Abstract: The paper argues that the invisibility of Portuguese immigrant women in Canada’s immigration policy documents and literature is related to Portuguese and Canadian nationalisms that define women in gendered ways, hiding and diminishing the importance of their everyday lives and their histories. The argument rests on an analysis of two interrelated phenomena: diaspora and nationalism, examined through the case of remittances and return migration. Diasporic experiences can lead to transformation and change in a community, or to a rejection of hybridity/cosmopolitanism. Those nationalist state sentiments in the country of immigration that define immigrant groups in a homogeneous fashion, masking gender and other differences, are more likely to result in a rejection of hybridity and cosmopolitanism by the immigrants. The paper poses the question whether the experiences of Portuguese immigrant men and women during the two decades of the 1960s to the early 1980s “propose” a new notion of “social citizenship” that is more gender inclusive and cosmopolitan. The approach can be extended to the comparative study of other immigrant women, given that the analysis draws on Bhattacharjee’s study of South Asian immigrant women in the US, and on her three-level approach defining “home” from the perspectives of the domestic sphere, the extended ethnic community, and the nation of origin.

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