“Even If the Only Thing for Me to Do Here Was to Milk Cows”: Portuguese Emigrant Descendant Returnees from Canada Narrate Pre-return Desires and Motivations

Abstract

The article analyzes the pre-return desires and preparatory steps of the descendants of Portuguese immigrants in Canada who have returned to Portugal. Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out from June 2008 to May 2011 in Portugal, the study draws from the narratives of twenty returnees, scrutinizing home-country/host-country interactions and negotiations, the maintenance of ancestral homeland contacts, and network building. I analyze how these are sustained via family, community, technology, and return visits. I show that, even though these descendants drew their return aspirations from both close diasporic proximity (in Canada) and faraway locations (in Portugal), the factors that induced a “return” mobility were seldom uniform among the participants. The article thus sets out to discuss the influences and motivations that created feelings of belonging and spiritual proximity to a land, a society, and a lifestyle that, in some cases, were highly valued and often glorified right from an early age within the collective settings of family and diasporic community and, in others, constructed individually at later stages through self-searching mechanisms.