Houses in transit: expressions of transnationalism between Portugal and France

Based on a multisite study with fieldwork carried out between 2011 and 2017 in Portugal (central Portugal) and in France (Val du Marne), we propose to follow the path of the professionals building who (re) migrated to France in the last decade. At the height of Portugal's international emigration, between the late 1960s and the early 1970s (Peixoto 2004: 2), there was a strong return of emigrants from the mid-1970s, early 1980s. The following years were marked by some emigration interspersed with return to the village of origin. In 2004, João Peixoto commented that weak economic growth associated with unemployment could promote emigration and reduce immigration (Peixoto 2004: 15). Building work fell 22% between 2007 and 2013 (75 nd Euro construct Conference, in INCI 2014: 34 36). In the last decade, many insolvent and unemployed professionals have (re) migrated to France in a permanent or temporary emigration. They carried with them materials and building techniques and aesthetic senses assimilated in the country of origin, which they began to use in the building of houses for long-standing Portuguese emigrants, contributing to the creation of referents of Portuguese in France. This movement of goods, people, and information in the form of intellectual capital, human, and material, embodies the transnational dynamics between the two countries (Levitt 1998, Portes 2004, Peggy Levitt and Nadya Jaworsky 2007). Portuguese immigrants reproduce new places, reconstruct their histories and reconfigure their ethnic projects (Appadurai 2004 [1996]: 67, 71). The building sector is involved in the transformation of the French landscape and serves as a barometer of identity reconstructions associated with diaspora phenomena, globalization, transnationalism, solidarity and hybridity. The present proposal is supported by research comprised of fieldwork, literature, filmographyand statistics, cross-reading at various scales of territory and privileging practices and discourses of everyday life of immigrants, emmigrants and residents.