In a sort of conceptual history in action, this chapter looks at the labels attached to the settlers-turned-migrants that were hotly contested. The most prominent among them, retornados (returnees) and refugiados (refugees), inferred conflicting views about the nature of their mobility and belonging and thus evoked divergent emotional and political responses. By disentangling how domestic, foreign, and international actors, notably the UNHCR, fought over these labels, the chapter demonstrates how the mechanisms of the international postwar refugee regime were compatible with and helped reinforce an ethnic reordering of citizenship and the postcolonial nation in Portugal. Conceptually, the chapter argues that historicizing these battles over how to name, interpret, and handle those who were leaving the colonies can provide fresh vistas for the broader scholarly discussion about coerced migration.

This chapter looks at the migrants not as objects of the state’s integration measures but as political subjects making claims in demonstrations, migrant associations, the parliament, and media outlets. It discusses how the government defused much of the returnees’ protest, initially perceived as a serious menace, through a pervasive rhetoric of national integration and the framing of migrant mobilization as a form of "apolitical politics." It further asks how migrants built their own associations, to what degree they were bound up with the political right, and why they ultimately proved to be politically weak and short-lived. In short, the chapter looks at how the voices of the returnees, while distinctly present directly after their arrival, were coopted, absorbed, and covered up by the emerging institutions of Portugal’s representative democracy, the kind of concessions the political class was ready to make along the way, and some of the legacies of this process.

This chapter introduces and contextualizes the book's focus on the Portuguese retornados or returnees and argues that by spotlighting their history, we illuminate the remaking of the Portuguese nation in a world after empire. Via Portugal’s returnees, we grasp how decolonization reshaped Western European societies – their demographic makeup, their laws and institutions, their notions of the national community, their political communication, and their public memories.

Through a focus on memories, Chapter 4 continues the story of migrant integration and postimperial nation-building from the mid-1970s and 1980s up to the present day. Since the turn of the millennium, the returnees have become much more visible again in the public sphere. This final chapter analyzes this return of "the return" in a memorial boom of sorts, its nostalgia, its use of markers of authenticity, and its narrative frameworks. It contextualizes these memories within the current worldwide battles over the legacies of empire, but also within the Portuguese context of the fortieth anniversary of the Carnation Revolution in 2014, which coincided with a severe economic crisis and harsh austerity measures. The chapter maintains that the recent upsurge of memorial activities on and by retornados that tend toward identity building should be challenged by historical thinking that looks toward truth.

The conclusion synthesizes the book's main findings and argues that a complex and truthful history of Portugal's returnees potentially matters to many of us today – not so much because they will be widely remembered and studied for a long time, but because they can help us comprehend something about the recent past that is fundamental for our present-day societies in Europe – and possibly even for our global future.

Shifting gears toward a social history of decolonization in the metropole, Chapter 2 looks at the housing provided for the refugee-like groups of returnees that depended on public welfare to put a roof over their heads. Bringing to light both the achievements and the limits of the state’s deliberate policy of integration, the chapter argues that the aid provided to the returnees served as laboratory for building a new welfare state aligned with the Western European model that Portuguese elites wished to espouse. Zooming in on the living conditions of residents, it also shows, however, that a lack of adequate facilities and resources frequently led to considerable hardships for the returnees. What is more, state-fostered integration was starkly unequal and tendentially racialized: Migrants who were non-Portuguese, nonwhite, or both were overrepresented in the housing facilities that offered the most difficult conditions. The success story of integration that dominates some academic and most popular accounts of the returnees’ history so far is in urgent need of qualification.