ABSTRACT
Despite the trend, particularly since the new millennium, of novels describing Brazilians travelling abroad or even set outside the country’s borders, and despite the evidence from official sources and ethnographic fieldwork that proves large numbers of Brazilians have been migrating in waves since the 1980s, there is a distinct lack of representation of illegal migrants to other countries in contemporary Brazilian literature. With particular attention to narrative style, this chapter discusses works by Regina Rheda, Claudia Canto and Luiz Ruffato which foreground undocumented Brazilian migrants’ experiences of working conditions, survival, avoiding the authorities and acculturation in the face of prejudice and stereotypes. The texts studied describe living in London in the early 1990s (Rheda), before a Brazilian ex-pat community had established itself and Lisbon in the 2000s (Canto and Ruffato), where Brazilians now make up half the migrant population.
