When the late 19th-century Portuguese artist and cartoonist Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro wanted to create a vehicle through which to mock and criticize the country’s powerful elite, he settled upon the character Zé Povinho, an unsophisticated country laborer who served as a stand-in for the average citizen. While some Portuguese people took umbrage with their country’s everyman being depicted as a simple peasant, time has softened this criticism, and Zé Povinho has become something of a national icon. “Little by little, we started to see him with a certain tenderness, as a symbol of the Portuguese identity, a reminder of where we came from,” says Andrea Salomé, a restaurant owner in Porto.