Echoes of 1975: another reason we immigrants don’t understand Portugal
White roses and red carnations
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
--William Faulkner
I’m often reminded how impossible it really is for an immigrant to fully integrate into a new culture and history, especially one as ancient and recent and complex as Portugal. In this post I look at different perspectives on Portugal’s revolution of 1974 and the turbulent year that followed. And reflect on my own naiveté, which still can surprise me at times.
In 1975, a butterfly beat its wings somewhere and people’s lives were profoundly changed in several corners of the world. I was 23 years old and living in Salvador, Bahia in the northeast of Brazil. I had traveled to Brazil, landing in Manaus in the Amazon with another American gal, blissfully unaware that the country was in the depths of a brutal civilian-military dictatorship. I quickly became aware, though, and you can read about my encounters with Brazil’s fascist regime in a previous post.
My friend Debbie and I left the US for Brazil in December 1974. Nixon had resigned that August, and men our age had lived in the shadow of being forced to serve in Vietnam until the military draft was ended in 1973. Or they had already served and came home traumatized. Many PAs (physician assistants) I looked up to as a young PA were Vietnam vets with a wealth of battlefield experience. I was walking down the street in Salvador, Bahia on April 30, 1975 and stopped dead in my tracks when I saw newspapers for sale with this headline:
SAIGON CAIU
SAIGON FELL
Refugees from Vietnam began to enter the US in large numbers that year, many of whom survived enormous hardship at sea as members of what were called “the Vietnamese boat people.”
Fast forward to the mid-2000s, and I’m now a professor in Duke University’s family medicine department, head of the Physician Assistant Program, and working as a consultant in Mozambique in southeastern Africa because of my skills in medical education and fluency in Portuguese. I was curious about Mozambique’s flag, which features a book, a hoe and a Kalashnikov assault rifle. I asked a Mozambican colleague about the weapon and she quietly replied:
“Faz parte da nossa história.”
“It’s part of our history.”
It hit me in that moment how little I understood about Mozambique, and what a dumb question I had asked. I learned more through conversations with team members on our curriculum project, and I read A Complicated War by William Finnegan, about the harrowing civil war that broke out after the Portuguese left in 1975.
Through these experiences I formed a view of Portugal and Mozambique, although at that point I had not yet been to Portugal. I learned of the subjugation of the Mozambican people, their struggle for liberation and their challenges in building their country when all the Portuguese professionals had left and their infrastructure was decimated (it was reported cement was poured down the water wells in Beira, for example). Decolonization occurred when the Portuguese left their territórios ultramarinos of Mozambique, Cape Verde, São Tomé e Príncipe and Angola. In Mozambique decolonization led to the creation of the técnicos de medicina, mid-level practitioners who became the backbone of their health care system. It was their curriculum I was engaged to help redesign in the 2000s.
Fast forward now to 2019, when Jasiel and I moved to Portugal to establish residency after two years in London. I knew the story of the peaceful end of decades of oppression and hardship in Portugal when the regime founded by the charming despot Salazar was brought down in 1974. This cataclysmic event became known as the Carnation Revolution, and my post about it (the most read in my few months of writing on Substack) is here.
Our first year In Portugal, on the April 25th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution I noted the significance of the holiday to a new Portuguese friend, a woman my son Jackson’s age. She paused for a moment, and then told me that for her parents, it wasn’t a celebration, it was the painful memory of a day that forced them to leave Angola, the only country they had ever known.
In 2020, I learned a medical education colleague (I’m an invited professor at the University of Algarve medical doctor course, teaching very occasionally) had been born and grew up in Mozambique. As we chatted, I found she was from Nampula, the northern province where I had done most of my consulting work. I told her about an idea I had for a novel: the 1974 Portugal revolution through the eyes of three women with different perspectives (it’s on the “to write” list but I haven’t done any work on it yet). She said she was planning to write a book about Mozambique and the Portuguese children who were born and grew up there and were wrenched away.
My colleague Dina Gaspar, published that book in March of this year. Moçambique: A “Voz” dos Filhos dos Retornados is deeply researched, well written and profoundly affecting. As it says on the book’s cover:
Esta obra mergulha profundamente na experiência humana de quem se viu arrancado à sua terra e forçado a enfrentar uma sociedade em ebulição, nos tempos tumultuosos do período pós 25 de Abril de 1974, em Portugal.
This work delves deeply into the human experience of those who were torn from their homeland and forced to face a society in turmoil during the tumultuous times following April 25, 1974, in Portugal.
The book is available through Amazon Spain, in Portuguese only.
For the children of what are called the retornados, their parents who went to establish lives in the overseas territories, Portugal was a foreign land, and their forced move to Portugal was deeply traumatic for them, as it was for their parents. People had been given financial incentives by the Portuguese government in the 1950s and 1960s to move to the overseas colonies and establish lives and businesses, especially in Angola and Mozambique in sub-Saharan Africa. For them the Carnation Revolution was a devastating rug pull, as they were forced to leave their homes to be thrust into Portuguese society where they were often poverty stricken and given little assistance. Hundreds of thousands of people had to return to the Portuguese mainland.
At this point I need to explain that in my academic life I was a qualitative researcher. That means I was more like an anthropologist, interviewing people and analyzing what they said, than a clinical trial maven crunching numbers about pharmaceutical outcomes. (My academic link is in bio, as they say, so you can check out my list of published manuscripts should you have idle time on your hands, dear reader). As a result of this academic bent, I have a natural tendency to do my best, however imperfectly, to keep an open mind about what people tell me. To not rush to judgment. To understand deeply. So dear reader, if you find my embrace of those who some would call “colonizers” puzzling, it is because I truly believe we must try to understand the tragedies people have experienced and how these distill their view of the world.
And with respect to the children of the retornados, they are no more complicit in colonization than Mexican children brought to the US as babies are really illegal aliens. These are all dreamers whose dreams were dashed. And we owe them a great deal of respect for everything they accomplish despite the barriers thrown up in front of them.
1974, Portugal. The uplifting story of April 25th, the day the dictatorship crumbled. When people put carnations in the barrels of soldiers’ guns and democracy was born.
The Portuguese, and especially Brazilians, have a nice way of responding to me when I assert fervently on a topic and they think I’ve missed the mark. Most people are too polite to say, “you’re full of it,” like Americans do.
They give a big sigh, then say:
“É complicado.”
It’s complicated.
And things got complicated very quickly after April 25, 1974. There was a right-wing coup attempt in March 1975. A year after the revolution, parliamentary elections with huge turnout swept in a socialist majority. Decolonization of Moçambique, Cape Verde, São Tomé e Príncipe followed. Then Verão Quente, the hot summer of jockeying for political position among the left and the right, land occupations, and “seizing the means of production” à la Communism through business takeovers.
[Sidebar: we Americans can now look at this and say, “how quaint.” Seizing the means of production, what’s the big deal? Trump has taken over a chunk of Nvidia and AMD chip production, claiming 15% of profits for sales to China. Upside-down world. Okay, now back to the post at hand.]
August, 1975. A more moderate faction in the Armed Forces movement lays down a framework for pluralist, democratic socialist governance as a counterpoint to more radical left-leaning groups.
Angola declares independence November 11, 1975.
November 25, 1975: a failed coup attempt by left-wing military units.
Portugal Decoded covered this history in their usual excellent fashion, and I highly recommend subscribing. I am grateful they gave me permission to repost this explanatory graphic:
There remain to this day differing views of the meaning of November 25, 1975. A right-leaning interpretation is that Portugal was saved from descent into communism. A left-leaning perspective is that the ability to achieve real reform to give greater power and rewards to the people was frustrated.
These fissures burst into the public discourse again this past week on November 25, 2025, when a military parade marked the 50th anniversary of the failed coup. An observance followed in parliament, where the dais was decorated with white roses, a symbol of the successful put-down of the 1975 coup attempt. Socialist deputies placed red carnations, symbol of the 1974 revolution, among the roses. André Ventura, a far-right extremist deputy and leader of the Chega party skilled at stoking the outrage machine, rose to speak at the podium, where he removed the red carnations from the display and declared:
“Hoje é dia de rosas brancas, e não de cravos vermelhos.”
Today is the day of white roses, not red carnations.
Several socialist deputies got up and walked out. A PSD (party of the prime minister) speaker followed and restored the carnations to the arrangement. Prime Minister Montenegro later laid down an olive branch (yeah, I’m mixing horticultural metaphors) by saying that “symbols should not be used to cancel other symbols.”
André Ventura is a leading candidate for president in the upcoming January election, highly favored among members of the more youthful demographic. He said a few weeks ago that the country needed “three Salazars” to straighten things out politically and economically. I hear echoes of Bolsonaro in Brazil, and his adoring speeches about the dictatorship that ended in 1985 (Bolsonaro is now in prison for a failed coup attempt in 2023). And DJT, whose admiration of Russia’s dictator is putting out tentacles in policy toward America’s allies, especially Ukraine. Ventura is running neck-and-neck with a right-leaning candidate, former admiral Henrique Gouveia e Melo. The prevailing wisdom is that Ventura will advance to the run-off election but he won’t win in the second round. I fear that somewhere in the world, a butterfly is beating its wings.
This past week, I discovered once again how much I have to learn about Portugal and its relatively recent history. Fifty years of a sometimes messy struggle for pluralist democracy with fractures that still exist, and these divisions may be widening as the presidential election campaign heats up.
As an immigrant, I confront once again the fact that I will never fully grasp:
A memória coletiva do país
The country’s collective memory, the very soul of Portugal.
And how true are Faulkner’s words: the past is never dead.
Justine, I always read your posts with interest and appreciation. But I just have a niggle with your title that I feel compelled to try and articulate.
"The immigrant experience" is too broad to mean anything and too specific in its assumptions to include everyone.
When you say "we immigrants will never understand," you're treating "immigrant" as an epistemological position - a way of knowing, or not knowing. But it's not. It's countless different relationships to place, history, power, belonging.
The framing assumes we immigrants are (or should be) all humble learners facing an impenetrable Portuguese collective memory. But that's not everyone's story. It might not even be most people's story.
It's performing a kind of respectful incomprehension that, oddly, claims its own authority.
Here's what I think: there is no single soul of Portugal to grasp or fail to grasp.
Portugal, like anywhere (and as you suggest), is an ongoing negotiation among people with vastly different relationships to its past, present, and future. The white roses and red carnations in parliament aren't revealing an essential truth that immigrants can't access. They're showing one moment in continuing arguments about what happened, what it meant, what it means now.
I'm not outside that because I'm an "immigrant." I'm at a different angle to it because of my particular history with this place.
After 35 years, my relationship to Portugal isn't characterized by what I can't understand. It's characterized by what I've lived, negotiated, lost, built, and continue to puzzle over.
And that's being something that doesn't fit neatly into being Portuguese/not Portuguese, insider/outsider, understander/non-understander.
Back to your Faulkner quote: ““The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The past continues to shape and be shaped by the present!
Portugal’s contemporary literature offers profound and nuanced exploration of this pivotal era in the creation of the modern Portuguese state. If American immigrants to Portugal intend to make that country their home, it would behoove them to learn about the recent history of their adopted country from the Portuguese point of view. Some recommended reading:
- António Lobo Antunes (Nobel Laureate nominee in Literature) many books on the trauma and degradation of the Colonial experience e.g. “The Land at the End of the World” and the situation faced by the Retornados e.g. “The Return of the Caravels”.
- Mia Couto (internationally recognized writer born in 1955 in Mozambique) who provides a nuanced counter narrative employing magical realism to represent the African perspective of brutal colonialism in e.g. “Sleepwalking Land”
- Rita Seabra (former central leader of the PCP during the coup) her gripping memoir “Foi Assim” (translated and available on Kindle) about entering the Communist Party at 18 and rising to be at the right hand of Álvaro Cunha, Secretary General of the PCP, during the Revolution.
- Frank Carlucci (US Ambassador during the coup) his writings document weekly meetings with Mario Soares that convinced him to trust the Portuguese people to find their own way to democracy. Only 7 months before 25 April 1974 was the bloody coup of 11 September 1973 in Chile and Carlucci worked steadfastly to convince Kissinger and Ford to stay out of Portugal to prevent a bloodbath. I am convinced that the PCP coup of 25 November 1975 ended in a whimper because of the phone conversations going on that day in Belem with the US. Put simply, the US would never have allowed a founding member of NATO to become a Stalinist communist state in the middle of the Cold War. The CIA remained deeply involved in the proxy wars of post colonial Southern Africa. The fate of modern Portugal did not occur in a vacuum.