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Accepted Paper:
Uzbeks on the beach:
Central Asian migrants on the Atlantic south coast of the Algarve (Portugal)
António Eduardo Mendonça
(Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal)
This paper aims at presenting and characterizing the Central Asian migrant community living in two municipalities of the Atlantic south coast of Portugal, Portimão and Lagoa. The community currently numbers almost 150 people, mainly Uzbekistanis with a few Kazakhstanis; the pioneers arrived more than twenty years ago, but there are several newcomers and also a return migration (mainly of families with children); the circonstances and motivations of these arrivals and departures are a main focus of this research.
Based on extended fieldwork and on some twenty in-depth interviews conducted between 2018 and 2023 - before and after the Covid-19 pandemic -, the paper also aims at understanding two rather different issues raised by the fieldwork: the first one has to do with a religious choice - why Central Asians avoid the nearest mosque, in Portimão, and prefer to attend another mosque some 15 km. away; the second one, with social and ethnic reasons and implications: why and how the global russian-speaking community of the first wave of migrants, twenty years ago, uniting Uzbekistanis, Ukrainians, Moldovans, Russians,... under the common umbrella of «Eastern Immigrants», is now divided into different profiles and identities.