US AND THEM!

1998

Geography is a good site for embedded metaphors. We are so accustomed to them we tend to ignore that there are mediation processes in language and in the graphic representation of places. We relate to maps, distances, territories, shapes, adjacencies, proximities, routes, as if they were experienced directly by the senses. They become a part of daily life, whether or not they are coherent with the rest of our empirical perceptions. In this article, which is dedicated to exploring issues of borders, identity and representations in Portuguese culture, maps will be constantly mentioned. I will suggest that maps have a prominent role in what is often referred to as "Portuguese culture." The statement involves some problems, since a generalization such as "a Portuguese culture" risks erasing the relevant social variables that reveal the heterogeneity of social processes, perceptions, and representations. Not all of us relate to metaphors in the same way, and what we see and understand depends largely on who we are, not only as unique human beings but as members of social groups, either defined by class, generation, gender, education, race, or site of origin. These different social variables interact in unique combinations that broaden the diversity and heterogeneity within each "culture"; there is no stereotypical Portuguese whose behaviors, perceptions and expectations can be taken to represent our particular "culture." The evidence of that diversity challenges the excessive claims of an embracing overall "culture" that might account for the specificities of our shared lives. This being said, it is by choice, not by omission, that this article is not after heterogeneities. It is rather after what we share, and maps are one of those things. I will attempt to explore two areas in which maps and spatial representations were the support to peculiar forms of collective identity in Portuguese culture. One of the cases corresponds to the identity of Portugal visa -vis 20 PORTUGUESE LITERARY & CULTURAL STUDIES 1 Europe, having Spain as the closest expression of otherness. The other one corresponds to the Luso-tropical colonial empire and its aftermath. Both of these expressions suffered a radical reversal in the last twenty-five yearsthe foreignness of Spain becoming submerged in the making of a European Union, and the empire giving way to new, post-colonial nations. The fact that those two processes occurred in less than one generation suggests that adults of today, who eyewitnessed the changes, and whose minds and worldviews were developed in settings quite incongruous with contemporary reality, may still be adjusting to the present. Memories are often in conflict with the evidence of today; and understanding contemporary Portuguese culture requires an exploration of the reminiscences that linger from the previous generation. One of them is the colonial mind that viewed the world according to Luso-tropicalist doctrine; another one is the perception of a fractured Iberia where Portugal and Spain constituted opposing entities. Both reminiscences can be recalled in a vivid, graphic manner, since both were contained in the maps hanging on the walls of our childhood classrooms. Maps were fundamental in a territory-obsessed colonial culture. There were always maps in the classrooms of the many public schools Salazar's regime had built to spread a unified knowledge and reality throughout the nation. Private schools followed the rule. Maps also happened to be more attractive than the portraits of Salazar and Thomaz that hung at each side of the classroom crucifix. Those sepia-tone prints were quite boring: Salazar as a unchangeable profde, like an immortal leader; and an aging Americo Thomaz, portrayed in full admiral regalia, who provided a face for the main character in dull jokes of the time. Maps were also ideal for the demands of wild imaginations. Not only for the imagination of school children, though; the regime's imaginative propaganda developed some extraordinary maps to furnish elementary school classrooms in the 1960s. There was one in particular that most perfectly embodied the regime's discourse of grandiosity. In that map the Portuguese colonies of the time were superimposed upon the surface of Europe. Mozambique occupied Spain and France, Angola spread out of Germany, and the smaller territories filled the remaining spaces. The message in the picture was that Portugal by itself, in its imperial, colonial self, could be considered larger than the continent of which it was geographically a part. This statement was quite confusing for children who were supposed to have

European Border Regions in Comparison. Overcoming Nationalistic Aspects or Re-Nationalization?, 2014

In 1769, when an employee of the Spanish Department of the Treasury visited the border with Portugal in order to find out what was going on there, he noted in his report that "even the oldest and most important natives of the Province, know as much about what goes on in the interior of Portugal as about what goes on in Malvar or China." 1 At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Dulong, a colonel of the 12th Light Infantry Regiment of the French Army, states in his Mémoire sur le Portugal, that "we do not know Portugal well; the Spanish don't know it, and I believe even the Portuguese themselves are as ignorant as us foreigners about the topography of their continental territory"; he does not understand that Spain, as powerful as it was, would have acknowledged more than a century before the independence of "this essential part of the peninsula." 2 The world of difference that separated the Spanish from the Portuguese was also so large that by the end of the nineteenth century, in spite of the efforts of a small group of intellectuals from both countries to improve relations, one of them wrote with sadness that "the despicable Caya border," between Elvas and Badajoz, "which some might consider the impenetrable Pyrenees, instead of a mere creek," had contributed on its own to the "divorce of two sister nations, more than the border drawn on account of the separation of the two kingdoms in 1668." 3 Like them, many soldiers, travelers, scholars and the curious crossed this fragile line and were surprised at how difficult it was at times not only to simply find the exact point at which one country ended and the other began, but in a deeper and more meaningful sense to find the true causes of an inconceivable distancing between closely located towns on different sides of the border with a history full of communal commonality.

Journal of Maps, 2024

Cross-border cooperation has developed fundamentally at the internal borders of the European Union. The border between Spain and Portugal, known as the line (raya in Spanish and raia in Portuguese), is one of them. Numerous cooperation projects have been developed there in recent years, although with a heterogeneous geographical distribution. The border seems to disappear, but far from doing so, it is just transformed, as the study of the dimension of national security shows, which is now largely binational. One of the highest levels of cross-border cooperation that has been achieved is that of integrated local units, called eurocities, with diverse objectives. We address the study of various dimensions of this eurocities with the aim of better understanding where they are created, in what political context and what is their demographic, economic and cultural impact.

Revista del CESLA. International Latin American Studies Review, 2018

Latin American migration to Portugal and Spain is usually facilitated by the historical and cultural ties that bind Latin American and Iberian countries. Nevertheless, these bonds might also function as a means of reinforcing power asymmetries and social hierarchies. Based on Decolonial Thinking and on theories of Social Psychology, this study is aimed at analyzing the dual role of these ties, both as factors of approximation and as instruments of domination and violence. Therefore, we conducted individual interviews with 23 Latin Americans (from Brazil, Chile and Mexico), aged between 18 and 49 years old, who migrated to Portugal or Spain. Data were analyzed through Thematic Analysis. The results allowed us to discuss: the use of language as an instrument of domination; the existence of negative stereotypes regarding Latin America(ns) and the process of essentialization of the “Other”; and how Latin Americans are sometimes seen as a preferred type of migrant and at other times as being eternal foreigners. We hope this study serves as an incentive for future reflections on how the different forms of coloniality might still shape present-day intergroup relations among countries with a shared colonial past.

Anthropology Today, 2018

This article gives an ethnographic account of national identity in the day‐to‐day lives of villagers who face one another across the Portuguese‐Spanish frontier along the Guadiana River on the Iberian Peninsula. The article shows that despite European integration, the symbolic boundaries of culture and identity in these nation states persist.

Convergence and divergence in Ibero-Romance across contact situations and beyond. De Gruyter, 2021

This paper studies the linguistic landscape of two distant border-crossing areas, located in the municipalities of Verín (Spain)-Chaves (Portugal) and Vilar Formoso (Portugal)-Fuentes de Oñoro (Spain). The research is based on a corpus of 306 texts promoted by public bodies and private entities or individuals. It examines the presence and weight of the languages in which they are written, as well as the linguistic accuracy of the collected texts, interference phenomena and mixed statements that combine both languages. The results obtained demonstrate the complexity of the linguistic landscape on the borderland, a place with intense interpersonal contact and, at the same time, an area where national identity is often vindicated. In this sense, convergence whereby linguistic systems of neighbouring languages become similar due to the borrowing of material from the neighbour's language or, on the contrary, non-convergence, i.e. the lack of such converging and thus the tendency to not use the neighbour's language in the texts placed into the public space, can serve as an indicator of language loyalty and, as such, of the strength of the national identity.

Análise Social, 2016

This article tackles the discourses of national identification produced by the inhabitants of a village close to the border between Portugal and Spain on the Guadiana river, in order to shed light on the persistence of the Castilians/Spaniards as the main collective partner, the “significant other” in the construction and reproduction, through difference, of Portuguese identity. Based on ethnographic materials collected approximately in the last two decades, it shows that, in the context under study, the representation of the personality of the Portuguese people emerges out of a structure of contrasts in relation to the representation of the Spaniards’ personality. Similarly, the contrast to the Castilians/Spaniards is the main leitmotif from which the Portuguese identity has been built over time.

Borders exist in almost every sphere of life. Initially, borders were established in connection with kingdoms, regions, towns, villages and cities. With nation-building, they became important as a line separating two national states with diff erent " national characteristics, " narratives and myths. The term " border " has a negative connotation for being a separating line, a warning signal not to cross a line between the allowed and the forbidden. The awareness of both mental and factual borders in manifold spheres of our life has made them a topic of consideration in almost all scholarly disciplines—history, geography, political science and many others. This book primarily incorporates an interdisciplinary and comparative approach. Historians, sociologists, anthropologists and political science scholars from a diverse range of European universities analyze historical as well as contemporary perceptions and perspectives concerning border regions—inside the EU, between EU and non-EU European countries, and between European and non-European countries.

2001

Within the borders of Europe, the raia (literally: line) between Spain and Portugal is quite singular. This, among other reasons, is due to its long history as a limit between two States and to its permanent absence in the main processes of modernization and development. Despite this, and for the border regions, the entrance of Portugal and Spain into the European Community did allow the establishment of the essential conditions for the formation of a new model of relations and development. The expectations generated in the border regions relating to this new model -symbolized in particular by the INTERREG initiative, in overcoming the chronic problems of socio-economic articulation and development will not materialise as expected if convergence processes at regional level are taken into account. Despite the positive interventions, these regions continue to lag far behind more dynamic areas with a higher living standard on the Iberian Peninsula, such that the asymmetries and inequal...

Border experiences in Europe - Birte Nienaber / Christian Wille (eds.), 2020

The project Frontera hispano-portuguesa: documentación lingüística y bibliográfica (FRONTESPO) was born in 2015 with the aim of exploring the linguistic situation of the border between Portugal and Spain, since, in spite of its extraordinary appeal, there was no overall description of it, and most studies were outdated. One of the tools created in the framework of this project was a speech corpus, the result of interviews with 287 informants from different age groups carried out in 64 towns on both sides of the border. In addition to linguistic data, the corpus provides information on border culture and experiences; some examples will be offered in this paper.