Between the Divided Soul and the Hybrid Soul: Memories of Immigration to Brazil in Miguel Torga and Roberto Leal

Abstract

This article analyses representations of Portuguese immigration to Brazil in the essays of Miguel Torga (1907–1995) and in the autobiography of Roberto Leal (1951–2019). Drawing on a comparative qualitative approach, it examines how two cultural mediators, situated in distinct fields — literature and mass culture — construct migratory memories and divergent forms of transnational belonging. The aim is to understand how these narratives transform individual experiences of displacement into public regimes of representation of the migrant condition, articulating memory, identity, and cultural mediation within the Luso-Brazilian space. Torga, who emigrated to Brazil in his youth, narrates the Brazilian experience as both a process of subject formation and a lasting fracture of subjectivity, configuring a “divided soul”. Leal, who emigrated to Brazil at the age of 11, constructs a narrative of reinvention, cultural mediation, and negotiation of belonging, delineating a “hybrid soul”. In dialogue with Eduardo Lourenço (1992, 2001), Stuart Hall (2003), Homi K. Bhabha (1994/1998), Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper (2000), and Néstor García Canclini (2010, 1989/2015), the article treats autobiographical and essayistic texts as cultural and performative sources in which migrant identity is produced, narrated, and contested. The comparison shows that Lusophony should not be understood as a naturally harmonious space, but rather as a field traversed by fractures, stigmas, symbolic hierarchies, and cultural negotiations, contributing to a critical reading of Portuguese-Brazilian migratory memories.