COUNTRYMEN RETURN: COLONIAL MIGRATION AND RURAL ECONOMY IN NORTHERN PORTUGA

In this study, the effects of some two decades of international migration on a rural labor exporting locality of northern Portugal are examined. Changes in rural economy, social organization and world view in the communities studied are viewed as resulting from the essentially circulatory nature of international labor migration which also forms a major component of broader modernizing trends currently unfolding throughout the Mediterranean. Principal economic changes documented in this study include growing commerical expansion and a continuing decline of agriculture in the face of emigrant generated suburbanization. The social structure of the locality studied has been marked by a reduction of the rural proletariat class as a result of emigration, as well as by the recent appearance of a class group of returned emigrants which no longer fits into the traditional social relations of production present throughout much of northern Portugal. Evidence of both an ideology of emigration and raised expectations for socioeconomic improvement were also found even as real opportunities for emigration from Portugal have declined in recent years.;While a fair degree of modernization has taken place in the communities studied, it is suggested that with continuing economic decline in Portugal, the impending implementation of EEC agricultural policies, growing modernization and the continuing decline of emigration options, in all likelihood northern Portugal is now entering a period of crisis and transition. As these trends converge and are played out in this region of Portugal, minifundia peasants and small farmers, together with returned emigrants, will play major roles in voicing discontent.