Strange Bedfellows: Brazilian Immigrants Negotiating Friendship in Lisbon

Abstract

In the late twentieth century, international migration became one of the strategies a number of Brazilians deployed to create and maintain a middle-class lifestyle. Many went to Portugal to seize the new opportunities offered by an expanding Portuguese economy and a skilled job market. As qualified Brazilians arrived with the required skills to fill these jobs and as they achieved a lifestyle that could be equated to a middle-class position in economic terms, they discovered more subjective barriers to their acceptance within general middle-class Portuguese society. In this article, I examine the role of friendship in people's efforts to integrate their middle-class migratory projects with their position in Brazil and Lisbon. I argue that making friends with the Portuguese was an important step for such a project while it required Brazilians to conform to Portuguese manners that contradicted the way they perceived themselves.

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