Other Brazils: Portuguese Refugees of African Decolonization in Brazil

Between 1974 and 1975, over 500,000 Portuguese colonists fled Angola at the moment of its national independence.  Where might they go?  While most went to Portugal and some crossed the border into South Africa, thousands migrated to Brazil.  They passed through circuitous routes, arriving through Portugal or South Africa, and even crossing the Atlantic on precarious boat lifts in an odd inversion of the slave trade.  They rendered the meaning of their flight through their perception of a Portuguese Atlantic community in which they imagined that their colonial project in Angola was to have lead to the creation of a "future Brazil" on the eastern shores of the South Atlantic.  Their flight to Brazil was also shaped by conflicting state policies - Brazilian authorities worked at cross-purposes, some facilitating immigration and others attempting to block it, while Portuguese authorities pushed migration as a way of alleviating the strains of its own society in the midst of wrenching economic and political changes.   This paper engages Brazilian and Portuguese diplomatic sources, police records and newspaper accounts to examine these settlers’ imagination of Brazil as a haven from the collapse of their colonial order.  It also employs sources connected to the Portuguese immigrant community in Rio de Janeiro to understand its campaign to receive these migrants.