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There and back in two languages : intersections of identity, bilingualism, and place for Luso-Canadian transnationals

University of British Columbia

The movement of Portuguese peoples through processes of transnationalism and globalization, have developed and maintained global diasporic communities over time and space. Luso-Canadians have a connection to Canada, either by birth or migration and a Portuguese (Luso) ancestry. There are two main purposes of this study. First, to examine the experiences of Luso-Canadian transnationals moving between the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) and Central Portugal, two spaces that hold complex connections to community, home, bilingualism, and identity. Second, to understand the dominant discourses and representations of Portuguese-ness in the GTA’s Portuguese community, by analyzing its established structures such as community and cultural centres, associations, and organizations. This research was conducted in the GTA and Central Portugal, and involved two and a half years of fieldwork, with time spent in both places. I interviewed 18 Luso-Canadian transnationals: 12 in the GTA and six in Central Portugal. I also conducted interviews with 52 community experts in the GTA’s Portuguese community, conducted a critical discourse analysis of material artifacts including community items and newspapers, conducted a linguistic landscape of symbolic Portuguese spaces, and participant observation. The primary conclusion is that Luso-Canadian transnationals and the GTA’s Portuguese community have diverse conceptualizations of Portuguese identity and culture. I use the concepts of way of being and way of belonging (Levitt and Glick Schiller, 2004) to explain this. Although they share geographic space, Luso-Canadian transnationals do not rely on or interact with the GTA’s Portuguese community. Instead, they rely on their transnational social capital including their extensive networks to mitigate their movements. Those who move to the GTA do so for better employment and education, while those who move to Central Portugal move for lifestyle, often because their employment and education are stable. Empirical evidence from the 52 community experts indicate that the GTA’s Portuguese community is facing unique challenges heightened by a few simultaneous factors: the suburbanization of the first generation and their descendants, the gentrification of symbolic Portuguese neighbourhoods such as ‘Little Portugal’ in Toronto, and the assimilation of second and subsequent Portuguese generations into the Canadian mainstream.

Text

2020-12-24

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/76912

Interdisciplinary Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCO

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/