Two generations sharing Adult Training (EFA) Courses - the impact of EFA certification on Lusophone immigrants and their descendants

Abstract

This paper is part of my on ongoing PhD research entitled “Lives recounted – the impact of the EFA experience on the life trajectories of Lusophone labour migrants and their descendants”. My proposal in this paper is to explain the path that led me to introduce the issue of intergenerational relationships into my PhD research. Initially, the goal was to understand the impact of EFA certification2 on Lusophone immigrants’ lives. According to the official statistics, it is immigrants who rely most on EFA training courses. However, the first biographical interviews that I carried out showed that the category ‘foreign’ includes not only immigrants but also the descendants of immigrants who, for family or legal reasons, do not have Portuguese nationality. Many immigrant descendants, in fact, have difficulty in acquiring citizenship, which affects various dimensions of their lives, including access to and continuation in the educational system and labour market. In the official statistics these immigrants and their descendants appear in the category ‘foreigners’, i.e. despite being born in Portugal, a significant number of the descendants of immigrants have never been able to acquire Portuguese nationality. The situation found in the fieldwork has thus led to the resizing of the sample, which now considers not only Lusophone immigrants but also the descendants of Lusophone immigrants as a key object of analysis. I aim to understand the different impacts of EFA certification on their lives, treating the generational differences as a crucial point of analysis. Despite these two generations sharing the certification processes, I start from the assumption that the discourses on the impact of the EFA experience in their lives can be differentiated. In this paper I intend to show that the official statistics in the ‘foreign’ category embrace different groups and different generations, which appear interchangeably in a single category. On the basis of interviews conducted to date, I argue that being a Lusophone immigrants and the descendants of Lusophone immigrants form two distinct categories – for we are referring here to different generations that, despite the firmly established relationships between them, ultimately (self)evaluate the EFA experience differently.