FOOTBALL. NOT POLITICS. The Portuguese don’t vote and don’t make demands in name of their community. But they do watch and also play football. Brussels has its own competition between Portuguese amateur teams.”
grandmother, so you could throw him in as well. I’d love to write a book like that, but of course they’d say I was nuts!” Scholar Graça Dos Santos of the Université de Haute Bretagne in Rennes has conducted research on the image that the Portuguese have in France and concluded that two clichés have stood the test of time. There is the “friendly slave” who, silently and underpaid, goes about doing his work. And then there is “the poet and the dreamer”. Both mental images predate the migration: the title of a 1910 song, from the operette Le jour et la Nuit by Charles Lecocq, was called Les Portugais sont toujours gais: “The Portuguese are always happy”; whereas in 1955 the popular French film Les Lavandières du Portugal (the washerwomen of Portugal) presents a cheaply exotic Portugal that according to Dos Santos furthermore contains many Spanish elements: one of the protagonists is the ‘old hidalgo’ (Spanish nobleman; the Portuguese equivalent is a fidalgo); its characters drink xéres (Spanish sherry). The Salazar regime contributed to the durability of the ‘cheaply exotic’ image of Portugal (though not of course the Hispanic elements...): through the government agency SPN (Secretario de Propaganda Nacional) and later the SIN (Secretario de Informacao Nacional) the New State spread propaganda about a Portuguese people that was ‘pacific, subservient and laborious’. The images of the SIN – illustrations of the great discoveries, pictures of farmers in folklore costume... still leave traces in our collective consciousness, Dos Santos claims.
You don’t vote, you don’t count A relatively low level of schooling is one problem dogging the Portuguese community in its development – although there are many exceptions as well. Another one is their aloofness from politics. In Brussels’ (or Belgian) politics the Portuguese are nowhere to be seen. The Brussels Capital Region parliament is host to deputies
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from many different backgrounds: Moroccan, Turkish, Greek... But not a Portuguese among them. In the latest elections of June 2009 many people of different origins spoke out – Brussels-based independent journalist Mehmet Koksal wrote a book about it: Bruxelles 2009, L’Autre Campagne – (“the other campaign”), a documentation of feverish activity by migrants working within the traditional parties, as well as those forming new parties to pursue more hardline policies. Of the Portuguese, not a trace. The Portuguese don’t act together to make demands in the name of their community. This is a general feature of the Portuguese diaspora throughout Europe, says Albano Cordeiro, and is especially striking in France. In the home country of heated political debates and animated street protests, about 800.000 Portuguese live in almost total discretion and seclusion. “Yes, the political je-m’enfoutisme of the Portuguese is abysmal!” Cordeiro says. “It’s the heritage of Salazar. How so? Look, a majority of Portuguese migrants in France, 92%, came from small villages, with a high illiteracy rate. At best, they’d had 3 to 4 years of primary education. It was really a double migration: not only to another country, but also from the countryside to the city. The first associations that were founded, were to help each other, speak Portuguese, have a social life among Portuguese. In the beginning it was all bricolage; they were informal associations, without a legal form. In Portugal, you see, it was seen as suspect to start an organization; you already tread in the political domain, which everybody wanted to avoid. This FEAR of politics...! After the revolution of the 25th April, this fear gradually dissipated and the informal associations were legalised to Associations Loi 1905 (non-profit organizations). But today still, the Portuguese form a relatively autonomous community, which spends its leisure time together. Actually, they spend the weekend in Portugal, only it’s a Portugal in France. In France, at least the Algerians make some noise, express themselves in the public arena, make demands. The Portuguese don’t, so they don’t count for anything.” In Brussels, Pedro Rupio, counsellor of the CCP and thus middle-man between the Portuguese authorities and the Brussels migrants concurs with these conclusions and sets out to do something about it: “It is crucial for the Portuguese community to let its voice be heard. That is why the CCP calls upon all the LusoBelgians here to register for political elections – Belgian, European and Portuguese. Today, of the 40,000 Portuguese in Belgium, only 2,500 are registered voters and only 600 of those actually vote. That is not good enough, because, as we say in Portugal, quem não vota não conta, or ‘he who doesn’t vote, doesn’t count’.” Somebody who was politically active is Maria Fatima Cavaco, who came to Brussels in 1975, and has worked here as a community worker since. She stood as an independent candidate (on a
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