historiography for their significant outflow of migrants to Brazil and arrived at the following figures: for the district of Porto, 18,308 passport records were collected for Pará between 1834 and 1930 (Cancela, 2019); for the district of Aveiro, 13,680 passport records were collected for Pará between 1882 and 1918 (Tavares, 2021); for the district of Braga, a total of 3,841 passports to Pará were recorded between 1868 and 1912;⁶ and for the district of Lisbon, 1,121 passport files were recorded between 1886 and 1900 (Cosme, 2015). Therefore, even though the years surveyed in the different districts mentioned above do not coincide, the researchers identified a total of 36,950 Portuguese immigrants to Pará at the turn of the twentieth century.

Much of this survey focused on the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, when there was an increase in immigration to Brazil in general and to the state of Pará in particular. By reducing the scale and working with one of the main districts of immigrant origin—Porto—we can get an exact idea of this increase.

As shown by my analysis in a previous article (Cancela, 2019), the line representing the five-year moving average in Figure 1 highlights that immigration intensified in the mid-1850s,⁷ maintained an upward trend throughout the decades of the rubber economy’s expansion (1850–1911), before decreasing significantly in the years of the rubber trade crisis (from 1911), when exports of rubber were in decline.

The same happened in the district of Aveiro, as analyzed by Tavares (2021). According to the author, in 1882, 105 people from Aveiro moved to the state of Pará. This number jumped to 888 in 1900 and stayed high (with annual entries of over 500 people) until 1913, the year before the First World War, when immigration numbers dropped to fewer than 150 people a year (Tavares 2021, 121–2).

When we expand the sample to include the various Portuguese districts as a whole, using the records of the Portuguese Consulate in Pará we can see that the data follows the same upward trend shown for the districts of Porto and Aveiro. The numbers rose from the 1850s, reaching a total of 6,661 entries in forty-nine years (1850 to 1899). Between 1900 and 1918, a period of eighteen years, there were 2,746 entries, a significant increase that corresponds to 41% of the total recorded in the second half of the nineteenth century.

These figures show the importance of the rubber economy in attracting immigrants, with the international situation and mass migrations from Europe to the Americas also contributing. However, in addition to these macroeconomic issues, we must consider the importance of social networks in the migratory processes. These networks made travel to and settling in a destination possible and minimized uncertainty, thus building bridges that helped immigrants to find housing and work, as discussed later.

Social markers of gender, age, and marital status

Most of the immigrants who moved to the state of Pará were men (Cancela 2019; Fontes 2016). However, the small number of female immigrants in the first half of the nineteenth century increased considerably in the early decades of the twentieth century, in a process of feminization of immigration that occurred not only among Portuguese women but in a broader process of mass international immigration from Europe to America, with more and more women participating in intercontinental and transoceanic immigration (Lutz, 2010).

The numbers help us understand this process of feminization of immigration. In Pará, for every ninety-nine men who migrated from the district of Porto in the first half of the nineteenth century there was one woman. This flow changed dramatically in the 1920s and 1930s, when the ratio fell to two men for every one woman arriving in the state. The same trend was observed for the Aveiro district, where we found that 160 men for every one woman migrated in the years 1882 and 1883. This ratio fell to twenty-six men for every one woman in the early twentieth century (1904–1908) (Tavares 2020, 135). These figures reflect the increase and prominence of women in international mass migration (Cancela & Tavares 2023).

In terms of age, most of the men and women from Porto who arrived in the state of Pará were between twenty and thirty-four years old (43%). Children between the ages of zero and fourteen were also present, accounting for around 12% of immigration. Those aged between fifteen and nineteen (8.2%) and between thirty-five and thirty-nine (10.3%) were also significant, although at a lower percentage. Above this age group, the numbers fell substantially for both sexes and did not exceed 7%. The data indicate that a large section of immigration was made up of young people of working age, which has been corroborated in other studies that have discussed Portuguese immigration—whether to the state of Pará (Tavares 2021; Cancela 2019; Cosme 2015; Emmi 2009; Fontes 2016; Carvalho 2011) or to other Brazilian states (Menezes & Matos 2017).

The age profile of the immigrants is reflected in their marital status upon arrival in the state, given that the percentage of single people and married people were fairly similar. It should be noted that migration subsidized by public or private authorities was not significant in the state of Pará, unlike in places where the coffee economy was taking hold and governments and landowners were encouraging families to come to the plantations. In Pará, although there was an immigration policy and official and private subsidies were available to promote agricultural nuclei, immigration was organized by the individuals themselves and sometimes by their networks of kinship, friendship, and fellow citizens, who pooled resources and made housing and work possible (Cancela 2023). According to this model, men and women often migrated alone; once they had settled down they could call on their spouses, children, relatives, or acquaintances to settle in the state.

Thus, although a significant proportion of the men who arrived in Pará from the district of Porto between 1850 and 1930 were married (42%), the percentage of single men was very similar (40.2%). The same profile was maintained among women, with the percentage of single women (42.5%) being practically the same as that of married women (43%). However, by analyzing the marriage profile of another Portuguese district, Lisbon, between 1886 and 1900, Cosme (2015) observed a wider variation in the marriage profile of immigrants. The percentage of married men was approximately 42%, while the percentage of single men was 55%. Among women, there was also a gap. Married women made up only 19%, in contrast with 67.5% for single women. When I analyzed the records from the Portuguese Consulate in Pará, where we found immigrants from the various Portuguese districts, single men (70%) and single women (72%) outnumbered married men (26%) and married women (13%).⁸

These percentages indicate that immigration to the state of Pará was made up of a large contingent of single people, which could increase, decrease, or remain balanced in relation to that of married people, depending on the district and the number of documents collected. This profile may be related to the fact that we are looking at a migration that is predominantly made up of young people. It may also be related to the absence of an effective and broad public and private policy to attract subsidized family labor to work in the state, which would have increased the number of married immigrants.

To some extent, the fact that many of these immigrants arrived as single women was reflected in their significant presence in the marriage registers that I found in the state, especially in relation to men, who accounted for a total of 17% of the grooms who got married in Belém between 1891 and 1930. In other words, out of every ten marriages that took place in the capital, roughly two involved a Portuguese spouse.

Immigration and marriage

In a previous study, I analyzed civil marriage records with Daniel Barroso. The earliest documents date from 1891, the year in which civil marriage was introduced in Brazil by the newly formed republican state. For the purposes of that work, we looked at records from 1891 to 1920,⁹ since we wanted to go beyond the context of the crisis of the rubber economy that emerged in 1910 and 1911. In our survey, we found that Portuguese men outnumbered Portuguese women (75% men; 25% women) (Cancela & Barroso 2011). With regard to the endogamy of the marriages, the fact that Portuguese men preferentially married women from Pará stands out; only 25.5% of them married a fellow countrywoman and only 18% married a woman with another immigrant background, such as a Spanish woman. The Portuguese women, on the other hand, preferentially married their fellow countrymen (80.5%). “Only 9.5% of them married men from Pará, 5% national migrants and 5% men of other nationalities, especially Spaniards.”¹⁰ This reflects the fact that more men migrated than women did.

However, when I observed the increase in female migration and the feminization of immigration in the twentieth century, as already highlighted here, I wondered whether this process would change the profile of marriages involving Portuguese immigrants. For this reason, I extended the survey to the year 1930, when Getúlio Vargas was sworn in as president of Brazil and drew up a nationalist policy that imposed restrictive measures on immigration within the ideology of valuing the national worker.¹¹

The first thing that stands out in the analysis is that the majority of the Portuguese marriages took place between 1908 and 1917, with an average of sixty-four marriages per year, even during the First World War. The average dropped to forty-two marriages a year between 1918 and 1930, a period marked by both the end of the international conflict and a decline in the flow of immigrants into the state of Pará, as shown in Figure 1. Therefore, the majority of the marriages took place up until 1917, and extending the survey to 1930 did not have much impact on the marriage profiles.

When I analyzed these figures by gender, the marriage trends by period remained the same. The marriages of Portuguese women were more likely to take place in the period before the First World War, with an average of twenty-six marriages between 1908 and 1913. During the war period (1914–1918), this average dropped but was still significant, standing at seventeen marriages a year. After the war, the average number of marriages did not increase again but fell to a low of ten marriages a year between 1919 and 1930. This profile was the same for men. Most of their marriages took place in the run-up to the First World War, with a total of sixty-six marriages between 1908 and 1913. During the years of the international conflict (1914–1918) this number dropped a little but was still significant at fifty-six marriages per year. After the war, the average dropped to thirty-seven marriages a year between 1919 and 1930—the year of the last marriage recorded among Portuguese men.

Similarly, in the sample that was extended up to 1930, there were more Portuguese grooms than brides. Men were involved in 76% of the marriages and women in 24% of them, despite the increase in female immigration and the fact that this migration was mostly of young, single women.

In terms of age at marriage, the differences were more pronounced according to the sex of the spouses (figure 2). The majority of Portuguese women (34%, to be exact) married when they were between sixteen and twenty years old. 29% were in the 21–25 age group when they married, and 18% were between the ages of twenty-six and thirty. Only 11% of the women married between the ages of thirty-one and thirty-five, and 7% after the age of thirty-six. One Portuguese woman had her first wedding at fifty-six years old, which was the limit for our sample.

As for Portuguese men, this profile is reversed. The majority of men married between the ages of twenty-six and thirty (32%); 28% married between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-five. Only 2.2% married between the ages of sixteen and twenty. The share of those who married between the ages of thirty-one and thirty-five was 17%. After the age of 36, the percentage of marriages reached 20.5%, while for women it was only 7%. The highest age upon marriage registration for men was 71. The age profile found for marriages involving Portuguese men and women was no different from that of Brazilians (Cancela 2011). Why did men, regardless of nationality, marry later?

This is related to the construction of the bourgeois order in the modern era, in which men are associated with the role of provider and must invest in work, educational training, and professional consolidation (Nazzari 2001). In the case of Brazil, the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century saw the expansion of cities, an increase in the urban population, and an expansion of the services and production sectors. This movement generated a need for educational and professional qualifications, especially in activities associated with the liberal professions, where young people from the elite and middle classes of the population worked. This training process required time, as did settling into a job, position, or profession that would allow the individual to obtain the resources to marry and support a family (ibid.). These representations of the male provider affected the performances and ideals of hegemonic masculinity of men of various nationalities (Matos 2010; Cancela 2011; Abrantes 2012; Melo 2013), and they help us to understand the need for more time in which to achieve the proper educational and financial condition, a fact that is reflected in the later age of marriage for men compared with that of women, especially for elite men and those from the urban middle classes.

Thus, when looking at the professional and occupational profiles of the Portuguese immigrants who married in Belém between 1890 and 1930, I observed that a significant percentage were involved in commercial activity or were even traders and industrialists, together accounting for around 40% of the newlyweds. These were followed by those registered as “employees” (26%), people who were professionally established. The rest of the grooms were distributed among various professions in the services sector, such as butchers, milkmen, tailors, gardeners, laborers, bricklayers, painters, coopers, shoemakers, and locksmiths. There were also a few fishermen, farmers, and gardeners.

Therefore, most of the newlyweds were people with resources involved in commerce, or people from the middle classes, employed in firms with different activities and services. This corroborates the argument above that the later age of men when marrying is associated with the bourgeois order, which ties the formation of the family unit to the condition of having a male provider who has gone through processes such as educational training, commercial and/or professional establishment.

The same was not necessarily true for women, whose educational background and professional establishment were not seen as a key condition for entering into a marital union. On the other hand, we cannot ignore a whole host of social representations that underlie age-related issues. As well as being markers of time, age groups function as markers of roles assigned to people by cultural tradition, defined and re-signified by gender. Many activities performed by women became associated with domestic work, which functioned as a generic expression used to define different female activities. These activities were devalued from the point of view of gender asymmetry, despite the fact that they were fundamental to the reproduction of the active economy in capitalist society (Souza-Lobo 2021 [1991]; Vergès 2020). Therefore, there were few brides whose professions were declared outside the nomenclature of domestic services or housework. Those whose professions were defined included landladies, teachers, fashion designers, and seamstresses.

Gender asymmetry can also be seen in the representations of women and their bodies. Fragments of these representations can be read in the magazine articles, which help us to understand a little more about the meaning of age and marriage at the beginning of the twentieth century. Although he was not Portuguese, Pará-born writer and politician Paulo Maranhão brought to us representations of age and marriage in the capital when he wrote of his love for a woman he met when she was still fifteen years old. He was not referring to a foreign woman, but the preferred age range for marriage for Portuguese women was no different from that for Brazilian women (Cancela 2011); this points to the confluence of social representations about women, age, and marriage in Pará, regardless of the nationality of those involved. The writer begins his prose by asking:

How old were you when I met you? You never told me, nor have I ever asked you, but one can guess it in the red ribbon of your lips, in the unique brightness of your eyes, in the pink freshness of your cheeks. If a man does not lose the violent language of the senses with marriage, the language of feelings must remain forbidden. What I do know is that it is not without pleasure... but with the instinct of subtle emotion that one experiences when contemplating a young woman, at whose side one would like to live, in constant adoration, and at whom one looks with the feigned indifference of the fox before the opulent grapevine, to which its mouth could not reach.¹²

Jumping ahead several years on from this encounter, he continues:

I am delighted to see that everything, or almost everything, about you has changed physically. Your lips are still red, darkness still reigns in your hair, but the youthful glow of fifteen years no longer graces your face. The delicate matrix of youth is succeeded by the crusty hue of thirty years. The complexion of your face is slowly losing the glow that singes your head. Your eyes—oh, your eyes!—are already like those old mirrors from which age gradually takes away the power of reflection [...]. (Ibid.)

Witnessing the passing of the years and the woman’s advancingold age, the author proclaims that he would know how to extract the warmth from the ashes, writing:

I am the only one following you, looking at you and wanting you. Do not expect anything else. Do not deceive yourself anymore. In the past, when you passed by, a murmur of strange phrases followed you. Not today. Today, no one turns around to see you, because there are thousands of girls in their twilight years who defy men’s gaze. Your shape sags. Your waist resists the lacing of the corset. Your step loses the grace and lightness of a gazelle’s stride... Forgive me if I tell you that I am happy because you are getting older. It is just that now I am calm: no one else will covet you... Only I have remained faithful. Only I have not changed. I am the only one left to whisper to you at thirty-five years of age what I did not have the courage to confide in you when you were fifteen. (Ibid.)

According to the author, at fifteen the girl still kindled men’s desire; as a woman of thirty, she was a memory of youth that was beginning to fade; and at thirty-five, all that remained was the memory of the girl she had once been, and no man would want her. This ideal, that associated a woman of thirty-five with old age and decadence is an important element that helps us comprehend the small percentage of women who married after turning thirty.

It is also worth emphasizing that, although marriage was a reality for some immigrants, many families were formed without an official civil or even religious marriage. The practice of concubinage was a reality for Brazilian and Portuguese people alike—not least because the rates of illegitimate unions were high in Portuguese society, especially in the northern counties, from which most of those who migrated to Pará and Brazil originated (Scott 2002).

Thus, when analyzing the records of the Portuguese Consulate in Pará, it was not difficult to find information about single women who lived in the state with their daughters in arrangements created by single mothers. Women who were not officially married, might or might not have lived with a man, or lived alone with their sons and daughters. This was the situation for Olivia de Jesus, a single, thirty-seven-year-old Portuguese laundress from Paredes da Beira, São João da Pesqueira, Viseu. Olivia traveled to Belém for the first time in 1906 from the Port of Leixões. In Belém, she lived in Rua Paes de Carvalho with her six underage children: Antônio (eleven), Virginia (nine), Raul (six), Celeste (four), Izilda (two), and Joaquim (six months old). Another was Beatriz Augusta Gomes, a single, thirty-three-year-old servant born in Sindim, Tabuaço, Viseu, who lived at Rua Lauro Sodré with her three children: Ana (fifteen), Aires (twelve), Hilda (nine).

It is possible to give multiple examples like these, but the important thing here is to emphasize that institutional marriage coexisted with arrangements created by single mothers and with conjugal relationships that were illegitimate in the eyes of the state and the church. Concubinage was a common practice among Portuguese and Brazilian immigrants, with social class being an important social marker for understanding the recurrence of this practice among the working class. These people had to deal with the costs of marriage, the difficulty of obtaining the documentation required by the state and the church, constant mobility, the loss of documentation, and having few or no assets.

Housing, work, and social networks

Despite their shared nationality, the profile of the Portuguese immigrants to Pará is quite heterogeneous. Some arrived with no income or standing and, over the years or across several generations, achieved social mobility. However, many of them continued to work in poorly paid jobs, such as selling milk and water around the city, transporting cargo, or working as a streetcar driver, bricklayer, furniture maker, laborer, milkmaid, maid, or laundress, or even as a clerk for a commercial business. As the Portuguese consul in Belém wrote in a letter to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs: “Services such as freight, hauls, cleaning houses etc., which in Lisbon, for example, are performed by Galicians, are carried out here exclusively by our compatriots. The young man on the corner in Pará is Portuguese.”¹³

Many of the Portuguese immigrants lived in unhealthy accommodation: in small rooms and shared areas, or even in rooms located in the bakeries and stores where they worked. These living arrangements were not uncommon, and I found several examples in the criminal cases I collected. Examples include the clerks Antônio de Mello and Antônio Saldanha, who lived in the upper floors of the warehouse where they worked, together with their Portuguese boss, Joaquim.¹⁴ The same housing situation was experienced by the bakers Mariano and Gonçalo: both of whom were single, the latter Portuguese and the former Spanish. They worked and lived in a bakery on Travessa São Pedro, which was owned by Ceará-born Cosme, another single man.

Some couples, too, lived where they worked. These people included the Portuguese Avelino Xavier da Costa (a clerk) and his twenty-three-year-old wife, Rosa Maria de Jesus (a housewife). They arrived in Pará in 1896 and lived on Travessa Sete de Setembro, upstairs from the business where they worked, which belonged to the 31-year-old Portuguese businessman José Osório, who also lived there.¹⁵ Avelino had been married for three years to Rosa Maria de Jesus and had come to Brazil in search of work. On the ship, they met a Portuguese man, Augusto Bello, who had before lived in Belém and recommended José Osório's business to them. José Osório was married, but his wife had gone to live in Europe, taking a nephew with her, so he was left alone in the house he lived in above his business. He employed the newly arrived Portuguese couple, with Rosa in charge of doing the housework and cooking (Cancela 2011, 233).

While, in this case the Portuguese couple found somewhere to live through a lead from a fellow countryman, others accessed accommodation through newspaper advertisements, such as those in A Província do Pará, where they read about the rental of “a flat on the upper floor of the Flora store, with good rooms, suitable for people employed in commercial work. Contact for further information at Flora store.”¹⁶

The spaces and types of housing used by the Portuguese immigrants in the city were varied. Those who made their living from selling milk in the streets of Belém usually lived in cowsheds located on the edges of the neighborhoods and the central streets. One of these cowsheds, located on Rua das Flores, was home to its owner and his workers, all Portuguese, aged between twenty-two and forty-six. Among them, two were married and four, including the owner of the establishment, were single.¹⁷

It was common for immigrants to live in close proximity on the same street, as was the case for the many washerwomen who lived on Avenida Tamandaré—many of whom were single and widowed, living with their offspring. In addition, some immigrants even lived in one residence made up of individual rooms and shared areas. An example of these living arrangements is described by Araújo (2023), who talks about the ranches of the twenty-two-year-old Portuguese immigrant Francisco Henrique Serafim, where several of his countrymen lived, many of whom were from the same parish, São Vicente da Raia, in the district of Vila Real.

I also encountered rarer situations in which women were living in hospitals or asylums; for example, the widow and seamstress Josefa Botelho de Carvalho (aged seventy) lived with her single daughter, Maria José de Carvalho (aged thirty-five) in the Domingos Freire Hospital. They were also from the Vila Real district. There were few religious women, such as Maria da Conceição de Magalhaes Aguiar (thirty-nine, born in Braga) and Maria do Rosario Alves (forty, born in Castelo Branco), who lived in the Santo Antônio nursing home.

In addition, I identified immigrants with the same trade, sometimes from the same Portuguese municipality, who were living together (Cancela 2023). A good example of this is the situation of the business belonging to the Portuguese carpenter Manoel Pedro da Silva Neto, from the municipality of Vila Nova de Gaia. Manoel arrived in the state of Pará in 1893, having gained social mobility and wealth by processing and exporting wood. In his company he employed more than fifty workers, most of whom came from the same Portuguese municipality as he did, Vila Nova de Gaia, and some even from in or around the same parish, Vilar do Paraíso (Cancela 2023, 98). When I analyzed the records of the workers at Manoel’s company, I was struck by the fact that many of them lived in the same establishment, Rua Bragança No. 3—probably one of the company’s properties.

These close working and living arrangements among Portuguese immigrants from the same municipality point to the existence of social networks being used as support mechanisms for migrating and finding a place to live and work, thus minimizing uncertainty in the destination society. Immigrants’ social standing, marked by the difficulty of earning an income, placed them on the outskirts of the capital, living in unsanitary housing such as cowsheds and ranches, with little or no infrastructure; they lived with other poor residents, some of whom were also foreign or national migrants, or even from Pará.

Hence, social networks that connected individuals, families, and fellow citizens, which could remain active despite the end of public policies to encourage immigration, private projects, or travel agencies and promoters, were important. This was especially the case in the context of the crisis of the rubber economy in 1911, when Pará’s economy lost its liquidity, income from public investments fell, and several companies went bankrupt. There was less incentive to migrate to Pará, not least because of the lack of funding and advertising policies. However, despite the economic crisis, immigrants regularly continued to arrive at Belém’s ports, even if this was in smaller numbers than during the heyday of the rubber economy.

The continuity of the arrival of these people may in part be associated with the social networks formed by the newcomers with immigrants who had been established in the state for a long time. In turn, although the rubber crisis left a hole in the public accounts and bankrupted several fortunes, other products began to enter the export market, such as Brazil nuts and timber, although even with these commodities, the state did not achieve the same liquidity generated by the rubber economy. An example of this is the timber extraction and processing company owned by the Portuguese Manoel Pedro, which welcomed immigrants to work there even after the collapse of the rubber economy in 1911 (Cancela 2023).

Similarly, I came across situations of Portuguese women living in the state in the 1920s, while the rubber economy was still in crisis, who, having lived and worked in Pará for some time, welcomed a newly migrated sister to share their home. Among these stories is that of sisters Maria Clotilde Marçal and Felizarda Roza Marçal. Maria Clotilde, a maid, who was twenty-seven, single, and a native of Penela in the district of Viseu, arrived in Belém in 1910 and lived on Avenida São Jerônimo. Her sister, Felizarda, was also single and a maid, having arrived in Belém twelve years later, in 1922. The two sisters lived on Avenida São Jerônimo. There was also a third sister, Genoveva de Jesus Marçal, who arrived in 1914—just after Clotilde’s arrival—when she was fourteen years old. At the age of twenty-three, in 1923, Genoveva no longer lived with her sisters. She lived on Travessa São Matheus, and moved again in 1924 after she got married. Another example is that of the sisters Amélia and Tereza de Jesus. Amélia was from Escurquela, in the municipality of Sernancelhe, in the district of Viseu. She was twenty-one, single, and a maid when she arrived in Belém in 1921. She lived on Avenida Generalíssimo Deodoro with her younger sister, Tereza, aged eleven, who migrated to the state in 1923.

I would like to reiterate here that the examples of the sisters mentioned above refer to their arrival in Belém in the 1920s, during a downturn in the rubber economy. Thus, a younger sister (single or married) arrived in Belém and had the support network of an older sister (single or married) who was already living in the state and whose home she could share, reducing the difficulties of settling down and encouraging mutual support.

This points to the need to think about immigration in a way that considers macroeconomic issues but does not dissociate them from the networks of kinship, friendship, and fellow citizenship that stem from capillary relationships that are formed by immigrants and involve people who have lived in a place for longer providing support for newcomers. From this perspective, when immigrants moved, their mobility was only possible because of this collective practice, which did not necessarily involve only people they knew. There could be various levels of proximity and contact between those who were part of this support network, which could be based on symmetrical or asymmetrical power relations, as in the relationship between a boss and his or her employees (Cancela 2023).

Closing remarks

In the social history of the city of Belém, there have been many successful and economically mobile Portuguese immigrants, mostly people who were linked to commerce and were politically active in the city (such as Francisco and João Gualberto, and João Jorge Correia), some of whom had noble titles (such as the Baron of Monte Córdova, José Martins), and many others. Countless pieces of information can be retrieved about these people, whose names appeared in Pará and Portuguese newspapers, and they serve as examples of social mobility and conquered wealth.

In general, the Portuguese who achieved the greatest fortunes were those who opened commercial and trading businesses, occupying lands traditionally marked by the presence of indigenous, Afro-descendant, and Quilombola [Maroon] populations, in a movement marked by conflict, tension, and expropriation of territory, and the work of these populations, who lived on small properties and worked in extractivism, farming, and animal husbandry.

The wealthy immigrants, along with many others who were generally well-off and were linked to commerce, qualified professions and positions, made their presence known by creating and maintaining institutions including the Sociedade Portuguesa Beneficente do Pará (1854), the Gabinete Português de Leitura (1867), the Tuna-Luso Caixeiral (1903), later called the Tuna Luso Comercial (1923). All these still exist in Belém today and were important spaces for sociability, visibility, and the dissemination of Portuguese culture, bringing together immigrants—especially those who had a higher social standing’ with resources and education to compose and reinvent the idea of a Portuguese colony in Pará. Imagined communities (Anderson 2008) are strengthened and renewed in the sociability and ethos of a Portuguese identity activated from these institutions and far beyond them when they mobilize symbols such as the language, the classic writers like Camões, the artists, and the commemorations that celebrate important events in Portuguese history, such as the birthday of a king or Vasco da Gama’s voyage to the Indies (Cancela & Guimarães 2018).

Some of the individuals who made up the local elite and fostered these Portuguese institutions owned newspapers, had businesses and positions, and did not see themselves as immigrants. The immigrant was “the other,” the poor person, with no education or income, who arrived in Belém having traveled in third class on a ship. The immigrant migrated “seeking” work, while the Portuguese with an income “traveled to” work. The immigrant was subjected to the stereotypes and prejudices from which the Portuguese elite wanted to differentiate themselves—maintaining their nationality and the institutions that reinforced the Portuguese identity, such as those mentioned above, but distancing themselves from the label of immigrant.

On the other hand, there were countless difficulties for those who did arrive in third class on the ships. Some would make a livelihood in crime or cheating (Sarges & Morgado 2010; Araújo 2023), but many others would seek their fortune in various activities and jobs in the city’s service sector. Having an acquaintance or a relative already living in Pará could make it easier for these newcomers to settle by providing them with housing and employment, but that did not make them immune to the difficulties and lack of resources in a city with expensive rents, unhealthy housing, and low-paying jobs.

In this article, I have shown how the flow of Portuguese immigration boomed in the second half of the nineteenth century, driven by the rubber economy. Even after the crisis generated by the sudden drop in rubber exports, immigration remained constant despite the numbers falling. After all, other products were entering the scene, such as wood and Brazil nuts. In addition, social networks were fundamental practices that continued to connect multiple generations of immigrants, even after the economic crisis.

Although it was an eminently male-dominated immigration, women’s presence grew sharply in the twentieth century, and migration became more feminized. Men and women, many of them single, who found a spouse in Belém, entering civil marriages that were preferably endogamous in the case of women and exogamous in the case of men. Portuguese men were a significant presence in the marriages that took place in the capital of Pará, appearing in 17% of the unions, meaning that a Portuguese man was involved in around two out of every ten marriages that took place in Belém.

Men were marrying at an older age than women, which was related to the new bourgeois social order and the values attached to the family and the capitalist division of labor, which were based on the ideal of the male producer and the female reproducer—commonly, but not exclusively, in the middle and upper classes. Thus, a large share of the people who sought civil marriage were business owners and qualified, educated professionals. On the other hand, customary unions, which were not officialized by the state and the church, were part of the behavior and reality of unskilled and low-income workers, not only in Pará but also in Portugal (Scott 2002).

Many different housing arrangements were used by these immigrants. While the business owners lived in houses and mansions, the workers lived in rooms in the same building as the businesses where they worked, or in ranches, cowsheds, or houses located in outlying areas or with a poorer infrastructure. Many of these living spaces had shared areas and the conditions were often unsanitary. Social networks could guarantee a place to live and work. The house or shed in Rua Bragança No. 03 was home to several carpenters, joiners, blacksmiths, bricklayers, and clerks who worked for Manoel Pedro da Silva’s timber export firm. A sister living in the state could give a younger sister the route, incentive, and justification to set out and have her family’s consent to follow the same path.

The quantitative data on the immigration flow, profile, and marriages were important for getting closer to people’s names and practices, in a game of scales that is so dear to micro-history. Likewise, the approach centered around the social markers of difference that highlight the distinctions among immigrants, countering the picture of a homogeneous group that the idea of a Portuguese colony might trigger.

These migratory stories of difficulty, difference, and asymmetry, but also of welcome and support can remind us of a not-so-distant past and reinforce the need to think about immigration, and the immigrant of yesterday and of today, with practices and policies of respect and citizenship.

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