From One Island to Another: Azorean Immigration
A Montrealer born in the Azores in the 1950s set out to trace his roots. The book that resulted tells the story of the first waves of Azorean immigration to Montréal.
In 2018, José-Louis Jacome published D’une île à l’autre. Fragments de mémoire (From One Island to Another: Memory Fragments), to which this dossier on the Mémoires des Montréalais website owes its name. The culmination of a personal project, the book, available in French and Portuguese, documents the beginnings of Azorean immigration to Montréal in the 1950s.
At the age of eight, José-Louis Jacome left the Azores with his mother and siblings to join his father in Montréal. With time, he became fully integrated into Québec society. And yet thirty years later, Jacome felt a need to reconnect with his Azorean roots. He carried out extensive research, travelling to Montréal, Toronto, and the Azores to interview family, friends, and all those who could help fill in memory gaps. Along the way, he gathered accounts and documents chronicling his family’s story before and after they settled in Montréal. He also met Joaquina Pires, a Portuguese Montrealer active in her community, who convinced Jacome that the information he had collected should be published. And so the project took on a new dimension, leading not only to a book, but also an exhibition and a fruitful collaboration with the MEM – Centre des mémoire montréalaises.
In the course of his research, Jacome came to realize that exploration of his family’s history had yielded a much bigger story—one that resonated with other Azorean Montrealers. Pires points out that immigrant communities are not homogenous. Montréal’s Portuguese community is no exception: mostly constituted in the second half of the 1900s, it emerged from several waves of migration prompted by different motivations and having different origins. Jacome’s work focuses on the Azores and Azoreans, offering a detailed and sensitive description of the conditions that pushed these islanders to leave their archipelago. The result is a unique perspective on this facet of Portuguese immigration to Montréal.
The dossier From One Island to Another: Azorean Immigration presents four articles based on Jacome’s book and adapted for the Mémoires des Montréalais website. Two articles tell the story of the first waves of Azorean immigration in the 1950s, based on the accounts of those who experienced it. In the other two, Jacome recalls his childhood and adolescence as a young immigrant in Montréal in the 1950s and ’60s.
The dossier also features three videos. In one, Jacome and Pires explain what sparked the idea for the book and how the book itself came into being. In another, José-Louis Jacome talks about how his personal quest led him to widen the scope of his research and write articles to benefit both Montréal’s Portuguese community and the host society. And in the fourth, Jacome takes viewers on a tour of the neighbourhoods of his Montréal childhood.
