Portuguese-Americans in the US

 

Dighton Rock

• Early 1500s–1542: Portuguese navigators/explorers are linked (in the text) to early contact with North American shores; João Rodrigues Cabrilho is noted as the first European to reach California (1542). Miguel Corte-Real may have been in the East Coast in the early 16th C 
• 1634: First documented Portuguese resident in colonial America: Mathias de Sousa
• Peter Francisco, "giant soldier" in the continental army, said to be from the Azores

Wave 1 — 1840s: the whaling corridor into New England

• Main driver / mechanism: Whaling voyages served as a route to America; whalers frequently stopped in the Azores to recruit crew, and many crew members later settled when ships docked in New England.

        Geography: New Bedford, Massachusetts (described as the whaling center by the early              19th century), alongside older whaling areas like Nantucket and Cape Cod

Wave 2 — Late 1890s: Azorean and Madeiran community-building in industrial and coastal New England

• Where (core clusters):

• Rhode Island: Tiverton, East Providence, Valley Falls, Pawtucket

• Southeastern Massachusetts: Taunton, Brockton, Fall River, New Bedford

• Also: Lowell and Lawrence (Northern MA), Southern New Hampshire, and neighborhoods in Boston (East Boston, North End), plus Cambridge and Somerville.

Why those places: Availability of low-skill work, particularly in the textile industry, accessible to newcomers with limited English

Wave 3 — From Capelinhos (1957–58) through the Immigration Act of 1965 and after

• 1957–58: Capelinhos volcano eruption (Faial, Azores) causes major destruction and displacement.
• 1958: Azorean Refugee Act signed, granting 1,500 visas to victims; extended in 1962.
• After WWII into this period: Another migration wave noted especially to the Northeast (NJ, NY, CT, RI, MA, MD) and California, including people described as fleeing the Salazar dictatorship; growth of Portuguese clubs for cultural preservation.
• 1965: Immigration and Nationality Act allows legal residents to sponsor family members, described as dramatically increasing Portuguese immigration into the 1970s and 1980s.

Snapshot by 2000

• 2000 U.S. census (as quoted in the text): 1,176,615 Portuguese-Americans, described there as mostly of Azorean descent (the excerpt itself flags that point as needing a citation)

HW for May 4 (anthology, pp. 144-147)

  Answer either or both:

1. Compare the poem "The Genetics of Leaving" and its treatment of the matters of language and memory with any other text read in this class.

2. Choose a favorite poem and try to pinpoint what interests you in it and how does the work on language contribute to enhance your attention.

3. Listen here to Etheridge Knight, research, and speculate on the operation of imitation or parody that Barbosa is doing in her "Welcome Back": https://soundcloud.com/robert-elijah-nesbitt/welcome-back-mr-knight-love-of

Here is the link to the author's page: https://www.shaunabarbosa.com/

HW for April 29: Tessa Hulls, "Feeding Ghosts"

 Answer one or more:

- How does the autobiography serve the telling of this diasporic narrative(s)?

- The flashback history journey that the autobiographical subject decides to embark in takes her through moments of Chinese and of Japanese history. How do these flashback journeys affect what you alresdy knew about Asian-American diaspora in the US?

- Choose the following or any other page (recording its number) to analyse in terms of text (close-reading) and image composition.

Gloria Anazldúa - Borderlands / La Frontera (HW for April 27)

 The concepts of hybridity and border space presented by Gloria Anzaldúa in Borderlands: La Frontera / The New Mestiza (1987) are considered key themes in postcolonial studies., (ver aqui: http://www.qub.ac.uk/imperial/key-concepts/Hybridity.htm) and these can be related with "Third Space of enunciation" defined by Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture (1995).

"The intervention of the Third Space, which makes the structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent process, destroys this mirror of representation in which cultural knowledge is continuously revealed as an integrated, open, expanding code. Such an intervention quite properly challenges our sense of the historical identity of culture as a homogenizing, unifying force, authenticated by the originary Past, kept alive in the national tradition of the People. In other words, the disruptive temporality of enunciation displaces the narrative of the Western nation (...) as being written in homogeneous, serial time.
It is only when we understand that all cultural statements and systems are constructed in this contradictory and ambivalent space of enunciation, that we begin to understand why hierarchical claims to the inherent originality or “purity” of cultures are untenable, even before we resort to empirical historical instances that demonstrate their hybridity."
Homi K. Bhabha.

Find and comment on examples of hybridity (in textual structure, narrative voice, themes addressed, and reproduced discourses) in the chapter of Borderlands to be read in class, and comment briefly on them.

HW for April 22: Linda Hogan's texts in dialogue with Gary Synder's "Unnatural Writing"

 In the essay “Unnatural Writing,” Gary Snyder proposes a few topics for a “New Nature Poetics.” Consider the following recommendation for an “art of the wild” — “That it study mind and language—language as wild system, mind as wild habitat, world as a ‘making’ (poem), poem as a creature of the wild mind” (p. 172, essay / p. 127 course anthology).

How can we relate Snyder’s invitation with Linda Hogan’s assertion in “Walking” — “I never learned the sunflower’s golden language or the tongues of its citizens. (…) But they knew what to do, how to live.” (p. 157, book / p. 115 course anthology).

    (image Chris Pappan, ‘Atom Heart Mother (Hearth)’, 2016, reproduced from https://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/land-carries-our-ancestors-contemporary-art-native-americans)

HW for April 15: Laily Long Soldier, poem 38, pp. 49-53

Choose one or mor 

1. Is this a poem? What to make of the first line: "Here, the sentence will be respected?"

2. Relate the poem to the book cover below

3. If you have studied Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" in Leaves of Grass, can you establish any connection between the ending of "38" and these lines from section 52 of Whitman's poem? 

“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love.

If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles” (1338-39).

Guidelines for final project

 Your final project is a literary analysis project worth 25% of your grade, broken down into:

• 5% for the plan/proposal (your 300-word handwritten rationale by April 24)

• 10% for the process (your May 13 draft with about two-thirds of the paper)

• 10% for the final result (the June 1 submission, up to 2000 words)

What You Have to Do

1. Choose a primary literary text from your syllabus — but not the one you used for your oral presentation.

2. Select a major critical or theoretical text that engages with that literary work and a theme or question that interests you in it (for example, an essay, critical theory, or scholarly article researched in google scholar).

3. Summarize the critical author’s argument (what they say about the text and how they interpret it).

4. Respond to that critical perspective — using your understanding of both the primary text and the critical framework — to develop your own short analysis or argument.

5. Keep everything within 2000 words maximum.

The Rationale (for April 24)

You’ll need to handwrite a 300-word justification explaining:

• Why you chose this particular text and critic.

• What angle or question you want to explore.

• How this project connects to your interests or course themes.

AI Use and Academic Integrity

AI tools are discouraged for environmental reasons but their use as an auxiliary is not forbidden.
You may use them if you cite the assistance properly using APA’s guideline for generative AI citations (e.g., Perplexity, powered by GPT-5, chat on plan proposal for final assignment, April 2026, https://www.perplexity.ai/search/25-5-plan-proposal-10-process-HiAddwVBQ8qTZeF1Au0MRA).
Also, your text should remain primarily your own: less than 35% AI-typical phrasing (which the teacher will verify with an IA-pattern recognition tool)