Is there a hyphen in ‘Ukrainian Portuguese’?

By Natalia Khanenko-Friesen

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From previous issue…

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.

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Since that time, community development took its due course, resulting eventually in the establishment of two faith communities, those of the Ukrainian Orthodox and Ukrainian Greek Catholic Churches. New political and cultural associations emerged, including the Association for Ukrainians in Portugal, newspapers and internet blogs. Saturday Schools began to operate serving all segments of the Ukrainian population. A dialogue has also developed between the community, various Portuguese organizations and authorities, especially with Portugal’s High Commissariat for Immigration and Intercultural Dialogue, known by its Portuguese abbreviation as ACIDI. In my conversation with Dr. Rosario Farmhouse, Portugal’s High Commissioner for Immigration, she commented that Ukrainians in Portugal are well integrated into the life of Portuguese society, and have a very positive image amongst the Portuguese. After our interview I thought that probably the time must have arrived for Ukrainians to refer to themselves at least as Portuguese Ukrainians, if not Ukrainian Portuguese.

The Ukrainians are indeed a ‘good kind’ of immigrant when it comes to their reputation in Portuguese society. On December 18, International Migrants’ Day, in Lisbon I attended the release of the multi-ethnic comprehensive sociological study commissioned by ACIDI. The study, headed by Professor Jorge Mahleiros of the University of Lisbon, confirmed that Ukrainians distinguish themselves from other immigrant populations in Portugal by a number of factors. For immigrants who work in low paid jobs, they have a high level of education. They are rather dispersed throughout the country, unlike some other immigrant groups that tend to settle only in larger urban centres. They tend to retain the same employment longer. Ukrainians have acquired an overall good knowledge of the Portuguese language. All these characteristics are indicators of the Ukrainians' good integration into Portuguese society. And yet, as Prof. Mahleiros shared with me over a cup of coffee a few days after the release of his milestone project, the Ukrainian community in Portugal continues to remain largely inaccessible to Portuguese researchers.

All in all, what in the eyes of Portuguese scholars and the High Commissioner for Immigration and Intercultural Dialogue is a sign of successful integration, Ukrainian activists in Portugal see as an indication of lag in the very process of integration, the lag that also sustains the ever present gap between Portuguese society and its Ukrainian minority. Education, brought over from Ukraine, has rarely translated into jobs in the field of training, as an overwhelming majority of these immigrants continue to occupy positions in the service and construction sectors of the economy. Retaining the same jobs by these immigrants speaks of the economic segregation in the country and the increased difficulty in finding better jobs, especially in the context of the economic crisis still looming over Southern Europe. The Ukrainian activists with whom I had met and talked during my most recent stay in Portugal, commented that Portuguese appear to be happy with this status quo. Perhaps, I thought, this had something to do with history, and as citizens of a former global empire, with nostalgia for its lost glory and power still lingering in their culture, Portuguese are accepting of immigrants' inferior position in their society simply out of habit.

Integration is far from being achieved yet for another reason, as Ukrainian community leaders pointed out, mainly because of the inability of Portuguese government authorities, including ACIDI, to recognize the complex make up of the Ukrainian ethnic minority. Even if Ukrainians are the majority amongst those who arrived in Portugal from the former Soviet Union, there is a tendency within the Portuguese bureaucracy to lump together the different nationalities and ethnicities from the former USSR under the same label of Leste (‘those from the East’). This attitude has found its further expression in the appointment to ACIDI of a representative from the Ukrainian community in Portugal who is seen by many Ukrainian activists, including highly-regarded Ludmilla Hall, as someone disinterested in issues and concerns of importance to the Ukrainian community. This has created further challenges in the life of the Ukrainian community in Portugal. While the largest non-Portuguese speaking minority, and a second largest ethnic group after the Brazilians, Ukrainians in Portugal, or so at least their community leaders feel, are under-and misrepresented.

Added to this feeling is the fact that the Ukrainian speaking population of Portugal currently does not have its own Ukrainian language newspaper in print. Efforts to establish and run such a newspaper of course had been made, and over the course of the last ten to twelve years, several Ukrainian newspapers had come to life. However, the self-positioning Russian language media in Portugal as the media for all Russian-speaking people in the country, by default, includes Ukrainians. Also, according to Pavlo Sadoka, President of the Association for Ukrainians in Portugal and who used to edit a Ukrainian language newspaper, is the fact that the Russian language media is financially supported by Russian sources, which made those efforts to sustain the Ukrainian language media in Portugal far less effective.

All this considered, it is no wonder why the name “Association for Ukrainians in Portugal” is linguistically constructed in this way, with the use of the preposition ‘in’ and not with the preposition ‘of’. Neither is it called “Ukrainian Portuguese Association,” in the manner of, say, “Ukrainian Canadian Congress.” A hyphen is not even on the horizon for Ukrainians in Portugal.

And so it goes, for years now, in that they are ‘well integrated’ in Portuguese society, many Ukrainian nurses, engineers, cloth designers, physicists, and other professionals, every morning put on their maid attires, or restaurant kitchen aprons, or construction garbs, and go to their places of employment. But these workers also remember that once evening or the weekend comes, like “Cinderellas”, they transform into school directors, teachers, radio show hosts, artists, and presidents of organizations and leaders of their community. With no previous history of Ukrainian immigration to this country, unlike in some other European countries such as Germany, France, or England, and with a very short history of cross-cultural relations between the mainstream and as a minority group, it will still be a while before Ukrainians in Portugual feel like describing themselves in Portuguese with the use of a hyphen.

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.

PHOTO

Church of São Jorge de Arroios, a Roman Catholic Church in Lisbon, is home to the largest congregation of Ukrainian Greek Catholics in the Lisbon area