20 years a migrant

I forgot to celebrate earlier this month the twentieth anniversary of my departure from Portugal. What was supposed to simply be a 3 month stay in Barcelona to get my head out of Portugal after an intense couple of years as a junior lawyer with too much responsibility but not the corresponding pay check, turned first into a year, then a PhD and a career in academia.

I left the day after the second of two Pearl Jam concerts in Lisbon* (I saw both) with a full suitcase and a plan to stay 3 months in Barcelona. Turned out that a couple of months in a colleague went to do a PhD in the US (or was it her husband?) and I took her job at the law firm on a rolling basis (6 months).

I was promised an increaase in salary upon the renewal and when that didn't happen but an offer to do a PhD in Nottingham with a full scholarship showed up instead I took the offer with both hands.

To be honest my plan was never to stay in academia and in fact designed my research to optimise the chances of going back to legal practice afterwards. Not that I wanted to go back, but I liked to keep the door(s) open and during the interviews for my PhD at least three partners in Portuguese law firms asked me to get in touch before deciding to take a job elsewhere.

I hesitated for a good while on what to do, only doing interviews for academia in the final stages of my PhD or soon after. By then I had done a weird remote interview with an international organisation. It wasn't done over Skype or anything so I had to go to the Regus office just outside East Midlands Airport to see a bunch of pixelated people on a huge screen. It was a mess and I got the info soon after they would not take me further in the process.

Two nights before my viva I confessed to my wife being tired of academia...and the next day the offer from Bangor landed on my inbox. I did my viva feeling relaxed and chilled, ending the day having a bottle of prosecco with my external (the late Steen Treumer) all by ourselves at the University of Nottingham School of Law common room...where I could not enter as a PhD student.

I did reject that first offer from a position of extreme strength (down to £200 in my bank account!) and managed to get a better offer that put me higher in the pay scale and a promise of a bump once the PhD had been formally awarded.

From then on, my career is reasonably normal for an academic. Five years at Bangor commuting four of them weekly down to Swansea, before moving to the Place That Shall Not Be Named.

Barcelona, however, kept its claws firmly in me like the harsh mistress she is and I ended up getting married there. Ironically at the Portuguese consulate after me laughing in class as an undergraduate in 2002 when I heard we could get married abroad at a consulate even if not residing in that country: who on earth would do that?! Well.

Once the Brexit vote happened I decided to leave. I had to leave. I could see the erosion of rights that would be coming down the pipeline arising from the vote. Having gone through the campaign without the right to vote I felt trapped and concerned. Getting British citizenship (for me first, then the girls later) was of key importance for me. Even though, looking at Reform and Restore today I no longer trust the weird coloured passport as an ironclad assurance our status is protected there. Shit only got worse in the decade since the referendum. Shit will get worse still before it gets any better.

Fast forward to 2019 and in the summer I attended the yearly EPLG meeting in Turin. I had no business in going there since I was not contributing to our yearly comparative book. But I was down and in need of being among friends. There I found out that CBS had a position open for associate professor in public procurement law and the rest is, as they say, history. To this day I think I was the first one appointed at Law at associate professor or higher coming from the outside and without having spent time there earlier in the career. I joined in early March 2020 and the plan was to be there a week a month until the summer before moving over with the family. Something happened in the meanwhile and, well, almost 7 years later my life is still built around a weird commute.

I had never planned to stay 20 years abroad but at the same time I don't have plans to go back either. I considered it in 2018 and 2020 during covid (to live there and work remotely) but that was about it.

Being a migrant is funny. The longer you spend abroad, the more you're neither (from) here nor (from) there. You never really belong anywhere. I stopped seeing myself as just Portuguese many years ago. I have less and less in common with the people who never left. It does not make me better (a common trap for expats) it simply makes me different. My brain switches from English to Portuguese and back and sometimes into Spanish (less so these days). There is stuff I love about Portugal and much...I do not (to say the least).

But the irony is that descending from multiple families of migrants, I have now come full circle. I have four surnames from four different countries and lost two Italians, a French and an Argentinian in the previous two generations. I'm a proverbial mongrel by descent and now also by choice.

That's who I am and that's fine.