Immigration, familism, and in-group competition : a study of the Portuguese in Victoria
Date
1982
Authors
Munzer, Rosa Maria Batista Pereira
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Abstract
Previous literature has shown that the Portuguese are traditionally very familistic and that first generation Portuguese actively seek to reunite their extended family in Canada. This would suggest that familism among the Portuguese in Canada should also be high.
In order to examine familism and the reasons for Portuguese immigration to Canada, the Portuguese community of 346 families living in the city of Victoria were surveyed. A random sample of 100 families was selected and the husband or wife in each family was interviewed using a structured Portuguese language questionnaire.
The present study found that the Canadian Portuguese community acted as the facilitators and not the instigators of extended family immigration to Canada. Most Portuguese chose to emigrate from Portugal for economic reasons and not to rejoin their extended family . The study also showed that the level of familism among the Portuguese in this sample was not as strong as that found by Aldrich, Lipman, and Goldman (1973) in Portugal even though the present sample emigrated from the most familistic regions of Portugal. It was determined that economic competition, status rivalry, and jealousy were the reasons for decreased familism. These findings replicated the results found by Munzer (1979) in her sample of Canadian Portuguese in the southern Okanagan area of British Columbia. The Victoria sample was slightly more familistic than the Okanagan sample. The Okanagan and Victoria samples were similar in that both communities were established during the same period, the immigrants in both samples are mainly undereducated working class Portuguese, and they emigrated mainly from the Azores and Northeastern Portugal. The main difference in the two samples is that the Victoria sample live in an urban environment and the Okanagan sample live in a rural environment.