Introduction

A micro-historical perspective on migration pathways offers the opportunity to analyze narratives based on the realities and experiences of those directly affected. This approach provides a bottom-up perspective, challenging the master narratives and moving beyond collective interpretations of migration history to explore the individual agency of the actors involved (Cooper 2019; Dewière 2023; Marcocci 2023; Ogborn 2008; Otele 2020). Using the case of Amélia Lopes da Cruz-Heinen and her family, this study focuses on individuals who are often mentioned only in passing in official documents, such as women, children and people of color. Additionally, Amélia’s migration path represents the story of one of the very few African women who moved to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg during the colonial period.

Such stories, existing in the shadows of the dominant narratives, can be uncovered by finding sources and reading them against the grain. While researching archives for records of so-called “métis” (those with one parent of Luxembourgish origin), I discovered the story of Amélia and her family. I encountered the name of Amélia Lopes da Cruz, who was married to the Luxembourger Etienne Heinen. This led me to further documents about Mrs. Heinen and eventually to her children. In this process, the memories and keepsakes of descendants played a crucial role, helping to reconstruct a rich and interesting life story that might never have been intended to be made visible. This paper is dedicated to, and results from, the personal memories of Raymond Heinen and the collective memories of the Heinen family. The family were in possession of various documents, such as employment contracts, birth certificates, marriage certificates, and letters. Additionally, I had several conversations with Raymond Heinen, who had lived in Africa until he was sixteen years old.

This text aims to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of trans-imperial migration. By telling this story, we acknowledge the intricate tapestry of human experiences that transcend borders and empires, enriching our understanding of migration, identity, agency, and resilience. The regions discussed here include Cabinda and Kongo Central (formerly Bas-Congo), as well as the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and the Belgian province of Luxembourg. These regions are not rigidly separated but are interconnected within the context of migration history.

Cabinda

Amélia Lopes da Cruz was born on 23 October 1921, in Makaia (Macaia), District of Cabinda.¹ At that time, the borders of the Portuguese colony Angola were still being defined, and Cabinda, though it was geographically separated by the Belgian Congo, was treated as part of the colony. Portugal’s claim to Cabinda dated back to the nineteenth century, and its colonialization of the territory was reinforced by the Treaty of Simulambuco 1885, which made Cabinda a protectorate of the Portuguese Crown.² Portugal thus claimed the territory north of the Congo River, which included the kingdoms of Loango, Kakongo, and Ngoyo.

Like other European colonial powers, before the twentieth century Portugal controlled de facto only a small part of its claimed territory, mainly in the coastal regions (Bender 1978, 97). To strengthen the colonizers’ presence, the Portuguese government encouraged emigration and sent exiled people, so-called “degredados”, to its overseas colonies (Coates 2013). By 1920, approximately 20,700 whites lived in Angola, accounting for less than 0.5 percent of the whole population (Bender 1978, 20).

Amélia would have fallen into the estimated 0.18 percent of the mestiço population. She was one of two daughters of Antonio Lopes da Cruz and N’Kezu Graixa.³ Raised by her maternal family in Makaia, Amélia was not acknowledged by her Portuguese father as his daughter, as noted in the records.⁴ The reasons for this are unclear, but it is significant that she bore her father’s nationality and his Portuguese surname.⁵ However, giving her a Portuguese name reflects Portugal’s colonial policies and its treatment of the mestiços, aiming to bind them culturally to Portugal while attempting to abandon or erase their Africanness (Alencastro 2012). One perspective on Amélia’s early life is that her mother and family resisted colonial assimilation and a separation from their child, especially given that there were indications that her father intended to take the children to Portugal.

According to the account shared by Amélia and her sister Anna Maria, and passed down by her firstborn, Raymond Heinen, Antonio’s unmarried sister in Portugal insisted that he bring the two children with him to Portugal.⁶ However, N’Kezu Graixa hid the children, and Antonio travelled to Portugal alone.

The extent to which Amélia’s story shaped her early life and her experiences as a child is uncertain. Nonetheless, her life unfolded in a peripheral region of the Portuguese colony in the 1920s, where the colonial state still lacked the same level of control as in coastal and urban areas. This raises questions about the tensions, interplays, and entanglements among various factors and actors, particularly from a marginalized perspective. The border delineations at the Berlin Conference (1884–1885) and in the Treaty of Simulambuco (1885) did not necessarily hinder the mobility of locals, as a micro-historical perspective can reveal when analyzing the colonial setting in a trans-imperial scope. The story of Amélia after she met the man who would become her husband, Etienne Heinen, unfolds in the borderlands of Cabinda and the Bas-Congo, at the intersection of the Belgian and Portuguese empires.

Bas-Congo

In 1926, Etienne Heinen, aged twenty-six, arrived in the Belgian Congo from Bissen, a small town in Luxembourg. He initially worked in Tshikapa, located in the province of Kasai, before spending nearly three decades in the territory of Mayumbé until his career came to an end in 1955. He served as a mechanic for the Société de Colonisation Agricole au Mayumbe (SCAM), which managed some of the most significant plantations in the Bas-Congo, and for a short time he worked for the Société internationale forestière et minière du Congo (Forminière).⁷

The 1938 census revealed that there were 1,987 individuals of “European race” in the Bas-Congo district—Etienne was one of eleven Luxembourgers recorded—with the largest group comprising Belgians (1,338), followed by the Portuguese (402).⁸ The Portuguese played a crucial role as traders and merchants in the Belgian Congo, illustrating the interconnectedness and trans-imperial characteristics of colonial power. In Tshela, the capital of the territory of Mayumbé, many Portuguese merchants were present. This town was the point of arrival for the train from Boma, which had served as the capital of the Belgian Congo until 1929. One notable figure in the city was Fonseca, who owned a hotel and conducted prosperous business there, importing products from Europe and South Africa. However, after the outbreak of the Second World War, a significant influx of Belgian goods entered the region and Portuguese products were less commonly found in the city.

By focusing on the men on the spot (the actors who were there at the time), we can illustrate the rich tapestry of interactions that provided Etienne with insights into the cultures and dynamics of the region. He interacted daily with a diverse range of people in his professional life, including Belgians, Portuguese, and other Europeans, as well as locals from various regions of the Congo Basin and from Portuguese colonies like Cape Verde.⁹ He was especially well connected with the drivers he trained for the SCAM, who held privileged positions due to their work. Nevertheless, the economic status, profession, and, consequently, the social standing of individuals were linked to racist ideology. Wallerstein referred to the interplay between race and class as “the ethnicization of the world workforce” (Wallerstein 1983, 77).

Amélia’s uncle Joseph, her mother’s brother, worked—at least temporarily—in Tshela, where Etienne resided for a considerable time. This familial connection might have facilitated the meeting between Etienne and Amélia in around 1938.¹⁰ In any case, their children’s birth certificates mention that they had lived together since 1938.¹¹ In most cases, sexual relations between European men and African women during that time were marked by violence and power dynamics, primarily serving the men’s sexual gratification (Hunt 2016, 41–47; Lauro 2005, 34–42). However, there were instances, like Amélia’s, where the relationship with a white man offered a form of refuge and security. Such cases can also be understood as examples of female strategy and agency, where women actively navigated to obtain some measure of safety or stability (Hunt 2016, 41–47).

On 2 April 1939, Amélia and Etienne’s first child, Raymond, was born in Muba (Lândana) in the province of Cabinda.¹² It is reasonable to deduce that Amélia returned to her family for the birth or was simply residing there at the time. Following a complicated birth, both she and her newborn spent their initial weeks with her family in Cabinda.¹³ Their second child, Christine, was born on 29 September 1942 in Kizu (north of Tshela), at the Scheut Mission.¹⁴ Here, the birth certificate issued in Tshela notes Amélia’s residence in Muba, Cabinda.

The story of the Heinen-Lopes da Cruz family is characterized by its trans-colonial and cross-border nature. Moreover, examining the family reveals what life was like on the margins of the colony. For example, the couple communicated in Kiyombe, a language spoken in Cabinda and Bas-Congo.¹⁵ Etienne hired a local teacher, Gérard Kuku, to educate his eldest child.¹⁶ From 1947 to 1948, Raymond attended a school in Lândana (Cabinda), where classes were taught to a mixed group of white, Black, and mestiço children.¹⁷ His teacher there was Antonio Buiti, a former Angolan seminarian and one of the first Angolan intellectuals, mastering Old Greek, Latin, French, and Portuguese.¹⁸ The following year, Raymond attended a school for Black children in Matadi.¹⁹ A report from that period states that the boy did not speak “either Kikongo or French well enough, which made it difficult for him to engage effectively in the classroom.”²⁰ Despite this challenge, he demonstrated considerable talent and received good grades as a result.

In 1949, Etienne intended to send his two children, aged ten and six, to boarding schools for European children in Kalina, Léopoldville (present-day Kinshasa). However, as his children were categorized as “quarterons,” their admission was more complicated and had to go through the Commission pour l’admission des Mulâtres dans les Ecoles pour Enfants Européens (Commission for the Admission of Mulattoes into Schools for European Children). There was an emphasis on proving that the children had received a “European education.” Despite these challenges, Etienne insisted that his children had always lived with him, which was used as evidence to argue that they were being raised in a “European manner.”²¹ In this context, Amélia is portrayed as an inconspicuous woman without a profession.²² Furthermore, the colonial administration questioned whether Etienne had previously married in Luxembourg or Belgium, which was not the case.

The need to assert a “European identity” became especially pronounced in interactions with the colonial state (Hunt 2016, 100). In contrast, during the family’s time in Tshela and Lampa, where they resided, the boundaries of identity might have been more fluid, allowing the family some degree of freedom from the pressure exerted by the rigid societal expectations associated with being European. Raymond’s and Christiane’s experiences in Léopoldville, during their early school years, were marked by exclusion. This was more pronounced for Christiane, while Raymond, according to his own statements, was able to prove himself through his football skills.²³

The documents related to the boarding school application in Léopoldville—Collège Albert I and Lycée du Sacré Coeur (today Collège Boboto and Lycée Bosangani)—also reveal that Etienne was planning to move to Europe with his two children after the next term. This may explain why he officially acknowledged his children at that time, which granted them Luxembourgish citizenship. It is unclear from the sources whether Amélia was included in these plans; what is certain is that Etienne and Amélia were not yet married. However, in 1951, during the Easter holidays, Etienne travelled to Europe with his two children to visit his sister, Thérèse, who lived alone in Gasperich, Luxembourg. Amélia was not part of the trip; instead, she crossed the border to Muba with their third child, born on 20 June 1950 in Kizu, to stay with her mother N’Kezu. On 8 June 1953, their fourth child was born.

Amélia’s life in the Bas-Congo was characterized by the reality that so-called “interracial” households were subject to different conditions. From the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century, interracial relationships and marriages were relatively normalized due to the prevailing circumstances (Lauro 2005, Ray 2015). However, this changed dramatically after the 1940s, when interracial sexuality began to be seen as immoral and harmful to the prestige of the colonial state and the ideology of white supremacy (Lauro 2020, 286). The authorities closely monitored the so-called “ménagères”, yet these relationships were often short-lived, informal, and reliant on the white man. While not prohibited by law in the Belgian Congo, such relationships were discouraged and rarely resulted in official marriages (Lauro 2020, 286–287). However, Amélia and Etienne married on 20 July 1955, just before they left Africa.²⁴

Luxembourg

In September 1955, the Heinen-Lopes da Cruz family, consisting of six members, migrated to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, after Etienne finished his career at the SCAM. Amélia Heinen became one of the very few African women to be brought to Luxembourg by her partner during the colonial period. While long-lasting interracial relationships were uncommon, it was rare for the children—so-called “métis” and “quarterons”—to be officially recognized. It was even more unusual for the African mothers of these children to be included in their European partners’ plans for life outside Africa.

Upon their arrival in Luxembourg, the family resided with Etienne’s sister Thérèse in Gasperich for the first eight months. The two older siblings, Raymond and Christiane, stayed at a boarding school in Belgium. Etienne had maintained consistent communication with his sister during his time in Africa, except during the Second World War, when contact between Luxembourgers in the Congo was disrupted. Thérèse, who had lost her partner during the First World War, remained unmarried and provided shelter to the family when they moved to the Grand-Duchy.²⁵

Despite the privileges Luxembourgers enjoyed in Belgium’s colonial projects, the Heinen family faced substantial challenges in accessing financial services, such as pensions and family allowances. Etienne had been employed by the SCAM and the Forminière, but the absence of agreements between these companies and the Grand Duchy had left him in a precarious financial situation.²⁶ He was informed that residency in Belgium was necessary to fulfil financial requirements, prompting the family to plan a move. In May 1956, they relocated to a site near Arlon in the Belgian province of Luxembourg, just across the border from the Grand Duchy.

Amélia had to make significant personal sacrifices during this transition. She had left her mother in Angola, her sister in the Congo, and her friends behind. The family’s adjustment to their new surroundings was compounded by tragedy: on December 18, 1957, Etienne passed away unexpectedly. This loss thrust Amélia into a challenging position, requiring her to secure her pension and financial support while caring for her children. These difficulties unfolded in an unfamiliar country, amplifying the complexities of the family’s situation. To address their financial concerns, the family sought assistance from the colonial association LUXOM, which advocated for Luxembourgish colonial veterans and their families. Records of “Mrs. Etienne Heinen” in the LUXOM archives revealed the family’s efforts to clarify their entitlements.²⁷ By the mid-1960s, the family began to stabilize, and Amélia received her widow’s pension and additional support.

Conclusion

Amélia’s life was marked by her movements within border regions, reflecting the fluidity and complexity of colonial identities and experiences. The family’s final relocation to Belgium was a strategic decision to access essential financial resources, highlighting the economic pressures that shaped their lives. In 1975, Amélia acquired Belgian citizenship and renounced her Portuguese citizenship. This decision underscores the complex interplay of familial ties, economic necessity, and colonial legacy in shaping individual lives.

The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg was able to pursue most of its colonial ambitions in Belgium’s overseas territories. Luxembourg, including its citizens, government, economy, and church, benefited from privileged access to the colonial periphery through Belgium. This allowed Luxembourg to reap the economic and strategic benefits of colonialism without directly managing the complexities and challenges associated with colonial governance. The Luxembourgish state did not have to address the colonial issues and problems that arose, such as the concerns of former officials and employees—especially after Congo’s independence. In addition, the matter of children with a Luxembourgish parent who were not acknowledged by their fathers was largely ignored.

However, Amélia’s journey exemplifies the challenges and strategies of individuals and families in the colonial context. Her ability to adapt and secure a future for her children amid the shifting political and social landscapes of the time is a testament to her resilience and agency. The family’s experiences offer a poignant lens through which broader historical narratives can be understood, shedding light on the often-overlooked stories of those who lived on the margins.

References

1. Alencastro, Luiz Felipe de. “Mulattos in Brazil and Angola: A Comparative Approach, from the Seventeenth to the Twenty-First Century.” In Racism and Ethnic Relations in the Portuguese-Speaking World, edited by Francisco Bethencourt, and Adrian Pearce, 71–96. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
2. Bender, Gerald J. Angola under the Portuguese: The Myth and the Reality. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.
3. Coates, Timothy J. Convict Labor in the Portuguese Empire, 1740–1932: Redefining the Empire with Forced Labor and New Imperialism. Boston: Brill, 2013.
4. Cooper, Frederick. Von der Sklaverei in die Prekarität? Afrikanische Arbeitsgeschichte im globalen Kontext. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019.
5. Dewière, Rémi. “The Slave and the Scholar: Representing Africa in the World from Early Modern Tripoli to Borno (N. Nigeria).” Journal of Early Modern History 27, no. 1–2 (2023): 32–58. https://doi.org/10.1163/15700658-bja10061
6. Hunt, Nancy Rose. A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
7. Lauro, Amandine. Coloniaux, ménagères et prostituées au Congo Belge, 1885–1930. Loverval: Editions Labor, 2005.
8. Lauro, Amandine. “Femmes, sexualité, métissage: les sujets ‘tabous’ de la colonisation?” In Le Congo colonial. Une histoire en questions, edited by Idesbald Goddeeris, Amandine Lauro, and Guy Vanthemsche, 279–90. Waterloo: Renaissance du Livre, 2020.
9. Marcocci, Giuseppe. “Portuguese Mercenary Networks in Seventeenth-Century India: An Experiment in Global Microhistory and its Archive”. Journal of Early Modern History 27, no. 1–2 (2023): 59–82. https://doi.org/10.1163/15700658-bja10058
10. Ogborn, Miles. Global Lives: Britain and the World, 1550-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
11. Otele, Olivette. African Europeans: An Untold History. London: Hurst & Company, 2020.
12. Ray, Carina E. Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015.
13. Wallerstein, Immanuel. Historical Capitalism. London: Verso, 1983.

Introduction

The mobility of religions is historically and contemporarily of great importance in the lusophone world, just as it is in other spaces created by colonial and postcolonial relationships. The present volume begins, chronologically speaking, with a contribution on the work of a seventeenth century Catholic missionary from Luxembourg in Amazonia; it ends with an article on contemporary religious relationships that might be described as re-migrations or re-importations of Catholic religious beliefs and practices from Cape Verde to Europe, namely to Luxembourg. One could speak of a closing circle or, alternatively, of reciprocity: the gift of the past is now, with some delay, being returned.

With this understanding, the phenomena discussed in this article are linked to the broader field of “independent Christianities” in Europe, new churches that see their mission as being to bring back the gospel to those who originally spread it and have since gone astray.¹ This unexpected element of immigration from Africa, Asia, and Latin America (Haar 2008, 37) has only gradually been recognized in migration studies, leading to a growing interest in religious transnationalism.² In France and other Western European countries, research on migration and religion was initially largely focused on Islam. For some years now, scholars have also shown interest in Christian churches from the South, notably from Africa—an interest that, in part, has been inspired by the growing visibility of these churches in public urban spaces.³

Studies on religious transnationalism in Luxembourg have been lacking. However, the country is an interesting case for the study of these migration-related phenomena, not least in view of its pronounced and long-standing religious homogeneity, which, as will be shown, had a considerable impact on migration policies. The spreading and growing importance of “African International Churches”⁴ in recent decades, as well as that of churches founded in Brazil and prospering mainly in the lusophone world, also make Luxembourg an interesting research field.⁵ The rapid growth of Brazilian neo-Pentecostal churches, such as the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, in Europe and elsewhere has attracted much scholarly attention.⁶ Another religious movement worth mentioning is the Racionalismo Cristão, a “spiritualist philosophy” founded in Brazil at the beginning of the twentieth century, which has been very prosperous on the Cape Verdean islands since its inception (Vasconcelos 2007; Plaideau 2009) and has also been present in Luxembourg for some time.

Religion is thus one of the domains in which relationships between different lusophone regions are continuously renewed and maintained and can gain importance in the process of individual and collective identity construction at new places of residence. The present article does not go into the complex mobilities of independent churches or religious movements but concentrates on differences that occur within the Catholic community—or, to put it more cautiously, that are not related to the adherence to another community of faith. In describing Cape Verdean funeral ceremonies, I propose investigating the return of elements of folk Catholicism, that is, of spiritual beliefs and social practices that are not really foreign in the Luxembourg context but are nonetheless strange and potentially disturbing. Studying transnational Christian folk religions is important not only with respect to historical processes of exchange and mutual transformation, especially when related to the emergence of Creole cultures,⁷ but also with respect to current popular religious reinventions and forms of re-enchantment. The case of Cape Verdean funeral ceremonies in Luxembourg is illuminating with regard to the possibility of reinvigorating or reappropriating traditional modes of spirituality in the processes of the re-enchantment of modern urban spaces and relationships.

Methods and conceptual considerations

My description is based on the results of ten narrative interviews with people who were from the Cape Verdean islands or had a family background there, most of which were held within the framework of a comparative project on cemeteries in Luxembourg and the Greater Region SaarLorLux.⁸ While the project primarily dealt with the spatial and material dimensions of mourning and commemoration, my individual research gradually deviated from this focus and turned toward the much broader and at the same time narrower field of Cape Verdean practices and beliefs related to death and dealing with the dead, which resulted in a sustained interest in the social aspects of mourning practices and the question of the social visibility of certain forms of aesthetic expression.

The research also included interviews with different “experts” in the field of funeral services, including three priests who were engaged in the Mission Catholique Portugaise in Luxembourg, representatives of the pastoral service of the archdiocese and the cemetery service of the city of Luxembourg, stonemasons, and the owner of a funeral parlor. A further activity consisted of visiting Luxembourgish cemeteries. During these inspections, I was in part accompanied by a long-established Cape Verdean migrant who was familiar with the deceased members of the Cape Verdean community and their families and remembered the circumstances of their deaths and their funerals. My empirical research was interrupted by the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, which made further interviews and actual participant observation (consisting of attending funeral ceremonies) impossible. This means that the study is unfinished and that the following article should, above all, be understood as indicating hitherto-neglected old and new connections in transnational lusospheres.⁹

My paper also aims to provide a critical appreciation of the narrow field of research on Cape Verdean migrations to Luxembourg. Studies in this area are altogether sparse, and the few we do have focus largely on questions of participation in the domains of work, education, and housing and, with the exception of Tavares’ ethno-linguistic work (Tavares 2018),¹⁰ are based on quantitative data.¹¹ Less attention has been paid to religion or, more generally, to spiritual beliefs and related practices and, ultimately, to the issue of cultural difference. The study of Cape Verdean funerary practices is well suited for introducing the problem of the perception and appreciation of difference in Luxembourg society. The issue of cultural difference, which occupied the social sciences intensively in the 1970s and 1980s, when the concept of ethnicity was widely discussed, has recently re-emerged as an important subject of research. This is reflected in new conceptual approaches that attempt to grasp the increasing complexity of cultural and social diversification processes—think of the much-debated concept of superdiversity (Vertovec 2023). At the same time, there is also a growing interest in the concrete forms of everyday encounters in complex formations of difference or, to mention some of the notions that accompany this new orientation, in conviviality, everyday multiculture, and prosaic negotiations of cultural difference (Gilroy 2006; Amin 2002).

These new concepts have essentially emerged against the backdrop of demographic and social developments in urban centers of the former colonial metropoles, for example, London. Interest in conviviality implies a questioning of such concepts as integration and social cohesion, which have been central to social sciences research on migration for decades. This is expressed particularly clearly by Paul Gilroy in his criticism of British liberal multicultural policies. In order to escape the dichotomous categorizations that stem from colonial conditions and are perpetuated by this multiculturalism, one must, according to Gilroy, turn to the everyday culture created by immigrants and their descendants, the “unruly convivial mode of interaction in which differences have to be negotiated in real time.” (Gilroy 2006, 39). The notion of conviviality has of late provoked some lively debate (Novicka & Vertovec 2014, Wise & Noble 2016; Boesen et al. 2023). Some authors see it as one of the latest turns in the humanities and social sciences; others deplore that it aggregates conceptual inconsistencies (Lapina 2016). The idea of conviviality remains imprecise, among other things, with regard to the distinction between descriptive-analytical and normative dimensions. However, this lack of conceptual rigor does not prevent the notion from inspiring a fruitful way of looking at our social reality; one that seeks to understand the actual practices of living together, the basic social processes that are both brought about by and constitutive for living with difference.

Cape Verdean immigration to Luxembourg, and the Luxembourg case in general, can make an interesting contribution to these new approaches, as it allows the study of diversity and everyday multiculturalism in a country without a direct colonial past and without large cities. With roughly 640,000 inhabitants, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg is very small, and it has strong rudiments of rural socio-spatial structures while at the same time being superdiverse. The latter is not only true for Luxembourg-city, where 70 % of the slightly more than 130,000 inhabitants are non-Luxembourg nationals from a total of more than 160 countries; former industrial towns in the country’s south, and even small rural towns, are also marked by a high degree of national diversity.

Research on this rural cosmopolitanism is in line with recent developments in both migration and rural studies, which are beginning to show interest in the different forms and effects of mobility and migration in villages and small towns.¹² This turn to rural localities can imply specific methodological and conceptual challenges. Studies on difference and conviviality are typically based on the results of empirical research in public urban spaces—a municipal park, a high street, or an individual grocery store.¹³ While Luxembourg-city and some of the country’s industrial towns also have particularly diverse neighborhoods and ensuing infrastructures and spaces of encounter, public space is generally less characterized by urban structures and habits. The question of the place of research therefore poses itself differently. My research is dedicated not to a specific space but to certain cultural practices, namely ways of mourning and remembrance. These have an emblematic place in the public realm—the cemetery—but they are not limited to it. Due to the diversification of individual and collective forms of mourning, the spatial dimension of mourning practices is increasingly coming into view. Instead of focusing on distinct ceremonial spaces, a growing number of scholars in the field of funerary studies turn to the multiplicity of places and practices associated with death and the dead, and to the symbolic and performative transformation of everyday spaces and landscapes into elements of these “deathscapes.”¹⁴ Before turning to Cape Verdean ceremonial practices as elements of modern deathscapes and addressing the conviviality of mourning in these indeterminate spaces, I will give a brief account of Cape Verdean migration to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.

Cape Verdean migration to Luxembourg

After a long period of “classical” labor migration to Luxembourg that started in the second half of the ninetheenth century when the steel industry began to flourish in the country’s south, a second phase of immigration linked to the growing construction and service industries began in the 1960s. The most significant group of immigrants during this second period was Portuguese, meaning that today, about 16% of the country’s population holds Portuguese citizenship.¹⁵ The first Cape Verdeans came to Luxembourg as part of this Portuguese labor force. Before 1975, the year when the national independence of the Cape Verdean islands was achieved, the inhabitants of the archipelago possessed Portuguese citizenship. Among the numerous Portuguese migrants who arrived in the Grand Duchy following the labor agreement between Luxembourg and Portugal signed in 1972 were therefore people originating from Cape Verde. The arrival of these unexpected “African Europeans” provoked negative and, in part, openly racist reactions and political efforts at limiting access to the country to white Portuguese. These measures comprised instructions released by the Ministry of Justice in 1974 to employers’ associations regarding the undesirability of recruiting Black people (Bauer et al. 1974; Laplanche & Vanderkam 1991; Kollwelter 2005).

Many Cape Verdean residents of Luxembourg are Portuguese citizens. Official demographic data therefore provide little information about the actual number of Cape Verdeans in the country. Although the figures are imprecise, we can state that the entire group is relatively small, probably numbering slightly more than 10,000 people.¹⁶ However, the numerical size of the group does not reflect its social and cultural significance. Cape Verdeans were the first and, for a long time, the only non-European immigrant community in Luxembourg. This also means that they were the first to challenge the notion of Luxembourg as an immigration society based on cultural homogeneity—a homogeneity that is grounded in a common Western European culture and, importantly, in a common adherence to Roman Catholicism.

The high degree of cultural and especially religious proximity between native Luxembourgers and immigrants, which resulted from an immigration policy that restricted access to the country to migrants from predominantly Catholic Western European countries, was seen as one of the reasons for the country’s “immigration success story”, that is, the fact that the high proportion of foreign residents in Luxembourg did not result in anti-immigration attitudes and xenophobia.¹⁷ This exclusivist policy was compromised when, in the 1970s, the growing group of immigrants of Portuguese nationality also comprised people from Africa, especially the Cape Verdes. A further step toward diversification was taken in the 1990s when Luxembourg accepted refugees from former Yugoslavia, including people of Muslim faith. Since then, the Muslim minority has grown with the arrival of refugees from Near Eastern and Middle Eastern countries and the arrival of French immigrants of North African origin.¹⁸ The number of migrants from other non-European countries, including sub-Saharan African countries, has similarly increased. Meanwhile, the alleged success story has also been strongly called into question. Public debates now focus explicitly on the economic and social situation of the country’s non-white population and present a rather bleak picture. In the “Second European Union Minorities and Discrimination Survey, Being Black in the EU” (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights 2018), Luxembourg ranked among the countries with the highest rates of experiencing racially motivated discrimination and violence. Nowhere were the rates concerning people from Africa higher than they were in Luxembourg.¹⁹

Given the prominent position that Cape Verdean migrants occupy in Luxembourg’s migration history, it seems surprising that until recently these people have remained more or less invisible. Not only were they largely overlooked in social sciences research, as already mentioned, but they were also absent from the political scene and from the country’s public life in general. We are confronted here with what has been described elsewhere as a postcolonial paradox; namely, the fact that visible minorities become invisible both by being treated as nonexistent and by opting for (partial) invisibility themselves.²⁰ Cape Verdean socio-cultural life and its popular expressions, such as music, dance, and cuisine, are highly secluded in Luxembourg. The situation is somewhat different in the domain of religion. Cape Verdean (and Portuguese) believers take an active part in the ecclesial life of a number of Catholic parishes, and Cape Verdean graves are gradually becoming a constituent part of the country’s funerary landscape.

This partial visibility hints at the specificity of the Cape Verdean case; the immigrants in question fulfilled the requirement of cultural homogeneity that underlaid Luxembourg’s immigration policy: they were Europeans in as much as they were Portuguese citizens and, like other Portuguese, Roman Catholic. The characterization of Cape Verdeans as non-European immigrants is thus an undue simplification. They called into question the clear categorical distinctions between European and African, familiar and foreign, self and other. It was, so to speak, the task and merit of the Cape Verdean migrants to acquaint Luxembourg society with processes of cultural intermingling and creolization. Although the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg had been engaged in multiple ways in the processes of global exchange and exploitation, including involvement in Belgian colonial enterprises in Congo and elsewhere,²¹ the cultural effects of these relationships had remained virtually unknown in the country itself.

Cape Verdean funerary culture

The visibility of Cape Verdean migrants in local religious contexts seems to result from similarity, a similarity that manifests in, among other things, common ceremonial forms, that is, in Catholic liturgy and ritual, as well as in certain aesthetico-material expressions, as shown by Cape Verdean graves in Luxembourgish cemeteries. The graves comply in essential respects with the usual local standards of grave design, which means that they have massive gravestones and slabs built from dark granite or marble—elements that are rarely found in cemeteries on the Cape Verdean islands. However, while the graves are similar, they also show differences. These do not reside in their enduring material form, but rather in the way they are maintained and looked after, that is, in the ongoing interaction with them. When wandering around the cemeteries of Bonnevoie in Luxembourg-city or Lallenge in Esch-sur-Alzette, one easily recognizes that for many Cape Verdean families, in contrast to most Luxembourgish families, the grave, and thus the public realm of the cemetery, is a social space where kinship relations are entertained. The bond with the dead is expressed and enacted in the adornment of the grave. For all their similarities, the graves thus point to differences in the relationship to the dead and hence to different attitudes toward public expressions of both religion and kinship.²²

While research on Cape Verdean migrants in general, including comparative works on migration to different European and North American countries, is relatively rich (Batalha 2004; Batalha & Carling 2008; Góis 2008), we find almost no studies on their funerary culture. One exception is an article by Pierre-Joseph Laurent and Charlotte Plaideau on “esprits voyageurs,” which gives some insight into the importance of ritual communication with the spirits of the dead among Cape Verdean migrants (Laurent & Plaideau 2010). In a “société à distance” like Cape Verde, where the number of citizens living abroad is higher than the number of domestic residents, the spirits of the deceased are principal agents of social integration. According to Laurent and Plaideau, they establish relations at a distance in families torn apart by migration.²³ As far as research on the Cape Verdean islands is concerned, the findings are strikingly inconsistent. The funerary culture on the island of Santiago has been intensively researched (Da Veiga Correia 2009; Mendes 2003 and 2018; Sareiva 1998) and is the subject of popular representations (Vera-Cruz 2017). In contrast, we know very little about the other islands. The internal diversity of the Cape Verdean islands, especially the distinction between leeward islands (Ilhas de Sotavento), including Santiago, and windward islands (Ilhas de Barlovento), which corresponds, among other things, to linguistic differences, cannot be discussed in the present article. My description concentrates on beliefs and practices that can be described as typical of the funerary culture of Santiago, the island from which about 50% of Luxembourg’s Cape Verdeans and most of my interview partners originate or to which they are connected through family ties. While they presented their attitudes and practices as “Cape Verdean,” some of the interviewees alluded to the internal dichotomy by describing the relative lack of expressions of grief among the inhabitants of a northern island, claiming that the latter could be mistaken for Europeans because, like them, they do not cry when burying their dead. As we see here, internal differences tend to be associated with emic notions of varying degrees of “Africanness”; the inhabitants of the southern islands, and Santiago in particular, are considered more African than those of the northern islands (Marcus 2019; Rodrigues 2002). However, just as remarkable as the non-Europeanness that is expressed here seems to be the strong identification with Catholic folk religious traditions. Interviewees not only compared the ceremonies of Cape Verdeans from other islands with European ways of mourning, but also often associated them with other Christian denominations, for example, Pentecostal or Baptist churches.²⁴

These brief remarks should make it clear that the notion of a homogenous Cape Verdean funerary culture would be misleading. At the same time, they were meant to point out that factual commonalities—in the present case between Cape Verdean and Luxembourgish Catholic practices and beliefs—can go hand in hand with fundamental differences and dichotomous categorizations. Against this background, I explore Cape Verdean ways of relating to the dead in Luxembourg and ask how entangled traditions contribute to their social (in)visibility and a conviviality of mourning.

The conviviality of mourning

As already described, the graves of Cape Verdean families largely conform with local standards. Conformity was also signaled by interviewees who emphasized that they appreciated the neatness and orderliness of Luxembourgish cemeteries. At the same time, however, they were often very explicit in describing the differences that exist despite the many similarities. They characterized Luxembourgish graves as cold, impersonal, and even neglected, and explained that Luxembourgers do not visit their graves, do not decorate them with flowers, and do not keep the gravestones clean. Compared with Cape Verdean (and Portuguese) graves and their typical floral abundance, those of Luxembourgish families do indeed give the impression of neglect. The contrast is particularly striking in urban cemeteries, where the vast majority of Luxembourgish graves are decorated with a flower arrangement only for major holidays, such as All Souls’ Day and Christmas. These differences in grave care seem to indicate that the family grave and thus the cemetery do not serve as places of mourning and remembrance in a similar way in both cases. The same is also evident in the burial ceremonial.

The standard Luxembourgish funeral consists of obsequies in the local morgue, held in the presence of the family and a small circle of relatives and friends, often followed by a mass in a nearby church. The inhumation takes place directly after the obsequies, and in many cases this is done by the cemetery workers in the absence of the bereaved and the funeral party (Kmec & Westendorp 2023). Cape Verdean funerals depart from this procedure in several respects, notably in regard to the importance of the presence of the corpse and the interaction with it, including accompanying it up to the act of burial. The tomb, at the moment of the burial, is the most important ceremonial place for collective expressions of grief and sorrow. Cape Verdeans experience the burial of their dead accompanied by relatives, friends, and acquaintances—often hundreds of people who arrive from near and far to express their sympathy for the bereaved and support them in the ritual event. This brings us to another distinguishing feature mentioned by interviewees: the individualization of mourning. It was noted that, different from Cape Verdeans, Luxembourgers do not show their grief and thus do not allow others to share it with them. They separate the relation to the dead from other social relations and exchanges.²⁵

By insisting on taking leave of their deceased at the open grave, Cape Verdeans engage in a negotiation about proper funeral ceremonies. Their collective mourning at the cemetery, including prayers, ritual laments, and often musical performances, can easily last for several hours. This means that it significantly affects the standard ceremonial sequence in both its secular and its religious aspects, that is, the services provided by the cemetery workers and by the priest. It goes without saying that these interferences with conventional procedures are conflictual and require concessions. One such concession to Cape Verdean customs made by several priests has been to change the ritual order by holding the religious service in the church before the actual entombing, whereas the service usually concludes the entire ceremony. Certain elements of the collective ritual are, however, difficult to negotiate, among other things because the negotiation partner is no longer an institution or office, such as the cemetery administration, which is committed to a certain degree of religious and cultural tolerance, but a diffuse multitude of cemetery visitors and passers-by.

An essential part of Cape Verdean ceremonial mourning is the ritualized lamentation called choro.²⁶ It comprises highly stylized crying and laments directed at the deceased as well as at the funeral party, recalling the qualities of the deceased and moments in their life, and it is accompanied by bodily expressions including gesticulations and vehement movements.²⁷ Some of the interviewees described choro as a kind of spectacle that might even involve quasi-professional performers, people who are renowned for their skills. In Luxembourgish cemeteries these lamentations are held in a much-reduced form because, according to interviewees, the poignancy of the true form as practiced in Cape Verde and especially on the island of Santiago would irritate other people to an unacceptable degree. Here, negotiation brings about (partial) concealment. The intensity of the expressions of grief must be reduced, since aesthetic approval or even mere indifference toward them cannot be expected. With this attenuation, however, the intensity and nature of the relationships expressed in the manifestations of grief are also concealed. In the present context, I will not delve into the religious beliefs that underlie the described forms of mourning, that is, the question of whether the ritual laments, just as the floral adornment of the grave, are to be understood as gifts in an ongoing exchange with the dead, which turn the dead into benevolent ancestors and are thus reciprocated. While it would be interesting to investigate the compatibility of ancestor cults and certain forms of spirit possession in Cape Verde (and elsewhere) with the Catholic idea of purgatory and the practices connected with it,²⁸ my present focus is on whether Cape Verdean ways of relating to the dead are visible or rather invisible in Luxembourg’s multicultural society and what this (in)visibility tells us about difference and conviviality. To put it differently, I am more concerned with the social than with the spiritual dimension of mourning.

As we have seen, for many Cape Verdean Luxembourgers, burying the dead is still essentially a collective duty, and the cemetery is therefore a space of communal agency. Yet collective funeral celebration is not limited to the moment of interment at the grave but stretches over a period of eight days, during which the family receives guests at their home, where rosary prayers are held every night. The private home of the deceased person thereby turns into a public sacred realm, a transformation that is emphasized by the mounting of a mat (esteira) where female mourners gather and that marks the liminal space between this world and the beyond.²⁹ Even in the months that follow, the family will receive visitors who arrive from abroad and make up for not having been able to attend the funeral. Interview partners stressed that from the moment a person’s death has been announced, the door of their house is open to everyone. Not only relatives and close friends, but all those who are somehow related to the deceased or one of their family members feel obliged to come to the house, express their condolences, take part in the prayers and—especially with regard to female visitors—make their contribution to the ritual laments. The funeral and the ceremonial mourning in general are moments of heightened sociality that culminate in a big meal. After the burial, the funeral party, which may involve several hundred people, gathers in a public space, usually a municipal hall, to eat and drink together. The meal consists of traditional dishes that are, in part, prepared from gifts of food. Condolence visitors feel obliged to contribute by bringing a bag containing certain products, just as they are obliged to share food with the bereaved.

In all this, Cape Verdean mourning rituals resemble former Luxemburgish customs, which were greatly influenced by traditional rural culture. Here, too, death used to transform the private domestic space into a public space where family, friends, and neighbors gathered for rosary prayers and collective wakes that included the element of convivium, that is, the sharing of coffee and spirits. For many Luxembourgers, especially the older generations, exposure to Cape Verdean ways of mourning and dealing with the dead implies an encounter with the ritual forms and social practices of folk Catholicism that were common in Luxembourg until the second half of the 20th century—with rudiments of this still subsisting in certain rural areas where participation in funeral ceremonies, especially accompanying the remains to the grave, is still widely considered a duty and a contribution to a collective effort.³⁰

What we do not find in Luxembourgish customs is the ritual lament or “tuneful weeping” (Robson 2007), which plays such an important role in Cape Verdean mourning ceremonies, especially in those practiced on the island of Santiago. Forms of public mourning comparable to choro are not unknown in Europe but are primarily found in Eastern European countries and in Greece (Seremetakis 1991; Danforth 1982; Holst-Warhaft 1992). It is therefore perhaps not surprising that this element of funeral practices provokes irritation and disapproval in Luxembourg. Complaints from neighbors are frequent, and female interviewees pointed out the dilemma in which they find themselves because they want to be considerate of their neighbors’ sensitivities but are unable to refrain from crying. The women described a struggle between almost physical expressive urges and civic considerations; they had to mediate between emotional and aesthetic fulfillment on the one hand and respect for the susceptibility of their fellow citizens, with their lack of appreciation and understanding, on the other. However, conflicts are also caused by those parts of Cape Verdean customs that are not as foreign to their Luxembourgish fellow citizens. The huge number of visitors, and their flow for days on end, can be perceived as a nuisance. Interviewees also mentioned that the large communal meal that concludes the funeral is not always received favorably and that they may encounter difficulties in obtaining a suitable locality.

The Cape Verdean ritual, even in its reduced Luxembourgish form, violates fundamental principles of the (urban) spatial order in which mourning and the remembrance of the dead are confined to the narrow framework of the family and to certain functionally defined public places, such as the morgue, church, or cemetery. At the same time, however, Cape Verdean ritual is reminiscent of common Catholic traditions. Here, difference does not mean confrontation with entirely foreign beliefs and religious practices. Cape Verdean funerary culture is essentially made up of Catholic customs that were—and, in some parts, still are—widespread in Luxembourg. The difference resides in the social significance of mourning. The perception and impact of this difference may be influenced by the fact that it can be attributed to relatively recent developments. In Luxembourg, the rationalization of the relationship to the dead and its separation from other social relationships essentially took place in the decades after the Second World War. Moreover, unlike in Protestantism, this rationalization of mourning is not justified and legitimized by religious dogma—which would exclude communication with the deceased and hold that the relationship with them can only be of the nature of memory—but rather the result of state institutional and administrative reforms. At the same time, the process is remarkably advanced, as is shown, for example, by the fact that the grave and the actual burial are usually no longer part of the funeral ritual.

It seems unlikely that a returning or renewal of Christian beliefs and practices, which, as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, certain new churches see as their task today, will succeed in the present case—leaving aside the question of whether such aspirations exist at all among Cape Verdean migrants. There are, however, indications that a need for other forms of mourning exists. This is shown, for example, by recent research on notions of continuing bonds, which gives some insight into the religious dimension and therapeutic effect of various forms of and mediums for communicating with the dead, be they grave-visiting rituals, home memorials, virtual cemeteries, or spiritualism (Kjærsgaard 2018; Wojtkowiak & Venbrux 2010; Gamba 2007; Despret 2019). Another indication is the emergence of new forms of collective and public mourning, ranging from “public crying” on the streets of Western European cities in the event of violent deaths (Weigel 2015) to eventized rituals—or, as Hubert Knoblauch formulates, “rituals of collective solitariness” (Knoblauch 2000)—that create an ephemeral community whose purpose is precisely to enable an individual ritual experience that does not require attachment to a religious or other community.³¹

Local traditions and efforts to preserve them can be a starting point for the revitalization of religious and spiritual beliefs. An example, which also comes from the lusophone world, is the encomendação das almas (“commending of the souls”), a custom that involves the communal singing of prayers for the dead. In certain parts of rural Portugal, where the custom originated and is again enjoying growing popularity, local initiatives are seeking to have the custom recognized as a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage (Antunes 2020). Comparison with these phenomena suggests that the idea of protecting choro is not that far-fetched. The popularization of Cape Verdean laments could be favored by their artistic-aesthetic dimension. They contain the moment of elaboration, a striving for perfection and, accordingly, also an agonistic element. Ceremonial weeping is compared to creating a song, and the differences in talent and performance are subject to evaluation.³²

The question remains as to how the fact of entangled traditions, the migration and re-migration of religious customs, influences processes of revival and popularization. The progressive rationalization and division of labor in our modern society might play a role here. Public mourning has always been associated with a high degree of functional differentiation; in most societies it was and is predominantly a task for women.³³ Will it, like other female duties, increasingly be left to immigrants, as envisaged by Bov Bjerg in his recently published book “Der Vorweiner” (“the pre-lamenter”) (Berg 2023)? Bjerg’s story is set at the end of our century, when the members of a resteuropäische (“rest of Europe”) upper class—Europe being almost completely flooded—hire and cultivate personal Vorweiner; migrants, preferably from the countries around the Gulf of Guinea, who by their artistry in weeping manage to move the funeral guests when the ashes of those they weep over are ceremonially scattered.

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Introduction

This paper sets out a history of lusophone migration to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. It seeks to explore to what extent this lusophone migration pattern overlaps with colonialism, institutionally and from the perspectives of everyday interactions between lusophone migrants, at the intersection of struggles related to citizenship, race, and language. It builds on data collected between December 2021 and June 2023 within the scope of the Disentangling Postcolonial Encounters in Globalization (DisPOSEG)¹ project. DisPOSEG was a three-year ethnographic-sociolinguistic project funded by the Fonds National de la Recherche Luxembourg (FNR) at the University of Luxembourg. The project investigated lusophone postcolonial work and social interactions in Luxembourg. Because it was an ethnographic study, most of the data consists of narrative interviews, field notes, observations, and spontaneous conversations with research participants during intensive fieldwork at four sites in four employment sectors: service and retail, cleaning, construction, and lifelong learning. In those sites, most of the workers, clients, and learners were migrants from Portuguese-speaking countries (Portugal and its former colonies).

The paper fosters a critical understanding of this migration pattern in a country that is positioned in the “colonial margins” (Purtschert & Fischer-Tiné 2015) and views itself as a “colonial outsider,” claiming an outsider status or exceptionalism in what concerns colonial involvements (Purtschert, Falk & Lüthi 2016). Nonetheless, it is important to note that even though they were not seen as colonial centers, all colonial outsiders and their cities gained economic and political advantages from their connections and collaborations with the more prominent European colonial powers. In the case of Luxembourg, this was evident from military and missionary activities, trade, and efforts to establish colonial associations and careers (Moes 2012 and in this volume; Bosma & Kolnberger 2017; Tavares & Vieira 2023).

Before historicizing lusophone presences in the Grand Duchy, we need to go back to the transformation of Luxembourg’s position in the global system of mobility. Before the mid-twentieth century, Luxembourg was characterized mainly as a country of emigration. During the nineteenth century and up to World War I, many Luxembourgish emigrants set their sights on the American continent, heading in particular to the United States, Brazil, and Argentina to escape poverty and war. In addition, many in the agricultural sector moved to neighboring France due to poor living conditions locally (Wey 2003; Kollwelter 2007; Scuto 2010; Perrin 2020). Perrin (2020, 322) highlights that “more than 72,000 Luxembourgers are estimated to have left the country from 1841 to 1891 (out of a total population of 212,800 in 1891).”² Later, in the first half of the twentieth century, the Luxembourgers who migrated to the American continent, especially to Brazil, included engineers who were involved in the development of the steel industry (Hadžalić 2019). In return, that migration from Luxembourg to Brazil helped to form the most recent “route” of migration from Brazil to Luxembourg (as shown below), which today is mainly considered to be a migrant-receiving country and, with migrants making up almost half of the population, has one of the highest proportions of migrants in the world (Statec 2020).

Indeed, Luxembourg started to become a country of immigration at the end of nineteenth century, when migrants initially arrived from Germany, France, and Belgium, soon followed by those from Italy, to work in the expanding steel industry after iron mineral deposits were discovered in the country’s south (Kollwelter 2007, 2). Portuguese people constitute the largest group of the more recent migrant population in Luxembourg, which also includes migrants from other European countries and other continents. Official Statec data (from 2020) indicates that about 16% of the resident population in the Grand Duchy has a Portuguese passport. Indeed, this small state at the heart of Europe has the highest proportion of migrants with a Portuguese nationality of all European countries. However, these so-called Portuguese/lusophone migrants come not only from Portugal but also from several other Portuguese-speaking countries. This creates an interesting luso-Afro-Brazilian colonial matrix of (re)encounters between individuals who are historically linked by Portuguese colonialism.

Yet, despite a considerable body of research on different aspects of migrants’ presence in Luxembourg (such as education and entrepreneurship), there is still a dearth of studies aimed at elucidating the reality of the so-called lusophone migrant group(s). There has been little in-depth examination of relationships between groups or individuals from Portugal, as a former colonizing country, and from its former colonies of Africa, Brazil, and Asia. This is especially true in terms of the relationships developed in a “third space” (Bhabha 1994), that is, a place where ex-colonizer and ex-colonized subjects meet, sometimes with both groups finding themselves in the subaltern position of migrant. In this case, Luxembourg is a third and new space for them, where they are all in the position of migrants. To some extent, this third space is constituted by colonialism inasmuch as that the arrival of the Portuguese in the 1960s shows that colonialism was one of the origins of Portuguese-speaking migration to Luxembourg (see below).

In the following section, I explore the link between colonialism, migration, and lusofonia and discuss the terms lusofonia and lusophone. Then, in Section 3, I give a more detailed background and present some important historical moments of lusophone migration to the Grand Duchy by mapping, in time and space, the enduring tensions, entanglements, and shiftings among race/ethnicity, citizenship, and language. I conclude by discussing to what extent lusophone migration to Luxembourg has been mediated by these entanglements, tensions, and shiftings from Portuguese colonial times to the current era of globalization.

Colonialism, lusofonia, and migration entanglements

To get a grasp of the extent to which interactions and encounters in “third space” (Bhabha 1994) migration contexts can produce effects of inclusion or exclusion or perpetuate postcolonial hierarchies, this paper takes a look at “entanglement” (Nuttall 2009; Kerfoot & Hyltenstam 2017). As Nuttall (2009, 2) posits, the notion of entanglement indicates “a set of relationships that is complicated, ensnaring, in a tangle, but which also implies a human foldedness. […] It works with difference and sameness but also with their limits, their predicaments, their moments of complication.” By examining the entanglements between colonialism, mobility/migration, and “imagined communities” (Anderson 1983) that are rooted in colonial languages, we can shed light on how the past is present in what concerns rearrangements at macro state levels and between their individuals in this era of globalization marked by political turbulence and incisive “imperial nostalgia” (Faraco 2011; Cahen 2012; Stoler 2016).

Thus, it would be an oversimplification to discuss “imagined communities” such as a lusofonia, la hispanofonia, la francophonie, or the commonwealth without acknowledging colonialism, because colonialism is fundamental to these transnational imagined communities (Vigouroux 2013; Del Valle 2011; Severo 2016). These types of “x-phonies” (i.e., language-based communities and related international associations) (Tavares 2025b) reflect the persistence of linguistic ideologies tied to nationalism and imperialism. They are discursive spaces where various economic, political, and social arrangements are negotiated (Del Valle 2011, 388). They represent reconfigurations based on the shared use of European (colonial) languages —Portuguese, Spanish, French, and English—among (former) colonized and colonizer nations and peoples. These reconfigurations extend beyond mere linguistic boundaries and the confines of former colonial administrations and structures (Maldonado-Torres 2007). They also signify new conceptualizations of political, economic, cultural, and social organization since the end of formal colonization, from former colonial and colonized countries to their “diasporas” in the postcolonial period.

To some extent, these x-phonies constitute a space for the reproduction of old hierarchies in interactions between former colonizing and formerly colonized countries. This is reflected in the interactions between their subjects: in their countries of origin, and beyond when they are both migrants, as in the case of “lusophones” in Luxembourg, for example. They are reminiscent of “coloniality” (Mignolo 2005), which “refers to longstanding patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations” (Moldonado-Torres 2007, 243). These x-phonies often reflect colonial modes of interaction and ways of seeing or perceiving the other as superior or inferior. Several researchers consider these language-based communities to be neo-colonial projects because, at least to some extent, they are by-products of colonialism and continue to reproduce colonial power relations in the postcolonial period (Vigouroux 2013; Heller & McElhiny 2017). Concurring with these scholars, I stress here that the “semantic fuzziness” of lusofonia or lusophone “appears to have been skillfully exploited by those engaged in [its] endeavour—be they individual, states, or nations—to advance their own agendas” (Vigouroux 2013, 382).

The meaning of lusofonia or lusophone is not always agreed on, either in the academic world or in everyday life. Depending on the situation or context, it triggers different interpretations and mixed feelings when uttered. In general, the word lusophone is used in institutions to refer to Portuguese-speaking countries (where Portuguese is the official language) and their inhabitants. However, at the same time, many people who are considered to be lusophones or grouped into this broad category do not speak Portuguese and do not consider themselves to be lusophones. Certain questions can be raised from here: for example, can we say that lusofonia is mainly a construction of authoritative institutions or stakeholders and their imaginations that draws on the idea of “imagined communities,” as Anderson (1983) puts it?

From the point of view of some people who are considered to be Portuguese speakers or lusophones in Luxembourg, lusofonia or lusophone is, to quote a participant in the DisPOSEG project, “just a word for me! A word to characterize us, nothing more.” They relate the word lusofonia to festive events, because it is hard to see its relevance in their everyday life. In the context of their day-to-day difficulties, lusofonia is largely abstract. Thus, can we deduce from this that there is a certain denial of lusofonia among the population? Has lusophone culture been somewhat romanticized? At the same time, others understand that this imagined group of Portuguese speakers can be instrumentalized for administrative purposes and for getting by (for example, for networking in the context of migration). This is especially true in the sense of the value of Portuguese, which nowadays functions as an icebreaker for entering the labor market in industry sectors such as construction, cleaning, and retail, where a significant number of lusophone migrants make a living (Tavares 2025). However, it is paramount to stress that the prefix luso is problematic, because it denotes Portuguese possessions and origins, especially to colonial subjects who think critically and have more awareness and experience of the persistence of historical impacts in the present. The same goes for the suffix -phone, because not all Portuguese speakers use Portuguese in their daily life, consider it to be a big part of their identity or identify strongly with it (Lança 2008). Furthermore, one should not forget that within the assumed “community of lusophones,” there are unequal citizenships. On the one hand, there are those who hold a citizenship that gives them a worldwide “ease of movement” (Carling 2002), namely, European lusophones. On the other hand, there are those with more limited mobility, that is, non-European lusophones (Tavares 2025a).

In this paper, to frame the research, I use the adjectives lusophone or Portuguese-speaking as an “artificial model” (Abadia et al. 2018) to refer to migrants in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg who come from countries where Portuguese is the official language—Portugal and its former colonies.

Lusophone migration to Luxembourg: its ethno-racial, citizenship, and language entanglements

Several researchers posit that lusophone migratory flow to Luxembourg began with Portuguese people trying to improve their lives by escaping the dictatorial regime of Salazar—the Estado Novo. This regime lasted from 1933 to 1974, including the period of the wars of independence of the Portuguese colonies in Africa from 1961 to 1974 (Laplanche & Vanderkam 1991; Hinger 2014). Lusophone migration is estimated to have gained ground toward the end of the 1960s. The Portuguese came to Luxembourg in the 1960s and early 1970s under labor agreements signed by Luxembourg and the (then fascist) Portuguese government to fill the vacancies left by Italian migrants who had returned to Italy or re-migrated to other European countries where they could get better salaries (Laplanche & Vanderkam 1991; Scuto 2010). Those labor agreements between the Luxembourg government and Portugal allowed the reunification of migrants with their families from the 1960s onward.

It is interesting to clarify the diversity and heterogeneity of this group of individuals originating from not only Portugal but also the former Portuguese colonies in Africa and Brazil. By applying multiple temporal lenses (albeit that some practices are more permanent/transversal than others in time and space, and sometimes overlap), we can distinguish different “routes” and temporalities related to complex (re)migration strategies and motives, from colonial Portugal and (post)colonial lusophone countries to Luxembourg. Note that here I refer to “routes” in both time and space and in terms of pursuing not only geographic mobility to Luxembourg but also social/work mobility after that.

However, before delving into the different temporalities of lusophone migration/mobility to Luxembourg as a whole, it is essential to give an overview of the different paths to accessing Luxembourgish citizenship nowadays. If one looks at the official website of the government of Luxembourg (Guichet.lu³), one reads that there are at least ten specific cases for acquiring Luxembourgish “citizenship by option.” These cases encompass three main pathways to, and principles of, Luxembourgish citizenship: (1) jus sanguinis (by descent), (2) jus solis (by birth in a territory), and (3) jus domicile (by right of residence in a territory) (cf. Bauder 2012; Vink & Bauböck 2013; Rhoads 2023). These pathways are typical across countries and continents. In Luxembourg and elsewhere, they have been loosely forefronted or combined with language competence and demands according to the political, economic, and nations-branding conveniences of time and polities, as will be shown later in this section.​

Concluding reflections: a presence rooted at the entanglements of citizenship, language and race

This paper demonstrates how luso-Afro-Brazilian presences in Luxembourg were and are mediated, both institutionally and individually, at the entanglements, tensions and shiftings between ideologies of race/ethnicity, citizenship and language, from formal Portuguese colonialism to contemporary Portuguese-speaking (re)migration to Luxembourg, including the late mobility of Brazilian Luxembourgers. For instance, from the institutional perspective, the paper shows how the idea of race and ethnicity was overtly used to determine what kind of lusophone migrants were desirable according to the Luxembourgish migration policies, without language requirements, at the early stage of lusophone migration to Luxembourg. The question of race was very incisive, to the point that Cape Verdean migration to Luxembourg was instrumentalized and racialized as part of rearrangements between the then fascist colonial Portuguese government and Luxembourg, with the latter even politically supporting the former despite the strong criticism from the UN on the former’s maintenance of its colonies in Africa. The justification of that official attempt to bar Cape Verdeans from Luxembourg suggested that black lusophone migrants would bear characteristics that were negative for good integration and social order in Luxembourg (Schiltz 2013).

In the context of colonial Portugal and its African colonies, the differentiation was not solely between the Portuguese colonizers and the African colonized. Individuals in African Portuguese colonies had varied racializing citizenship statuses. Cape Verdean elites often served as administrators and were perceived as proxy colonizers for the Portuguese in Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and Mozambique (Meintel 1984). The privileged status of Cape Verdeans was based on the racial hierarchy of the colonial empire, which categorized them as “mixed race” (mestiço) due to their mixed African and European origin, resulting in lighter skin than that of individuals from other Portuguese colonies in mainland Africa. Consequently, Cape Verdeans were considered Citizens, while Angolans, Mozambicans, and Bissau-Guineans were deemed Indigenas, who were thought of as less intelligent and less civilized (Mattos 2013). The lighter skin color of Cape Verdeans, along with the selective formal education the elites received and their ability to speak Portuguese, were factors that favored their racialized Portuguese citizenship and facilitated their mobility to Portugal under colonial rule. However, when (re)migrating to Luxembourg, their racialized Portuguese citizenship became a hindrance to Cape Verdeans. The same skin color then hampered their migration. This illustrates the complex interplay of race/ethnicity ideologies, language, and citizenship and lusophone mobility. Furthermore, as described above, the incisiveness of race ideologies manifested in the case of retornados. That produced exclusion and social discrimination against white Portuguese (and their descendants) in Portugal, due to the assumption that these retornados had been corrupted culturally by African customs (Eldridge, Kalter & Taylor, 2023).

More recently, when the law of 8 March 2017 was amended on the basis of ancestry, the rule of jus sanguinis (which is closely related to ideologies of race and ethnicity) outweighed the importance of linguistic competence and the other citizenship pathways, such as the jus domicilis (duration of residence) and the jus solis (place of birth) to a certain extent. This shows how unequal access to citizenship is conveniently mediated by nation-states according to their political and economic needs in time and space. It is important to note that despite the relative ease of gaining official inclusion from the nation-state through jus sanguinis citizenship, the tension between language and race/ancestry persists at the individual level. This is especially true when one holds this citizenship but lacks one of the languages of authority (in this case, Luxembourgish) which is declared “the national language” (Hawkey & Horner 2022). Thus, access to (accelerated) citizenship does not necessarily result in social mobility, as Rodney’s case shows. Neither does it trigger feelings of fully belonging in the individuals themselves or influence the extent to which they are perceived as Luxembourgers by others. Place of birth, language competences, and ancestry form complex and, in part, fragile elements of Luxembourgish citizenship. Therefore, there is a need to disentangle what it means to be a Luxembourger, especially the questions of how, when, why, and to what extent having competence in the language of Luxembourgish fosters and defines (or does not define) belonging to the Grand Duchy on both individual and state levels.

This paper has demonstrated that from the beginning, the question of race has been present in lusophone mobility to Luxembourg—either overtly or covertly, and for the purpose of exclusion or inclusion. Let us remember the racialized Portuguese citizenship of Cape Verdeans that led to the revision of the labor agreement between the fascist Portuguese government and Luxembourg, and the mobility/acquisition of Luxembourgish citizenship that was attained by Brazilians under the jus sanguinis logic. For a long time, the logic of inclusion and belonging has unequally excluded and included people from the boundaries of nation-states. This has created enduring inequalities and injustices, given that nation-states privilege their citizens and nationals over human beings or humanity.

The paper has also demonstrated that, both at the state level and the individual level, the way in which individuals from formerly colonized countries and the former colonizing country perceive themselves in the so-called era of globalization is still influenced by colonial outlooks and differentiations. This commonly occurs in administrative, social, professional, and linguistic interactions and encounters. Furthermore, the colonial differentiations have produced complex interactional effects between diversified Portuguese speakers from Africa, Portugal, and Brazil. To a certain extent, these differentiations are still present in their encounters in Portuguese-speaking countries and beyond in diasporic contexts, including in the countries of migration that they all share, such as Luxembourg, as Rodney’s and Maria José’s cases illustrate.

In conclusion, I would like to stress that the data collected within the framework of the DisPOSEG project has provided insights into how historical divisions and complicities are still influencing interactions between Portuguese speakers. In terms of hierarchies at work, there is a tendency to reproduce colonial models in their third space migration context of Luxembourg, as seen in Rodney’s case. Our results reveal the existence of what Maldonado-Torres (2007) calls “coloniality of being” in the relationships between different Portuguese speakers in social and work contexts. That is to say, their interactions are often marked by friction and tension resulting from the internalization of superiority and inferiority that arises in colonialist racial relations. Considering the diversity and complexity of the migration processes in question, understanding the history and the colonial past will help us to develop an understanding of Portuguese-speaking interactions and of the specificities, trajectories, and important sociolinguistic challenges of lusophone migrants in Luxembourg.

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Introduction

Quitéria Maria do Rosário was walking the streets of the city of Belém, in the captaincy of Grão-Pará, in 1778. She was a woman whose life crossed the Atlantic and was associated with the trajectory of so many other immigrants who were forced to leave North Africa and anchor in 18th-century Amazon. She made a living from trade, which she did with the help of her two enslaved servants, and headed a household that was dedicated to “dealing in foodstuffs.” She was a married woman and a “freed black” although she did not live with her husband. She was a character who helped to colour with various shades of meaning what the Portuguese Crown referred to as “people who were in Mazagão Square until it was evacuated.”² Quitéria broke with such a broad designation and demanded recognition of the distinction and demanded recognition of the multiple possibilities of existing within a group of immigrants who had left Morocco.

Beyond Quitéria’s trajectory, the tactics³ adopted in the face of the Amazonian landscape scenario, and the experiences⁴ of an immigrant in the lands of Grão-Pará, we are interested in analyzing the group and the multiple strategies⁵ used by those who joined her on this journey. Quitéria had originally arrived in the Amazon from the Portuguese fortress of Mazagão. She and more than two thousand other people were forced to leave their homes and take up residence on another continent: an entire city emigrated on the same day, first to Lisbon and months later, from Lisbon to Belém. In this spatially long and temporally short process of immigration, lives were rebuilt. Between the collective migratory experience and individual survival strategies, Quitéria became part of the colonial Amazonian universe, in a world that was different from her old home and which required efforts to adapt—a process that was associated with ceasing to be “Mazagão people.”

Where Quitéria came from

Before setting foot in Grão-Pará, Quitéria lived on the edge of the Atlantic, near the present-day Moroccan city of El Jadida. She lived as enslaved person in a walled citadel characterized by the Portuguese efforts to dominate the African coast since 1514, when the fortress of Mazagão was built. The construction of the fortress was linked to the need to set up trading posts to supply the Lusitanian ships that were trying to get around the continent on their way to India. These trading posts formed a network of mutual support in the Dukkala region, both in the military sphere and in the supply of food. At the center of this network, Mazagão was the longest-lasting fortress, only being evacuated in 1769. Protected for years by the military engineering employed in its construction, it had sea-facing fronts in order to allow independent supplies if it were surrounded by land, it was rectangular in shape with walls eleven meters wide and fourteen meters high, and it once housed a town with 700 houses and approximately 2,600 inhabitants (Vidal 2008, 16–22).

Mazagão was initially inhabited by a population of Lusitanian origin, including islanders from the Azores, and it was marked by disputes between Muslims and Catholics as well as by intense cultural exchanges. In addition to the constant martial tensions, the isolation of the fortress created similarities between those who lived within its walls and those who lived outside them. This aspect was recorded by one of the governors of Mazagão, José Vasques Álvares da Cunha, who stated in May 1760 that “those inside the Square [of the fortress] as well as those outside, which can only be distinguished by the fact that some have beards and the others don’t.”⁶ Over the centuries, the “Mazaganists”⁷ reinvented their identities and cultural practices, and, although they served the king of Portugal, they had needs and daily lives that often placed them far from Lisbon.

Until 1769, it was unlikely that Quitéria and the other two thousand inhabitants of Mazagão would ever have imagined that their lives were going to be embedded in the forests and rivers of the Amazon. The relationship between the fortress of Mazagão and colonial Amazonia was strengthened when the population of the Lusitanian “square,”⁸ which had existed on the African coast for more than 250 years, was evacuated on the orders of the late Portuguese king Dom José I. The order came after a siege, which was begun in December 1768 by Sultan Mulah Mohamed and lasted until March of the following year. What happened next was impressive: the displacement by sea of an entire city: 469 families and 225 lone individuals who, together, amounted to 2,093 immigrants. “[…] an urban society separating itself from its stone shell [...] A city without walls, provisionally distributed in 14 floating neighborhoods, sets sail for Lisbon” (Vidal 2008, 51). In the midst of this population was Quitéria, listed by the fortress administrators as “family number #258,” in the household of her former owner and his wife⁹.

Having set foot in Lisbon, Quitéria barely had time to adapt to the capital of the Empire. She and the other Mazaganists arrived in March 1769 and stayed in Lisbon until September of the same year, when they left for a new destination. In fact, this fate had been considered by the Crown even before the abandonment of Mazagão, on March 16, 1769, when secretary of state for the navy and overseas territories Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado sent a letter to the governor of Grão-Pará containing the following order: “With these families [of Mazagans] the King Our Lord orders that a new settlement be established on the northern coast of the Amazon to join hands with Macapá and Vila Vistosa.”¹⁰

The Mazaganists crossed the Atlantic to reach the port of Belém in Grão-Pará in a compulsory immigration, which they themselves described as “violently transported to the aforementioned state of Pará.”¹¹ Since the right not to leave Lisbon was conditional on the express authorization of the king, it is possible to find a list of thirty-six names of Mazaganists who did not travel to the Amazon but stayed in Portugal.¹² These include cases such as that of Francisco Xavier da Silva Palma, who had been banished to Mazagão for six years; that of Luís Manoel de Macedo, who was waiting for his children to recover from an illness in the city of Lisbon so that he could later live in Portugal with his sister in Vila Viçosa; that of Teresa Maria de Jesus, who, because her husband had died, was allowed to live with her father, a servant of the Count of Cunha; and that of José de Moares, a surgeon, who stayed to look after sick immigrants¹³. The restrictions on allowing the Mazaganists to remain in Lisbon highlight not only the Portuguese Crown’s plan to transfer the fortress in its entirety (or nearly so) but also the resistance in part of this population toward emigrating to the Amazon: a place described by some of the immigrants with “loathing.”¹⁴

The final destination of these immigrants was not chosen without reason: it was linked to the Portuguese efforts to strengthen and colonize the frontiers of Portuguese America. In the case of the northern frontier, there was tension due to the proximity to French Guiana. In this sense, as mentioned by Mendonça Furtado, the settlement of these immigrants would not be in the city of Belém, but in a village created and named especially for this purpose: Vila de Nova Mazagão. The governor of the state of Grão-Pará and Maranhão at the time, João Pereira Caldas, remembered the usefulness of the presence of the Mazagans for “the defense and security of the Macapá Barrier against the French neighbors.”¹⁵ His speech followed macro-political tensions that had been orbiting the northern edges of Lusitanian America since the 17th century: the French invasion of Maranhão in 1612; the Treaty of Utrecht, signed in 1713 “to prevent any occasion of discord that might arise between the vassals of the Crown of France and those of the Crown of Portugal [...] over the lands of the Cabo Norte¹⁶” (Guedes 1989, 210); the epidemic of 1748–1750, which ravaged the captaincy of Grão-Pará and caused its governor to worry about foreign forces that “might take advantage of the weakness of our troops to encourage some project that might disturb our conservation”¹⁷; and even in the years 1751–1754, when the Crown financed an influx of Azorean immigrants who were to be settled on the northern borders, mainly in Macapá. The defense of Cabo Norte was planned by the Portuguese administrators on the basis of forming a belt of villages (Macapá, Vistosa da Madre Deus, and Nova Mazagão) and partly built on the displacement of individuals who crossed the Atlantic. It was a region where “culture and settlement” were to be encouraged as a territorial defense strategy (Costa 2018), and it was made up of people with very different origins: Azorean immigrants, various indigenous peoples, enslaved people from Senegambia and Angola, as well as the Mazaganists. Although of a macro nature, linked to the disputes between European countries over possessions in America, the efforts to colonize Cabo Norte directly interfered in the lives of those who were forced to immigrate to the Amazon. The life of Quitéria, an enslaved woman, was directly affected by the concerns of the King of Portugal and the pressures imposed by the French Crown.

On January 11, 1770, less than a year after the evacuation of the fortress, ten ships bringing the Mazaganists anchored in Grão-Pará, and Quitéria would set foot on Amazonian soil for the first time. The estimate is that 1,642 individuals arrived, divided into 388 families (Martins 2010). These individuals came from the same place—the fortress of Mazagão in Morocco—but they brought different “baggage”: differences in age, gender, freedom status, occupation, military rank, family size, marital status, and title of nobility. These elements would later be directly linked to the possibilities of building strategies and tactics for social integration and survival; they were elements that gave other colors to the idea of a “Mazagão People.” A new world opened up before the eyes of these displaced people, with a natural environment so different than the one they knew, in what they described as a “transportation to a climate so far away.”¹⁸

In the land that received them—Grão-Pará—the impact was also significant, especially when we consider the number of immigrants disembarking. This was a lot of people arriving in a single day; even the immigration of Azoreans, during its three years (1751, 1752, and 1754), with funding from the Crown, did not reach such a figure, with 945 islanders disembarked at the port of Belém (Vieira Junior 2017). Still in terms of contextualizing the significance of this number of Mazagan immigrants, we should point out that when the population of the entire captaincy was counted in 1773, divided into 74 villages/parishes/localities, only six of them had a population greater than the 1,642 Mazaganists who arrived. Despite the immigrants’ complaints and the difficulties of adapting to the new land, in three years the population of Mazagan origin living in the captaincy had increased by 18% compared with the number of people who had landed in 1770. This growth is explained by the reconstitution of families, the children born after the arrival, and the increase in the ownership of enslaved people—the latter received as payment of debts owed by the Crown to officials or soldiers who served in the fortress¹⁹. The increase in this population and the construction of new families broadened the perspective on “the Mazagão people”: new nuances emerged, including those married to locals, and children born in Grão-Pará.

Quitéria went from being a captive to being an owner, and she did so by acquiring enslaved people and setting up her own home in Belém. This change in social status was made possible by the rapid accumulation of capital — probably the result of her work as a food vendor, which allowed her to buy not only two captives but also her own freedom. On the chessboard that reveals the daily life of Grão-Pará, Quitéria made moves to cope with the new land, sometimes taking advantage of the opportunities created and sometimes fighting against the baggage she had brought with her from Mazagão; namely, her condition as a slave, a black woman, a single woman, and a woman over thirty—at the time, something considered very close to old age.

But let us go back to the arrival and try to understand it from the viewpoint of the local rulers. If the number of immigrants arriving was significant, imagine that this arrival took place in a single day and involved a population with no experience of the region. Immediately, demands were made for supplies and shelter for the immigrants, which required administrative measures. The governor of the state of Grão-Pará and Maranhão, who welcomed the immigrants, had already been informed by Lisbon that the Mazaganists would be coming and tried to prepare himself, at least minimally; for example, he paid for five sumacas (small, two-masted boats) loaded with dried meat to come from Paraíba and Bahia²⁰. The governor-general of the captaincy went so far as to say that “the people from Mazagão that His Majesty was pleased to send to this state [of Grão-Pará and Maranhão] have made this city [of Belém] very populous [emphasis added], so that it cannot be envied by the [cities] of our Kingdom”²¹. He went on to report, in a hyperbolic and laudatory tone, that in addition to dried meat, the Mazaganists were supplied with flour and fish, as well as a duly equipped hospital to care for their sick, and “that the same Mazaganists are delighted with the good life they lead and the abundance they experience”²².

From another perspective—that of the newcomers—the sense of support was quite different. The feeling of being “pleasantly pleased” was not shared by the immigrants themselves. Some did not see their arrival in the new land in such a generous light. For example, Domingos Pinto asked to return to the kingdom of Portugal, claiming that his wife had acquired “a serious illness that is incurable in this climate”²³. The idea that Grão-Pará had contaminated “airs”²⁴ was repeated in the petition of Isidoro José da Fonseca Cabral Mesquita, a sixty-five-year-old sergeant-major who made a request to return to the kingdom because he felt “compelled to change airs in order to restore his health.”²⁵ These excerpts make it clear that the transfer to Grão-Pará was not as generous an action as some of the local authorities wanted it to appear, nor as the Crown wanted to believe. The document sent to the Queen in 1778 by the so-called representatives of the immigrants (judges, councilors, and the magistrate of the district of Mazagão) made their perceptions of the transfer clear: “It was announced that they were destined for settling in Pará, and they immediately felt repugnant to being transported to such a distant climate, since they recognized that this was not the reward they deserved for their services.”²⁶ That relocation was seen as a journey reserved for “those who, in order to escape the punishment deserved for their atrocious crimes [...] and not a people who are always faithful, always constant and only exercised in the throes of war”²⁷. And even though the local governor had made an effort to supply the Mazagans with dried meat and fish, his efforts were seen by the immigrants’ representatives as ineffective, because “these foodstuffs are ordinarily useless for sustenance, they double the illnesses they suffer, rather than preserving their health”²⁸.

Quitéria, on the other hand, was not so bothered, because the new home brought the possibility of freedom, marriage, and material enrichment. The process of relocation gradually acquired different meanings among those involved, meanings that fragmented the group initially known as the “Mazagão people.”

Hell for some, opportunity for others

The group of immigrants who arrived in Belém in a compulsory migration from Mazagão was not homogeneous. ranging from enslaved people to qualified members of the Order of Christ, men to women, from single to married and widowed, in addition to many other differences (age, occupation, family size, etc.). Thus, as mentioned above, the immigrants had to deal with and struggle with the baggage they brought with them, which meant developing different tactics that were often associated with the composition of the household and family. The reconfiguration of the Mazagan families in the new land is clear, for example, in the case of Quitéria herself, who embarked in Mazagão in a household group made up of herself and her owners but once in the Amazon became free, took up residence, got married, and acquired two enslaved people, all in the short span of nine years (1769–1778).

The couple who owned Quitéria in Mazagão were Luís Loureiro Rego and his wife, Jacinta Valente. Their household structure and family configuration also changed between 1769 and 1778: They had two daughters, and Luís’ mother, Dona Isabel Cereja, moved in with her son. Still in the fortress of Mazagão, Dona Isabel headed her own household and shared it only with a twelve-year-old slave²⁹. In Belém, at the advanced age of sixty-four, she moved in with her son and her daughter-in-law, thus increasing her ownership of slaves to two individuals, “a mulatto and a black woman”³⁰. The household Quitéria knew in Morocco underwent changes in Grão-Pará. It was divided into two: one composed of Quitéria and her two enslaved servants; and the other composed of her two masters, Dona Isabel, the couple’s two new daughters (born in Grão-Pará), and four more enslaved people — in the second part of the household was an increase from three to nine people.

In the original composition of Quitéria’s household, there was not only a reconfiguration of the domestic unit, especially in the group of people who lived in the house, but also a reconfiguration of the social position of the people who lived there. As white people from the Kingdom of Portugal, her former masters were treated as “good people,”³¹ even though they lived in “great poverty and [...] there is no way to make a living”—in the society of the Old Regime, economic distinction is different from social distinction (Sampaio 2010). In addition, if the number of women associated with the household of Luís and Jacinta (Quitéria’s former owners) was increased, they joined the exclusive category of “Donas” [Mrs.] (Silva 2002), a kind of treatment that Jacinta did not receive in Mazagão. In fact, for these immigrants, despite their original social status, the move to Grão-Pará was a point of “transition” in the course of their lives³², but these transitions did not happen in the same way, and the social markers and tactics adopted were fundamental in shaping them. The same immigration experience unfolded into different representations and possibilities.

In Belém, Quitéria had married another slave, whose master was Antônio Loureiro. It is reasonable to infer that Antônio Loureiro was a relative of Luís Loureiro, indicating that the marriage market for Quitéria was limited to her master’s initial social network; as far as marriage was concerned, Quitéria was still a Mazaganist. The marriage could have had a broadening effect on Quitéria’s condition: she was no longer a slave but an owner, who was leaving someone else’s home to set up her own, and she was no longer a single woman but a married woman—elements which, when added together, meant an upward social shift (Silva 2002).

This was the trajectory of Quitéria’s and of Luís and Jacinta’s households in the city of Belém in 1778. However, Belém was not the final home envisioned by the Lusitanian administrators for the Mazagan immigrants. Even before they arrived in Lisbon, the planned destination of the population evacuated from the fortress of Mazagão was the north of the captaincy of Grão-Pará (Vidal 2008, 138). Perhaps this was because they were perceived by the Crown as “frontier people”³³ who were more capable of settling and ensuring colonization under pressure from foreign kingdoms “exercised in the throes of war.” A new village that was built in Cabo Norte in 1770, Vila Nova de Mazagão, was conceived as the final home for the immigrants (Costa 2018). In this sense, we can understand why Quitéria’s husband lived in Nova Mazagão while his wife waited in Belém for a possible order to move from the governor of Grão-Pará.

The Mazagans had their residential destinations compulsorily decided and financed, although they resisted and asked for the right not to go to Nova Mazagão. This was the case for João Maneta, an elderly man who was eighty years old and blind, who asked Queen Maria I not to transfer him, his daughters, and his sons-in-law from Belém to Nova Mazagão “so that in the same [city of Belém] they could be perpetual residents whose grace others have achieved”³⁴. Or, to give another example, Gaspar Amorim Amora, who, after marrying for the second time in Belém, went to live with his new wife (also a Mazaganist) on a farm where he tilled the land and traded in canoes³⁵. Others simply fled, like José Rodrigues, who went to Mato Grosso to make rammed earth and had still not returned by 1778; Inácio José da Penha de França “fled a long time ago to Minas”; and Lázaro Valente de Loureiro, who went to Bahia, leaving “his wife and children in considerable abandonment” in Belém³⁶. In practice, we can observe a capillarity on the part of the Mazaganists, finding them in several towns and rivers in Grão-Pará: Macapá, Joanes, Vigia, Souzel, Pinhel, Benfica, Cametá, Azevedo, São Caetano de Odivelas, Rio Abeté, Rio Turauá, Rio da Boavista, and Igarapé do Jamboassú.³⁷

The internal migration of the immigrants was directly associated with the social markers of these individuals. For example, we can find Mazaganists who disembarked in Belém bearing the noble distinction of knight of the Order of Christ, the main Portuguese military order (Olival 2001), who were soon appointed village directors³⁸; examples include Francisco Fernandes de Macedo, director in the village of Porto de Mós, and Salvador Rodrigues do Couto, director in the village of Ponte de Pedra. We highlight Dona Antônia Valente here, who married Paulo Fernandes Belo, deputy captain, knight of the Order of Christ, and director of the town of Soure, in Belém. What stands out is the fact that Paulo Fernandes was born in the fortress of Mazagão and arrived before the great influx of Mazagans, in other words, before 1770. However, other Mazaganists, even if they were not qualified by the Order of Christ, could still be appointed director: Domingos Cardoso was appointed director of the village of Souzel; Antônio Gonçalves Lêdo was made director of the village of Benfica; and João Pedro became director of Lugar de Outeiro.³⁹

We should not jump to the conclusion that the distinction of nobility made by some Mazaganists served the same purpose. For example, there were differences among the immigrants who had qualified for the Order of Christ: in 1778, the knight Inácio Freire da Fonseca owned a wood factory, twenty-two slaves, and a house on Rua da Praia de Santo Antônio in Belém; in the same year, the knight André Cardoso de Miranda lived on a farm in the Igarapé do Caraparú and was experiencing “considerable poverty, because until now the work of his fields has not corresponded to things that are useful for him to be able to live off with fortune”; and the knight Lourenço de Pina also “live[d] in poverty” in the Igarapé do Caraparú. Although the qualification of the Order of Christ interfered with occupying positions and accumulating wealth⁴⁰, it was no guarantee of such as it was linked to other elements, such as marriage and setting up a kinship network, slave ownership, property management, and place of residence.

Returning to the task of settling immigrants in Cabo Norte, the transfer of almost two thousand people from Africa to Grão-Pará, with a stopover in Lisbon, was quick and took less than a year. However, due to individual decisions and the natural and structural difficulties, the journey of these immigrants from Belém to Nova Mazagão took a long time. In December 1778, a list was sent to the queen with the names of 494 Mazagans who were still living in the city; in other words, 30% of the population that had disembarked in 1770. This list was divided into three “classes”: the first class was made up of those who had not been told to leave Belém for Nova Mazagão; the second class included those who had received the “tools and rations they were entitled to” but had not been transported to Nova Mazagão; lastly, the third class included those who were on the road “that leads to Vila de Ourém”⁴¹ (a village founded by Azoreans). In this list, Quitéria’s name appeared in the tenth family, ranked as “first class.”⁴²

During the wait to move to Cabo Norte, new couples formed—as was the case with Inês Maria. At the time of the evacuation of the fortress in Morocco, she was ten years old. Nine years later, in Belém, inserted into the local marriage market, and taking advantage of her age and her initial status as a single woman, she became the central figure in her original family and started to support her widowed mother and brother, something that was made possible only because she married Captain João Gonçalves Calheiros, the owner of seventy enslaved people and whose business included rice farming, sugar mills and commerce. ⁴³ Her husband lived in the city of Belém, where Inês Maria also continued to live. Isabel Torres, also a Mazaganist, was the widow of the judge of orphans in the village of Cametá and, in the same village, married for the second time and remained there. Dona Catarina Valente married the director of the village of São Caetano de Odivelas, in Morocco. Catarina was married⁴⁴ and, probably during the relocation period, became a widow. The Mazaganist Mariana Manoel was a widow in Mazagão, and in the Amazon she married Manoel Pires, a pardo [“brown-skinned”] Portuguese. As the final example, so as not to tire the reader, we cite Mrs. Violante Lopes, who left Mazagão at the age of sixteen and married Maurício José, director of the village of Óbidos, in Belém⁴⁵. Quitéria also married, but, unlike the other situations mentioned above, she did not follow her husband; in contrast, her husband went to Nova Mazagão and she remained in Belém. Could the families formed by women who came from Mazagão and married people from Belém be classified as “Mazaganists”? Or did these women and their dependents gradually join the ranks of the city’s former residents?

It is clear that the immigrants interacted with the population of Belém and other locations while they waited for the final transfer, thus remaking their lives, expanding their families, building new livelihoods for their households, and resisting the Crown’s initial directives. Just as a qualification of the Order of Christ could form an element of social insertion for some Mazaganists, marriage was a means widely used by single and widowed Mazaganist women. In other situations, however, even women from the Mazaganist community who married in Belém still struggled to make ends meet: this was the case for Francisca Maria, who married a soldier who later died—struggling to survive, she became the owner of “two cachaça [“brandy”] taverns”; and for Mrs. Antônia Maria, who married her stepfather’s brother in Belém (her mother was widowed and had married for the second time in Belém) and was living “in total helplessness, as [her husband] has no agency due to his total incapacity.”⁴⁶

Just as the conditions were varied, so were the interconnections between the markers of “differences” (nobility, marital status, gender, generation, origin) (Brah 2006). The life opportunities of the migrants did not follow rules, although we can find points of convergence. One of these elements was their attempt not to put down roots in their destination village, Nova Mazagão.

Settling and adaptations

Though shoulder-to-shoulder in the process of moving from Morocco, after arriving in the New World these immigrants sought different paths and possibilities; Quitéria, for example, continued to live in Belém, while other Mazagans settled in different villages and on different rivers. However, most of them went to Vila Nova Mazagão in compliance with the orders imposed by the Crown. In 1773 there were 1,325 Mazagans in Belém and 543 in the new village; four years later there was a reversal, with 494 immigrants in Belém and 1,763 in Vila Nova de Mazagão.⁴⁷ The increase in the population of Nova Mazagão was reinforced by the king’s imposition of the displacement of these immigrants, a cause for complaint by Mazagan representatives: “the great loss of freedom they experience when they leave their home [in Nova Mazagão].” Indeed, the death of King Dom José I in 1777 meant that many of the residents who had already settled in Nova Mazagão were able to leave, bypassing the initial order to settle there:

“[...] until the time that news reached us [in Belém] that Our Lord had called the Most Honorable King Dom José the First to Heaven; for since then the same people [of Nova Mazagão] have been in such a state of worry and restlessness, hoping that their requests would be granted and that His Majesty of this State would order them to re-export this continent.”⁴⁸

There was a clear dispute between the immigrants relocated to the new village and the colonial authorities. This dispute was characterized by the material conditions of settlement, the tactics and strategies adopted in the face of the Amazonian landscape, and the continued “dilution” of the immigrants into a more general and less specific population in terms of origin, a slow transformation from “Mazaganist” into “inhabitant of the captaincy.” The attempt to settle these “people” in Nova Mazagão was in line with the Crown’s view of perceiving them as a unit, a “people” that had merely changed location.

The obligation to settle was linked to the fact that the destination was avoided by many. On the other hand, even the governor of the state, João Pereira Caldas, demanded from Lisbon the right of free movement for the Mazaganists: “if it seemed convenient to His Majesty, it could be facilitated for these people the freedom to settle wherever they wanted within the Captaincy.”⁴⁹ This expression of concern was aimed at “avoiding greater expenses” for the state in supporting immigrants in the early years of Vila de Nova Mazagão and in the construction of the village itself—an activity that, in 1772, had employed more than two hundred people, including carpenters, blacksmiths, masons, and sawyers.⁵⁰ The building costs were constantly mentioned, especially as they were paid for by local resources. Pereira Caldas himself had estimated that the construction of each house would cost $2,000 to the state treasury.⁵¹ Francisco de Souza Estrela and Joaquim Antônio, respectively the master carpenter and the mason responsible for the construction work in the village of Nova Mazagão, made it clear that the wooden houses covered in straw would have a very short lifespan: “while some properties are being completed, the weather has ruined others, as the many thunderstorms experienced in the winter and the harsh winds and the continuous rains have caused them to be demolished.”⁵² These tensions over the fate of the Mazaganists show that, although the Crown had envisioned the settlement of the immigrants, the implementation of this idea was the responsibility of the treasury of the government of Grão-Pará and Maranhão, which could mean local resistance to Lisbon’s project.

But Pereira Caldas had not been listened to and the obligation for the Mazagans to settle in the town continued, despite a great many other complaints. In addition to the residency requirement, the Mazagans who settled in Nova Mazagão complained about the quality of the soil, which they said was insufficient to support its dwellers. In a letter sent directly to the queen, representatives of the Mazaganists complained that the land had already been “populated by the national Indians of the country, and by the same helpless people.”⁵³ Residents constantly complained about the “fruitlessness of the land on which they are situated.” In a document sent to the district clerk, the Mazaganists again stated that “any work would be useless due to the weakness and situation of the land, and that is why the people live in an oppressive and deplorable state [...] the village is in a state of helplessness or death from hunger.”⁵⁴ The village surgeons, still trying to convince people of the difficulty of surviving in the region, stated that they acquired many diseases because they were “continuously working in very rough and swampy lands.”⁵⁵ To the precarious state of the soil, we must add the lack of experience in farming and, even more so, in planting on the banks of the Amazon River and its floodplains.

As Pereira Caldas pointed out: “these people, even if alive, are very suitable for the exercise of the Arms in which they were raised, and are not suitable for farming; and for this reason they were raised for a different purpose.”⁵⁶ The governor was making it clear that the Mazaganists’ present was compromised by their past, by the tradition they had been forged in, which was war. In 1769, before the transfer and still living in the fortress, we found 615 individuals declaring their occupations, with the vast majority categorized in military functions, but it was not possible to find any farmers—though we point out that there was some timid planting in the vicinity of the fortress.⁵⁷ However, in 1778, in Vila Nova de Mazagão, this picture saw a major alteration: of the 175 heads of households who declared their occupation, 129 were categorized as farmers, some of whom combined two occupations, such as carpenter and farmer, surgeon and farmer, bleeder and farmer, tailor and farmer, or gunsmith and farmer. One example of a household dedicated to farming is that of Antônio Loureiro, the owner of Quitéria’s husband, who produced one hundred alqueires [roughly 2,420 hectares] of rice in 1778. Rice farming in the Amazon River delta was encouraged by the Portuguese Crown (Ravena 1998).

On the basis of this initial data, two conclusions can be drawn: despite the complaints made by the residents of Nova Mazagão and by Governor Pereira Caldas, the village’s main activity was agriculture. This is related to the second conclusion: by cross-referencing information on the departure and settlement of these Mazaganists, a change in the immigrants’ occupational profile can be observed through the conversion of military personnel into farmers. This was more than a formal classification and included changes in the horizon of daily activities, which were no longer linked to repairing walls or trading with Islamized peoples but to dealing with rice fields and learning from the indigenous people about the rainy seasons and the flooding of the Amazon River. There was a change in day-to-day demands and the need to adapt of a population educated in war.

Another point complained about by the newcomers to Nova Mazagão was the small number of enslaved people, which also marks a turning point in the composition of the Mazagan population. Even in the fortress of Mazagão, among enslaved people such as Quitéria, it was not very common to find women; there were only twenty-nine of them and twenty male slaves. Data that serves as a parameter to consider the weight of slavery participation in Mazagão’s economy, show that the exploitation of captive labor was neither common nor the main means of support for these families. While living in Mazagão, Quitéria is unlikely to have imagined that one day she would be an owner of slaves.

Years later, for the immigrants in Nova Mazagão, slavery became an essential condition for survival. Slavery was not limited to captives from Africa, but included a significant number of indigenous people, as the Governor of Macapá, Lobo de Almada, pointed out: “people from the descent of Monte Alegre [...] distributing to each of them [Mazaganists] two Indians and one for others [average].”⁵⁸ Governor Pereira Caldas, who we are already familiar with, also emphasized the presence of indigenous labor distributed among the residents of the new town: “the laborious and heavy tasks that farming in this country requires and undoubtedly cannot be achieved by another very inferior quality of settlers without providing them with the means of the precise workers that, apart from the indigenous people, must be the slaves [enslaved Africans].” It is not hard to imagine Vila Nova de Mazagão being the scene of constant interactions between indigenous populations, enslaved Africans, and Mazagans, which meant not only a new productive organization but also the exchange of knowledge, values, and perspectives on work. For those who came from the fortress of Mazagão, the other was no longer the Muslim but the indigenous, the enslaved Africans, and the old inhabitants of the captaincy—identity also changes when confronted with a “new other.”

In the new world, the Mazaganists were part of a slave society. In 1778, the residents’ representatives claimed to have seventy-one underage slaves, “who only serve to increase poverty in the daily expenditure of livelihoods,” and stated that they owed seventy-four captives to the General Company of Commerce of Grão-Pará and Maranhão, a debt that was difficult to repay, as many had died⁵⁹. They stated that there were still 257 enslaved people left, including Quitéria’s husband, and that their purchase price had been excessive—they had been received as payment for debts owed by the “Almoxarifado da Extinta Praça de Mazagão” [Warehouse of the former Mazagão Square]. In the same year, the population of Vila Nova Mazagão totaled 1,591 people spread over 310 households, with 395 enslaved people constituting 22% of the total population—almost a quarter of the population made up of captives⁶⁰.

In addition to the exponential increase in this population when compared to the forty-nine captives who left the fortress, the meaning that slave labor took on for the Mazaganists is striking. There are indications that the livelihoods of the Mazagans were represented by the immigrants themselves as being linked to the ownership of slaves. Diogo Serrão de Abreu, for example, asked to leave Nova Mazagão with his family, giving reasons including the fact that he lived “very poorly because he did not have any slaves.”⁶¹ Maria Alves Macedo also claimed something similar, saying that she could go up to “forty-eight hours without eating” because she had “no slaves and not even a man with her, since she was a young maiden.”⁶² Even among those Mazaganists who still lived in Belém, such as Quitéria, the ownership of captives was seen as an important economic component, as it forced those who were enslaved to “earn a living” for their masters. For example, José Veloso, a forty-year-old man who had been an artilleryman in Mazagão and went on to become a shoemaker in Belém, lived off the labor of two slaves. Luiz Valente Cordeiro, who had been a soldier in the fortress, and his family made a living in Belém from sewing and from the work of two underage slaves.⁶³ Other examples could be cited, but suffice it to say that among the 114 families of Mazaganists in Belém in 1778, 187 slaves were owned. There was certainly a survival strategy among the Mazaganists in taking advantage of the supply of enslaved people via the Companhia Geral de Comércio [General Company of Commerce], which cemented them within a society where captive labor was the rule—Quitéria herself adhered to this sense of social place and material survival.

If the village of Nova Mazagão represented the final destination of the Mazagans, this fate was not accepted passively by the immigrants; many lived or wanted to live elsewhere. At the same time, the natural environment was an obstacle to this settlement. The new reality of these immigrants was associated with the ownership of slaves, a trend they immediately adopted. In a new natural environment and a new world of work, these immigrants reinvented themselves, gradually ceasing to be the “Mazagão people.”

Closing remarks

Stuart Hall, when discussing Caribbean cultural identity in terms of its diasporic movement, helps us to think about the Mazaganists after their compulsory displacement to the Amazon. He does so mainly by highlighting how part of national identity is constituted in the relationship with the other, in contact with difference and in the reinforcement of origin as an identifying category, and at the same time cannot be summarized in a binarism between inside and outside (Hall 2016). It would be foolhardy to attribute a “national identity” to the Mazaganists in the middle of the 18th century. However, in a short period of time (1769–1778), we saw tensions between claiming a place of origin and the different survival tactics adopted by this group of immigrants.

On the one hand, the Mazaganists claimed a series of rights associated with the origin of a group that was isolated in Africa, fighting in the name of the Portuguese king and the Catholic God, “an ever-faithful People” to the Empire and to the Church. Not without reason is the reference to the “obedience and loyalty of the ancient progenitors of that People” to King João IV, who in 1640 had freed the Portuguese throne from the Spanish domination – a period known as the Restoration.⁶⁴ The idea of “progenitors” also appears in the documentation more than once, for example, when the magistrate of the Mazagans recalled “those people who violently/ after seeing the blood of their progenitors spilled in the square of Mazagão when they surrendered it after hard and valiantly fighting the enemy/ were transported to this state [of Grão-Pará and Maranhão).”⁶⁵ In a direct line, the word “progenitors” is related to “ancestors”; the Mazaganists were claiming the memory of common ancestors who had fought on behalf of Portugal. The argument was subtle but had a degree of efficiency, because within an Old Regime society, providing services to the king had to be paid for with royal favors (Olival 2001). Mazaganist representatives claimed an identity forged in a history of battle and loyalty to the kingdom and therefore liable to be rewarded, while at the same time claiming through a tradition that linked the past, present, and future of the Mazaganists in an unbroken line (Hall 2003, 29).

But in this case, the outside world was not the stage for the construction of the “Mazaganist” identity, even though (we remember once again) they claimed a shared origin in providing services to the king and fighting the enemy of the Catholic faith. In the Amazon, these immigrants sought different paths. Some became local administrators, others became traders, enslavers, and farmers. In practice, they reinvented themselves, following the capillarity of the rivers and the opportunities they came across. They reinvented their lives and, with each day that passed, stopped being “Mazaganists” and stopped being soldiers. There was resistance to the Crown for treating them as a unit, as a “Mazagão people,” and this struggle materialized in the effort not to settle in their destination village: a village designed to continue the life of the abandoned fortress. Not wanting to stay in Vila Nova Mazagão meant wanting not to be seen as a “Mazaganist,” but to be seen in their multiple possibilities of existence. Thus, Quitéria’s life across the ocean no longer fits in Nova Mazagão and no longer fits with being a slave. Quitéria, and many others like her, left part of themselves behind on the ocean and rebuilt themselves in the Amazon.

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