A thoughtful reader recently asked me a question about my recent post, On Black Womanhood and Migration in Lisbon, that I’m grateful for and that I should have named more explicitly from the start:
I noticed that the women you interviewed are able to speak English. How are you thinking about that, given that English proficiency is often an indicator of privilege, especially for Brazilians and other Lusophone communities?
She’s right. And the question gets to the heart of something far bigger than methodology.
Let’s start here: there is linguistic privilege in migration. And I exercised mine while in Lisbon.
I was in Lisbon as an artist-in-residence, invited into that space through long-cultivated relationships, institutional trust, and a reputation built over years of producing and archiving Black women’s stories. I was able to move through the city, conduct interviews, present my work, and publish reflections in English, a language that, for better or worse, functions as the dominant currency of global business, academia, media, and entertainment.
English is not neutral. It is power-laden. And it travels well.
That privilege is often only noticed or criticized in caricatures of the “ugly American.” But having lived nearly a decade in Spain, I can say plainly: English-language privilege is not uniquely American. British and Australian migrants wield it just as readily, perhaps with less scrutiny. The difference is not the language itself, but who is perceived as entitled to it.
Which brings me to Blackness.
When I first moved to Spain, I remember reading a conversation in a Facebook group about navigating racist encounters, specifically racial profiling in El Corte Inglés, a major department store chain. Someone suggested a strategy that stuck with me:
Walk in and immediately speak English to a sales associate.
The logic was clear. English could shift how you were seen. It could signal money, education, foreignness, or safety.
If the associate responded in English, the advice was to correct their English briefly, then switch back to Spanish. If they refused to engage in English, switch to Spanish anyway.
I remember thinking: What is all of this about?
Why should asserting linguistic privilege be necessary? But also, why is racial profiling ubiquitous? And if the discomfort is already being imposed, should it be quietly endured, or redistributed?
I don’t have a clean answer. I’m not sure there is one.
What I do know is that Black Americans often arrive in global spaces with a particular bundle of privileges: citizenship, money, cultural capital, and language that can be wielded, consciously or not. And those privileges interact in complex ways with local histories of Blackness, colonialism, class, and exclusion.
This is why a single narrative of “Black migration,” or even “Black American migration,” is dangerously flattening.
Now, back to my project.
The fact that this work is currently produced in English is itself an exercise of linguistic privilege. It means that the stories most immediately accessible are those of Black Lusophone migrant women who have had the opportunity to learn English, who are proficient enough to speak it comfortably, and who feel safe enough to share deeply personal experiences in a second (or third) language.
That reality shapes who gets heard.
And it also means that so much is lost.
Anyone who has tried to articulate their inner life in a non-native language knows this. Your humor, your cadence, your rage, your tenderness, your vernacular do not always survive translation. Colloquialisms diluted. Cultural references thin out. Meaning slips.
In an ideal world, I would conduct these interviews in Portuguese. Or work with a translator during the interviews. And then collaborate with culturally fluent transcribers who understand not just the linguistic differences between Brazilian and European Portuguese, for example, but the subtler distinctions shaped by nationality, class, and regional identity. I would then enlist a bevy of voice actresses to voice the translations for the audience.
But this project is self-funded. And it is not (yet) my full-time work.
That doesn’t absolve the limitation, but it does explain it.
This phase of the project is preliminary fieldwork: relationship-building, grounding, listening, and surfacing exactly these tensions. It is incomplete by design. And it is ongoing.
What fascinates me, and what I refuse to smooth over, is precisely this entanglement: how privilege operates within Black migration, how language mediates belonging, how arrival reshapes power, and why migration narratives feel so seductive when stripped of context.
This work is delicate. It is tedious. And yes, there is always the risk of “getting it wrong.”
But I believe these questions deserve air. They deserve discomfort. They deserve to be spoken aloud and allowed to linger.
So, if you know of grants, funding bodies, patrons, or institutions interested in supporting work that takes these complexities seriously, especially work that would allow this project to expand linguistically and methodologically, I would genuinely love to hear from you.
And as always, I welcome your thoughts. This project is better when it’s in conversation.
Be Well,
Christine
I truly appreciate your candor and transparency on these thorny issues. My husband and I have talked about some of this vis a vis US privilege in Mexico, and what that means for him as a Black man.
There's also a weird way in which my Spanish proficiency affords me more connection and better treatment than those who don't speak any Spanish, which white Anglophones may perceive as "privilege" (it's not, it's cultural humility and competency that I earned by listening, immersing, and studying).
Bottom line, I appreciate you acknowledging this. Many "expat" writers get very defensive when these conversations arise.