At the beginning of the 1960s, a group of 17 young adults from the Brazilian city of Governador Valadares filed for work visas in the U.S. They were the first people from the provincial municipality — 315 kilometers from the Minas Gerais state capital of Belo Horizonte — to leave the city en masse to pursue the ‘American Dream.’
Money was not their main objective, however. Born into upper-middle-class families and fluent English speakers, they saw the U.S. as a land of opportunity, well-developed, and culturally interesting.
At the time, Governador Valadares found itself in a period of economic decay. Nearby mica mines were exhausted, having once supplied the American demand for aircraft and radios during World War II. The decline of local natural resources and agribusiness stunted the real-world prospects of Valadarenses.
By the end of the 1970s, as the whole of Brazil hurtled into economic collapse, Governador Valadares saw the start of a veritable migratory exodus to the U.S., which only increased in the 1980s. In turn, this altered the social and economic routine of the city, with local banks receiving large volumes of transfers in U.S. Dollars. Soon, the municipality as a whole began feeding into this “culture of emigration.”
A study from Boston University showed that Governador Valadares was the Brazilian city that contributed the most to international migration flows to the state of Massachusetts in the 1990s. In a relatively short time, the Valadarenses played an important part in the local Massachusetts economy.
Now, in the 2020s, Governador Valadares remains Brazil’s biggest “exporter” of citizens to the U.S. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is now dependent on the dollars sent home by Valadarense expats — so much so that the city has gained the nickname “Vala-Dollars.”
As a result of the Brazilian economic crisis in 2016, only aggravated by the pandemic last year, the U.S. has become an even more attractive destination for would-be Brazilian migrants. Since the end of 2018, when far-right President Jair Bolsonaro was elected, the Brazilian Real has lost over 50 percent of its value against the...
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