Is there a hyphen in ‘Ukrainian Portuguese’?

By Natalia Khanenko-Friesen

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On a sunny December afternoon in Lisbon, I sat down in a restaurant for an interview with Mrs. Ludmilla Hall, a Portuguese Ukrainian whose parents fled war-torn Ukraine during the Second World War and ended up settling in Brazil. A community activist who seems to be available to so many people around the clock, pani Ludmilla was sharing with me, during what turned out to be a nine hour conversation, many memories of her childhood in Brazil, her time in Angola as the wife of a Portuguese officer, and eventually her life and community work in Lisbon once the family settled back in Portugal’s capital in 1969.

I met Ludmilla at a joint event organized by the Ukrainian Cultural Educational Centre Dyvosvit and the Portuguese National Association for Families of which she is General Secretary. Mrs. Hall, a member of Lisbon high society, married years ago into a well established Portuguese family, and is seen by many Ukrainians in Portugal as a key supporter, advisor, consultant, sponsor and overall backbone to the Ukrainian community in Lisbon. She sheltered many early migrants in their early days of arriving, helped others in times of crisis, founded a Ukrainian radio program in Portugal, continues to act as a translator and community advocate in courts, and is even known to teach recent migrants table manners. In short, she might be to the Ukrainians in Portugal what the whole network of the ‘old’ Ukrainian Canadian organizations is to the Fourth Wave of Ukrainian immigrants to Canada, and perhaps more. And she is fully capable of wearing many hats and sitting as chair on plenty of committees.

While I wrote with ease that Ludmilla is a Portuguese Ukrainian, I am having difficulty applying the same label to the rest of the Ukrainians in Portugal. This certainly feeds into the question: why are we so accustomed to the labels of “Ukrainian Canadian” or “Ukrainian American”, and why don’t we hear people say ‘I am a Ukrainian German’ or ‘Ukrainian British’ or, in our case, ‘a Ukrainian Portuguese’? The answer to this question stems from the answer to another question:how well are Ukrainians integrated in Portuguese society?

Historically speaking, the Ukrainian community in Portugal is still a project in the making. As a community, a cultural minority and an ethnic group, Ukrainians appeared on Portugal’s ethnic map less than two decades ago. In the second half of the 1990s, Portugal, in its preparation for Expo 1998, initiated the substantial upgrade of its roads infrastructure and began the construction of the Expo Village, just east of central Lisbon. Together with the agricultural sector, the construction boom attracted a steady flow of Ukrainian migrants. Since that time, as a joke from the early 2000s goes, the country’s Ukrainian migrants, most speaking “po-halytsky” (or in Galician), became experts in speaking “po-portuhalytsky” or in “Portugalician”.

The construction boom soon returned after 1998, as the Portuguese began preparations for the European Soccer Championship in 2004. According to Viktor Susak, Lviv-based professor of sociology, who spent some time in the early 2000s researching the Ukrainian immigration to Portugal and who shared with me the above joke back in 2004, the largest influx of Ukrainian migrants happened between 1999 and 2004.

By 2013, sociologists in both Ukraine and Portugal, had already drafted a few demographic and sociological profiles of the Ukrainians in Portugal. These facts we know, as Pavlo Sadoka, President of the Association for Ukrainians in Portugal, shared with me in one of our many conversations. The mid-2000s witnessed the highest percentage of the Ukrainian presence in the country, with 80 thousand officially registered immigrants, and another 120 thousand Ukrainians working in the country illegally. Since that time, these numbers have dropped. Today, analysts are talking about some 54 thousand Ukrainians legally residing in Portugal (as of 2009), and another estimated 10 thousand waiting for legalization.

Ukrainians continue to occupy the same sectors of the Portuguese economy as they did at the time of their first arrival to this country. Men typically work in the construction, and women are employed mostly in domestic and food services. Unlike in other countries of Mediterranean Europe, such as Italy and Greece for example, where the majority of migrants were and are women, in Portugal both genders are well represented in the demographic profile of the Ukrainian immigration to this country. This of course has resulted in more balanced community development, with stronger hold on family structure and values, than in Ukrainian immigrants’ lives in other Mediterranean countries.

The statistics on immigration certainly gives us a good introduction to the Ukrainian community in Portugal. To appreciate its unique character, one still needs to explore other dimensions of the community’s development. The host country, its culture, prevalent ideologies, religion, ethnic composition, experience with immigration and its attitudes towards Ukrainians, all play their role in the kind of community Ukrainians are building for themselves in Portugal.

Also of importance are the earliest experiences of Ukrainians in Portugal, as the first challenges and obstacles that people on the move experience tend to enter the collective memory of their community later. And these ‘Portuguese beginnings’ were certainly marked by challenges. According to Pavlo Sadoka, at the onset of the Ukrainian immigration to Portugal, the life of Ukrainians in this country was marred by what was then known to be the active Slavic mafia. Every movement of the first migrants in the late 1990s was accompanied by their constant harassment by the criminal network of Russian, Ukrainian and Moldovan elements. Capitalizing on the non-legal status of the workers, racketeers demanded tributes from them at any step of their movement, never shunning from bullying, plain robbing and physically assaulting them. Things changed dramatically once the Portuguese authorities stepped up to fight the Slavic or even Ukrainian mafia, and introduced the first round of immigrant legalization in 2001.

Continued in next issue…

Dr. Natalia Khanenko-Friesen is Associate Professor, Cultural Anthropology in the Department of Religion and Culture at St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon.

PHOTOS

1 - Pavlo Sadoka addresses students and parents at the opening of the new academic year at the Cultural Educational Centre Dyvosvit. September 2012

2 - Dyvosvit Director Yuriy Unhurian and Associate Director Vlada Kiyak discuss cultural programming in their Saturday School, November 2011