Pictures Tell the Story of Portuguese in France

PARIS - The girl in the black-and-white photograph bit shyly on her finger, concealing a slight smile.  Maria da Conceição Tina Melhorado looked at her long and hard.

“I knew it was me,” Ms. Melhorado, 54, said, recalling her first encounter with the image in 2010, when a friend called her about it. “But the date in the caption was off by a year, so I had some doubt.”

While she embarked on a mission to confirm her theory, Ms. Melhorado quickly learned that the photo wasn't just part of some obscure archive that existed deep in Internet space. It was an advertisement for an art exhibition in Portugal.  She discovered that she was, quite literally, the poster child for Portuguese immigration to France.

“Obviously, I was shocked,” Ms. Melhorado said with a brief laugh. “I didn't know what to think.”

Today, that picture is part of “Pour une Vie Meilleure” (For a Better Life), a collection of photographs dedicated to the Portuguese migration to France in the 1960s and '70s. The images, on display at the Palais de la Porte Dorée in the 12th arrondissement, belong to Gérald Bloncourt, a Haitian photojournalist who spent 20 years working, photographing and walking with Portuguese immigrants as they made their way north.

Both populations benefited from the migration, which peaked between 1969 and 1971 with the arrival of more than 350,000 immigrants. France needed cheap labor as it continued to recover from World War II, while the Portuguese who left sought to escape a poor economy and an oppressive dictatorship, and to avoid military service.

And throughout that time, Mr. Bloncourt followed Portuguese émigrés on foot, documenting their struggles.

“I was protesting against poverty,” Mr. Bloncourt said at the show's opening last week (it runs through July 31). “I wanted to use my photos as a weapon in hopes to change the world.”

Ms. Melhorado's father left for France in 1962 in hopes of finding higher wages. Two years later, she and the rest of her family walked from their hometown, Vila Nova de Foz Côa in northern Portugal, to Paris, where they reunited and resettled in St. Denis.

From roadside haircuts to mud-covered slums, Mr. Bloncourt's images capture one of the first and largest waves of immigration to France. Besides serving as a comprehensive historical record, the photos shed light on a group that, according to some, has been overlooked.

“This is a forgotten immigrant population,” said Caroline Brettell, a professor at Southern Methodist University in Texas who spent a year between the two countries studying the movement. “It was completely different from the sort of politics of race and whatever else is going on in France today with the larger Muslim populations.”

One reason why they are overlooked, Professor Brettell said, is because their transition was relatively seamless; linguistic similarities and a shared Roman-Catholic background helped to forge bonds between the two groups.

Another factor in the forgetting of that immigration story is that the immigrants themselves chose not to tell it.

“I was ashamed,” Ms. Melhorado said, motioning to the shantytown depicted in the photograph. “I didn't want my children and my co-workers to see that this is where I was from, that this is where I lived.”

But Mr. Bloncourt's work left her no choice. During a lesson on immigration in school, her son's teacher shared some photos with the class, including one of her.

“I asked him how he felt when his classmates found out the little girl in the picture was his mother,” Mrs. Melhorado recounted. “He said ‘proud.' ”

“That's when I realized how important it is for our story to be told, and when any feelings of shame I had turned to pride.”

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 25, 2013

An earlier version of this post and the caption with Gérald Bloncourt's photograph of a girl included inconsistent information about the girl's age and the date the photograph was taken.