Portuguese Trinidadian and Tobagonian

Portuguese Trinidadians and Tobagonians are the descendants of emigrants from Portugal to Trinidad and Tobago.

Trinidad and Tobago saw four major waves of migration from Portugal. The historical background to the first wave, which began in 1846, was an earlier influx of Azorean workers to British Guiana in 1834 following the British abolition of slavery the previous year, along with Scottish Presbyterian evangelism in Madeira in the early 1840s. Seeking to resolve labor shortages in Trinidad, the British government signed a treaty with Portugal covering contract labour migration from Madeira to Trinidad, following which the first group of 219 Madeiran contract workers arrived in May 1846, and then 773 more in the remainder of the year. Further migration, beginning in the 1870s, was spurred by a phylloxera infestation in Madeira. As a result, the Madeiran community of Trinidad grew to roughly two thousand by the end of the nineteenth century. The migrants comprised both Protestants and Catholics, though many of the Protestants later moved to the United States or Brazil. In the 1930s and again after World War II, there were two further influxes of Portuguese migrants.[1] Migrants formed two major ethnic associations, the Portuguese Club and the Portuguese Association.[2]

Portuguese migrants in those years occupied an intermediate social position: physically they resembled the largely-upper-class migrants from other European countries, but in terms of socioeconomic class they were closer to African descendants and Indian migrants. As Miguel Vale de Almeida described it, "[n]either whites nor Blacks considered the Portuguese to be sociologically white". After 1960, exact statistics on the Portuguese community became unavailable because the census ceased to distinguish Portuguese as a separate group; they were thenceforth counted in the categories "Europeans", "Mixed", or "Others".[3]