Research offers insights into experiences of Brazilian immigrants

Alan Marcus’ doctoral dissertation research on Brazilian immigrants and returnees to the South American nation was featured in the Jan. 13 edition of the Milford (Mass.) Daily News.

For his Ph.D. thesis in Geography, Marcus looked at Brazilian migrants’ intersecting experiences, perceptions, and inter-relationships with place, identity and change. Titled “The Contexts and Consequences of Brazilian Transnational Migration Processes: An Ethnic Geography in Two Countries,” the dissertation evaluates migrant spatial processes and sociocultural changes incurred by migration by looking at two older and two recent “migration corridors” between the United States and Brazil.

In the late 1980s, says Marcus, over 1 million Brazilians left Brazil without returning. Today, an estimated 2 million Brazilians live abroad, and more than 1 million are believed to reside in the United States.

Marcus conducted fieldwork in Framingham and Marietta, Georgia — two communities that have experienced an influx of Brazilian immigrants — and two towns in Brazil where residents left for the U.S.: Governador Valadares, in the state of Minas Gerais, and Piracanjuba, in the state of Goias.

Using a combination of in-depth interviews, focus groups, informal interviews, a survey and other methodologies, Marcus tried to determine why so many Brazilians go to the U.S., whether they are happy and how Brazilian men and women deal with change after arriving in North America. He also asked how Brazilians self-identify ethno-racially before and after migrating and how their religious affiliation impacts migration.

He says his research results show that Brazilians who migrate to the United States are historically seduced by U.S. idealization and by geographical imaginations incurred by, U.S. Protestant and U.S. cultural influences, and by stories of returnee migrants. Brazilian immigrant women are generally happier in the United States than their male counterparts, who experience a sense of emasculation, as levels of female social capital and economic empowerment increase after immigration. Brazilians self-identify with various ethno-racial categories after migration occurs and tend to have positive interactions with U.S. whites, but negative interactions with U.S. blacks and other immigrant groups.

Brazilian immigrants experience a low sense of immigrant community, and if they could vote in the U.S., the majority would vote for the Democratic Party, he says. The conditions and consequences of migration processes are multi-dimensional, complex, and not economic alone, rather they are generated and sustained by transnational social and religious networks.

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January 23, 2008.

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