‘Life has come a long way from the simplicity of dal-chawal (lentil-rice) and chapatipappad (Indian breads), hard iron beds, and hand-me-downs at my parents’ cozy home that nestled eleven chirpy siblings in British-India to my now empty nest in Brazil! My kids have flown away from my nest as I had once from my parents.’ Joana’s tone is tinged with nostalgia as she recaps the 84 years of her life.
Joana Juliana Pinto Mascarenhas settled in the city of São Paulo in 1958. Her destiny as an immigrant is an offshoot of the political upheaval in the mid-twentieth century when a new political order was set upon Asia.
Joana’s ancestral home-land Goa was one of Portugal’s possessions that it was trying to hold on to in the 1950s against the claims of the newly independent India. There was not only socio-political instability, but also unrest in commercial transactions in Goa. The tension led to an uprising in Dadra and Nagar Haveli in 1954. There were already large-scale sufferings in the sub-continent because of the Indo-Pak division. To escape the crises, several nervous Goans, some of whose stories remain undocumented, left their homes. Joana and her husband, Armando Mascarenhas spent many sleepless nights scrutinising the political situation before they decided to migrate to Portugal.
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