At Christmas times during the Salazar regime, some of those who stayed in the country would leave to visit their relatives who had fled the war or the prisons and sought refuge elsewhere, above all in Paris. While there, they waited anxiously for the wind to bring news from their country. And they waited longingly for their parents, siblings or friends who arrived laden with bacalhau, cornbread, sweets, and all the flavours and smells of the places of their childhood, their grandparents and the memories of those who stayed behind. The arrival of the New Year, where they would hug each other longingly before departure, sadly announced their return to the cafés of the Rive Gauche, where they would debate, in low voices that still revealed desperation, the strategies and tactics for the revolution that inexorably approached.
     On the roads there and back, we would meet hundreds of other Portuguese people who were coming home for the holidays or going back to work. They were the poor, the economic emigrants. The rich and the poor, as Pasolini would certainly have reminded us, going in different directions. On one side, the few, with their theories at the Petit Cluny, the Lutèce or the Café Luxembourgo; and the others, who were many, in their, for the moment, joyous and lively villages when they returned home at Christmas. Separated on the roads and in the city; some on the periphery, the others in the centre.
     Periphery and centre in everyday life, going in different directions in returning to their seasonal houses, together in their absence from the homeland all year long, whether they were in Lisbon, Paris or Porto, the three largest cities that added to its own those recently arrived from Trás-os-Montes, Minho or the Alentejo. One day, in Paris, we decided to see how they lived, who they were, what they thought. We got into a car and drove out to visit them and photograph them outside the gates of the city, where they lived huddled together in tin or wood shacks in the midst of mud, waste, car and caravan cemeteries, on private land next to the large rent-controlled housing developments (HLM). Jacinto Rodrigues was studying sociology and was conducting a survey that was to be part of academic project. But above all, he wanted to learn and just be amongst the people, in his element. Perhaps one day we would travel the roads in the same direction as them, we thought. Luísa Brandão, Zé Mário Branco, Jacinto and I went. I took the photos myself. It was Christmas 1965. There were nine years to go.|