BY ALVARO VILLALOBOS LOPEZ, SCIENCES PO, SPECIAL TO THE MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

Sitting at a table, he drinks his coffee while talking to two women. His white shirt is spotless. His hair, in place. His words roll slowly. He looks determined. António de Macedo Andrade, Portuguese immigrant, is the owner of the restaurant Paris Madeira, in Paris' 9th district.

Like Andrade, Alberto Alves, Antonia Gonçalves, and José da Silva arrived in Paris between 1968 and 1970. They had to work hard to create their own companies in and around Paris. Affluent and prosperous, they represent a vital minority in France's Portuguese community.

In 1962, 50.000 Portuguese immigrants lived in France. Six years later, there were 300,000. By 1975, 800,000 Portuguese had settled. Since then, the figure stabilized and the community composed of Portuguese and Franco-Portuguese, is now approaching a million individuals. Within Paris, the Portuguese population of 47,000 is the largest foreign community, before the Algerians, Moroccans or Tunisians, according to the latest official census in 1999.

Over there

During the 1960s, at the peak of the Portuguese immigration wave, the dictatorship of Oliveira Salazar followed a dual policy: on one hand, encouraging the departure of its urban population, and on the other hand, trying to channel the emigrants to the African colonies.

"It was a question of image. The urban population was educated and thus knew more about its rights. It represented a threat to the regime. It was an ideal target," explains Jorge de Portugal Branco, a sociologist working for the Portuguese embassy in Paris.

Nonetheless, at the time, the migrants were mostly leaving the rural regions in the north of the country. The main reason was the failure of the autarchic economic model. Thousands of migrants went to France which was then in need of manual workers to fuel its economic expansion. About half of these migrants arrived illegally, as the Salazar regime made it almost impossible for its citizens to obtain a passport.

The migrants would cross Spain and then the Pyrenees Mountains, by foot or hidden in trucks. Most often, the father would leave first, followed a little later by the rest of his family. For those who chose to be smuggled in, the consequences of being arrested were harsh. Often beaten by the French police they would then be sent back to Portugal to be incarcerated. In Salazar's jails, those who had left the country illegally would be tortured and sometimes killed.

For the migrants who managed to get to France, the preferred destinations were the Parisian suburbs of Saint-Denis, Val de Marne, Hauts de Seine. Without specialized skills and unable to speak French fluently, the Portuguese immigrants were hired for unqualified positions, in construction and factories for the most part. They would work long hours and rent small rooms. For some of them, the situation was dire as they had to find a roof in a slum. In one slum, located in Champigny-sur-Marne, between 10,000 and 12,000 people - families and single men - were living. Created in 1956, the slum disappeared in 1973 after a law passed in 1970 created a vast program of social housing.

José da Silva lived in Montalegre, in northern Portugal, before leaving with his mother in 1967. They crossed Spain and settled in Fuenterrabia, in the Spanish Basque region, close to the French border.

"I keep a very fond memory of a bar from that village. It was located near a lighthouse. I would go there to work and then I would go for a ride on a friend's vespa," he recalls.

After a year, he decided to cross the border to France. His mother had been in Paris for two months. He remembers that a policeman actually told him to take cab to Saint-Jean-de-Luz, on the French side of the border and then to hop on a train to Paris.

Like da Silva, Alberto Alves also came from northern Portugal. He crossed on foot. The goal was the same: to flee Portugal's misery and Salazar's dictatorship to look for a better future in France.

It was what Carlos Vinhas' parents had in mind when they left their village where the inhabitants resorted to the smuggling of Spanish olive oil and oranges to supplement the income they got from growing crops and cattle. When he left, Vinhas' dad was assured of a contract working construction upon his arrival in France.

For António de Macedo Andrade, "Salazar's dictatorship was a humiliation." In Madeira, the region of Portugal where he was born, he had a job, in his grandparents' grocery store, but he preferred to "leave the country, because it was the best way to keep [his] liberty."

It is for the kids that the decision to emigrate would be the hardest. It is what happened to Alves, but also to Vinhas' parents or those of Antonia Goncalves who says that "my father arrived in France in 1965. At the time, I started working in Portugal in a shoe factory. After five years, my father decided not to come back and had us, me, my mother and my sister, come to France to be reunited."

The first years

When José da Silva arrived in 1968, at age 14, he and his mother settled in the suburb of Levallois-Perret. They lived together in a small room with a bunk bed. The WC was shared by all the inhabitants on their floor.

"Fortunately, the community was helping a lot. They would lend us money when times were hard," da Silva recalls. At the time, he was working odd jobs in street markets to make a few francs.

Alberto Alves also arrived when he was a young boy. It was 1970 and he was only 10. His father, a gardener, had already moved to Paris. The nine of them - his six brothers and two parents - lived in a 400 sq ft apartment in Genevilliers for three to four years, until they were provided social housing. As his brothers started to work, their situation improved.
Living conditions were hard for the Portuguese immigrants during their first years, even for those, like Carlos Vinhas, who was born in France. The hardships led the immigrants to preserve a tight relationship within the community. Vinhas recalls the families who lived next door when he was growing up.

"I would play with the neighbors' kids. We would ride our bikes, meet in the courtyard. For my parents, it might have been hard, but for me, I did not need anything," Vinhas recollects.

Others, like Antonio de Macedo came to France a little older. He was 23. Despite his law diploma from a university in Lisbon, Antonio started working in a restaurant's kitchen. For him, not speaking French was a handicap.

"It was complicated, but when you arrive as a young man with the will to succeed, you're like a courageous child," he says with a smile.

Antonia Goncalves also had to overcome the language barrier. When she arrived in 1970, she took a job in a rubber factory in Paris. She regretted leaving her family behind and recalls how sad she was whenever she returned to Portugal to visit.

"It was mostly the language that would make me feel the separation. Furthermore, at the factory I was working with Arabic, Portuguese and Spanish people. I was barely speaking French. We had to use signs to communicate," she explains. She often used an interpreter to communicate with her boss and coworkers.

Work, Work, Work

By the 1980s, the Portuguese who had arrived in France without skills were becoming more specialized in their trades. Some of those who had been working construction jobs created their own companies while their children attended high school, Some saw their children obtain university diplomas. This generation got jobs in the service industry. Today, more than 46.000 companies in France are headed by people of Portuguese origin or descent.

José da Silva is a good illustration. With his experience in construction, he progressively worked his way up the social ladder until he was in charge of a team of 200 workers. In 1982, he decided to create his own company - JDS - like his initials. He hired 88 people, mostly Portuguese. His employees were mostly his age - in their thirties - and had emigrated in the 1980s. With the job that José da Silva was offering them, they could apply for a right to stay legally in France.

On the side, da Silva has been working in night clubs, since 1974. He started as a barman and became co-director of two clubs owned by a Spanish immigrant. In 1990, he opened his own club, Costa do Sol, in Villeneuve-Saint-George, in the Paris suburbs. A year later, he sold his construction company to devote his time to his clubs. Today, the majority of his 48 employees are Portuguese.

Alberto Alves has a similar story. He started in the tapestry and decoration business, "making white Louis XVI seats for [former French presidents] Valery Giscard d'Estaing and Francois Mitterrand," he recalls. In 1980, he took a job working for Molinari, a Portuguese cigarette company. But in 1997, when Philip Morris acquired the parent company of Molinari, Alves decided to buy off a branch of the company called Portugal des Saveurs. To get a bank loan he had to prove he had clients and he had to take out a mortgage on his house. Portugal des Saveurs is now a successful import business that specializes in the distribution in France, of Portuguese wines, meat products, cod fish, and cheeses.

These immigrants felt the need the be their own. For Jorge de Portugal Branco, there is a cultural factor that values work. "This tendency is even more accentuated for immigrants coming from a rural background," Branco says. "For them, the position of employee is not encouraging. It is in their mentality to be independent by creating their own company."

For Antonio de Macedo Andrade, that transition did not come easily. After a year and a half working as a cook, he asked his boss to let him work at the bar so he could have direct contact with the customers.

"'But you don't speak French good enough,'" his boss answered him before adding, "'you can work in the wine cellar, once you've finished your task in kitchen.'"

So Andrade started working in the cellar, learning the names of all the wines. Six years later, he was began working at the bar, but also as a waiter and managing the register. He had gained his employer's confidence.

"I was working between 14 and 18 hours a day, but I was not counting. I would tell myself that I had come to succeed," says Andrade. His motto was "work hard and a lot to gain their respect."

Andrade continued to work in the same establishment until 1981, when he quit to work as a manager in the restaurant which he now owns. In 1984, he took out a loan to buy the restaurant and renamed it Paris Madeira. He started by hiring six employees. There are now 13.

But in some cases, hard work was not enough. For some Portuguese immigrants, the road to prosperity has meant that they had to overcome the bankruptcy of the companies they were working for, or their relocation.

That has been the case for Antonia Goncalves. Today, the 57-year-old woman is the owner of a bakery and pastry shop in Pierrefitte-sur-Seine.

Between 1970 and 1985, she lost her job three times. The factories in which she worked closed, filed for bankruptcy or relocated. In 1985, she took a job as a salesperson in a boutique that sold luxury goods. After 11 years, she quit her position to buy a bakery and pastry shop, previously owned by a Portuguese friend, who had filed for bankruptcy. Goncalves bought off the debts and "got to work," as she says. To keep her shop afloat, she sometimes had to work 17-hour days.

This ability to switch jobs partly explains why the unemployment rate in the Portuguese community remains lower than the national French average. In 1999, the rate was reaching 11.4% while the national average was 12.8%. At the same time, the average unemployment rate for foreign-born populations living in France was around 25%.

While in the 1960s and 1970s, 70% of the Portuguese immigrant workforce worked in the construction and factory sectors, by 1999, more than 60% of the community had found employment in different sectors of the economy. Nonetheless, while only 5.8% of the French workforce works construction, in the Portuguese community, the rate remains at 21.2%. In contrast, more than half of the Portuguese living in France work now in the service industry.

The story of Carlos Vonhas is more unusual. At 44, he is president of the Franco-Portuguese Chamber of Commerce and CEO of the French branch of Fidelidad Mundial, the leading Portuguese insurance company that is controlled by the state-owned bank Caixa Geral de Depositos. Born in France, he is bi-national and as such a member of the second generation of Portuguese living in France. At the age of 26, he was already managing, on behalf of the BNP bank, the portfolio of small and larger companies, Louis Vuitton among them. At 31, he had become manager at the Union des Assurances de Paris - an insurance company - and a year later was hired as adjunct general director for the French branch of the Portuguese bank Pinto i Sotto Mayor.

"One needed to be a certain age to be given responsibilities. It was not my case," says Vonhas. "It was posing a problem while I had to manage 300 employees. I had to impose myself based on my abilities."

Second-generation Portuguese have not typically risen in France that quickly. As of 1999, only 0.7% of those of working age were considered "management" or in the "intellectual and artistic professions." Even fewer, only 0.37% were counted as entrepreneurs with at least 10 employees.

The most common perception of the Portuguese in France is that of "concierge" or "gardiniere" in a Paris apartment building. Even if the portion of Portuguese employed in "services to the person" category is not negligible (16.8%), the qualified employees represent the largest professional category in the census with 28%, followed by the category of the unqualified employees (25%) whether in industry or manual trades.

To what do Portuguese business leaders attribute the relatively slow prosperity for first and even second generation Portuguese?

"I could see the difference between the way my French employers would talk to me or the Portuguese masons without qualification," says da Silva. "I was lucky because I had a job and a qualification when I was very young." As for Goncalves, who is a minority within a minority in that she's a female who has become her own boss.

Holding on

While they had to be brave and patient to become their own employers, these immigrants also had to work hard to develop their businesses. When Goncalves bought her bakery and pastry shop, she found herself with a dilapidated place that needed renovation. After fixing it up, the hardest part was to develop a client base. With the help of 17 employees, among whom is her daughter who is in charge of marketing, and her husband, who serves as manager, Goncalves, is proud to say that she has about one hundred clients. Her success is measured by their fidelity, and driven by her hard work. Their orders arrive in the evening, so the preparation has to be done at night while the delivery trucks arrive at 5:30 in the morning.

"We cannot count the hours we work. Sometimes, we do 30 hours in a row," she notes. "For Chrstmas, I end up spending the night here to help with the cakes."

Marie-Christine Volovitch-Tavares, historian and specialist on Portuguese immigration in France, warns that "sometimes, self-employment does not imply that the person is secure financially."

Alberto Alves insists that he is making the same wage as he was ten years ago and complains that in France "it is better to be a good employee than an employer. Here I do not have health insurance. I pay for a private insurance. I even pay for my pension plan."

And for Alves, his choice to specialize in the importation and distribution of Portuguese products has created its own obstacle to success. All the products have to be translated. "And here, in French restaurants, it is impossible to sell foreign wines," he adds.

A look at their country

Since its inclusion in the European Union in 1986, Portugal's economy has expanded, especially with the development of the service sector helped by economic growth during the 1990s. This economic growth enabled Portugal to be part of the euro zone in 1998 and to adopt the euro in January 2002, along with the other 11 countries.

Nonetheless, Portugal's economic growth has slowed down considerably since 2001, with a growth rate estimated at 1.2% for 2006. The gross domestic product is less than two-thirds of the average of the four central European economies. Even worse, in 2005, the deficit doubled the rate fixed by the EU while in 2006, the public debt was equal to more than 60% of the GDP.

This situation revolts da Silva. "Today, we are in an impasse. The cost of living is slow, so are the wages. They are half what it is in Spain. Actually, Portugal is the poorest European member-state." He is surprised to learn that the new Eastern European member-states are even poorer than Portugal.

"The EU was good to Portugal's big entrepreneurs. But for the rest of the population, the country is knee-deep in poverty. We live on the money from the EU and Spain," offers Alberto Alves.

All agree that Portugal's economy is hurting. But would they return to their homeland?

José da Silva hesitates: "I don't know if I would go back to Portugal. But to Spain, yes. Cost of living is higher there."

Carlos Vinhas might go back if he had the occasion. He is sure that his family would follow him if he ever decided to return. He adds that he would look for a job in the private sector which offers more opportunities.

Alberto Alves is torn between two countries.

"When I go back to Portugal, to visit my suppliers and my parents, people always think that I am a foreigner by looking at the way I dress, I speak and I think," he says.

For Alves, his heart is in Portugal while his head leans toward France. He feels unease in both countries even though he has been living in France for about forty years. He adds that "I don't speak Portuguese very well nor French."

The reason why they stay, as Antonia Gonçalves puts it, is that they have contributed to the pension system. She adds that "even though we go back to Portugal for vacations, our roots, our friends and our children are here now. When we retire, maybe we'll go spend two months out of the year there, but our future is not in Portugal."

May 2007

27-May-07 | 10:20 AM
Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Filed under: Feature Stories, France, Paris Dispatches, Portugal



E-mail this page | Printer-friendly version

Email this entry to:


Your email address:


Message (optional):

TrackBack URL for this entry