His grandfather Rodrigo Delfim Pereira (1823–1891), a Brazilian minister to Berlin, Paris, and Hamburg, titled Lord (Senhor) of Quinta das Murtas, was the illegitimate son of Pedro II of Brazil from his mistress Maria Benedita de Castro do Canto e Melo, Baroness of Sorocaba.

[1][8] Thus when the Emperor was overthrown in a sudden coup d'état in 1889, leading to the proclamation of the Republic, he was sent to spend his childhood at the royal court of Portugal.

[6] He graduated from the Academia Militar das Agulhas Negras (Resende, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) as a civil engineer.

[6] At the age of 24 his second cousin once removed Manuel II of Portugal was forced to exile to the United States after the 5 October 1910 revolution; Royalist Rodrigo joined him pursued by the fear of being condemned for his affiliations.

[6] In 1924 he competed in tennis at the 1924 Summer Olympics,[9] where he was eliminated in the first round of both singles and doubles by Arturo Hortal and Enrique Maier and Ricardo Saprissa, to whom the Portuguese team gave a walkover.

[6] In the midst of World War I he first sought to be enlisted in the Portuguese Army, which was refused;[16] then in 1917 he joined the American Expeditionary Forces and was transported to France.

[6] He moved back to Portugal in 1921 and in the 1930s he started working for Fassio Ltd., the Portuguese contractor of the American tractor manufacturer company Allis-Chalmers.