Portuguese Trinidadian and Tobagonian

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Portuguese Trinidadians and Tobagonians
Trinitários e Tobagões portugueses
Portugal Trinidad and Tobago
Regions with significant populations
Trinidad and Tobago
Languages
Trinidadian and Tobagonian English  · Portuguese
Religion
Christianity
(Roman Catholicism · Presbyterianism)
Related ethnic groups
White Trinidadian and Tobagonian · Portuguese Guyanese · Portuguese Surinamese · Portuguese diaspora

Portuguese Trinidadians and Tobagonians are the descendants of emigrants from Portugal to Trinidad and Tobago.

Trinidad and Tobago saw four major waves of migration from Portugal. The historical background to the second wave, which began in 1846, was an earlier influx of Azorean and Madeiran workers in 1834 following the British abolition of slavery the previous year, along with Scottish Presbyterian evangelism in Madeira in the early 1840s. Seeking to resolve labour shortages in Trinidad, the British government signed a treaty with Portugal covering contract labour migration from Madeira to Trinidad, following which a group of 219 Madeiran contract workers arrived in May 1846, and then 773 more in the remainder of the year. Further migration, beginning in the 1870s, was spurred by a phylloxera infestation in Madeira. As a result, the Madeiran community of Trinidad grew to roughly two thousand by the end of the nineteenth century. The migrants comprised both Catholics and Protestants, though many of the Protestants later moved to the United States or Brazil. In the 1930s and again after World War II, there were two further influxes of Portuguese migrants.[1] Migrants and their descendants formed two major ethnic associations, the Portuguese Association (Associação Portuguesa Primeiro de Dezembro) and the Portuguese Club.[2]

Portuguese migrants in those years occupied an intermediate social position: physically, they resembled the largely-upper-class migrants from other European countries, but in terms of socioeconomic status, they were closer to African descendants and Indian migrants. As Miguel Vale de Almeida described it, "[n]either whites nor Blacks considered the Portuguese to be sociologically white" (see Bridget Brereton 1979:34). After 1960, exact statistics on the Portuguese community became unavailable because the census ceased to distinguish Portuguese as a separate group; they were thenceforth counted in the categories "Europeans", "Mixed", or "Others",[3] until 2011 when they were included again in the national census.

Notable people[]

References[]

  1. ^ Vale de Almeida, Miguel (2004). An Earth-colored Sea: "race," Culture, and the Politics of Identity in the Postcolonial Portuguese-speaking World. Berghahn Books. pp. 3–4. ISBN 9781571816085.
  2. ^ Vale de Almeida 2004, p. 4
  3. ^ Vale de Almeida 2004, pp. 4–5
  4. ^ Smith, Martin (11 December 2020). "Da Silva's journey to West Indies Test cap". Retrieved 2 February 2021.

Further reading[]

  • Ferreira, Jo-Anne S. (2018). The Portuguese of Trinidad and Tobago: Portrait of an Ethnic Minority (revised ed.). University of the West Indies Press. ISBN 9789766406608.
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