Delving deeper into Azorean culture in California

This was a fun blog for me, because I came across a few surprises. My first surprise was when I went to the library to check out the three books I used. One book, The Holy Ghost Festas: A Historical Perspective of the Portuguese in California, I had seen before at my grandparent’s house and knew what it looked like…or so I thought. I was expecting a small book with less than 100 pages, but instead I found a huge, over 500-page coffee table book! It’s actually a really informative book with a lot of great pictures, but its not a very fun book to lug around places, that’s for sure! My second surprise was when I was checking out the books, all three very clearly about Portuguese in California, and the woman checking out my books said “looks like you’re gunna be reading about all my relatives!” To which I said “yeah my relatives too!” It was really fun and made me want to delve into the books! Just to keep things simple for this entry, I decided to write book by book, instead of topic by topic. I know it might seem kind of lazy, but it was just the easiest way for me to write and keep my sanity!

Alameida, Carlos. Portuguese Immigrants: The Centennial Story of the Portuguese Union of the State of California. Hayward: Suburban Press, 1978.

As the title suggests, this book is about the story of Portuguese immigration to California, and the community that sprang from the immigration. Alameida starts off talking about immigration, and specifically the problems with immigration statistics before 1930. In the US, record keeping wasn’t standardized until about the 1930s, and records in Portugal were full of holes, and it was only worse in the Azores. Because of this, the statistics that do exist are skewed. What I mean is that, when Azoreans did immigrate, they often didn’t distinguish between Portugal and the Azores as the country they emigrated from, so the numbers are skewed to show more Portuguese immigrants than Azorean immigrants. But whatever the actual numbers might be, the records do show that from 1820 to 1855, 3,562 Portuguese immigrants entered the US (12).

Beside this statistical problem, Portuguese immigrants faced many other institutional obstacles. For example, from the early 1900s until 1952, there were immigration laws requiring immigrants to pass literacy tests to enter the country. This dealt a blow especially to the Azoreans because illiteracy on the islands “where illiteracy was very high (estimated eighty per cent [sic])” (13). This, coupled with harsh immigration quotas, lead to a sharp fall in Portuguese immigration. In the 1950s, immigration issues for Portuguese were slightly abated by the Azorean Refugee Act, but it only allowed “a few thousand victims of the volcanic eruption off the islands of Faial (Capelinhos) to immigrate to the U.S.A.” (13). The point that immigration troubles really came to an end was when President Kennedy’s immigration bill, posthumously passed by President Johnson, eliminated immigration based on quotas and “allowed immigration based on the skills needed in the country” (13). This allowed many more Portuguese to enter the country, leading to the population boom of Azoreans in America from 1960-1980.

Once Azoreans immigrated to California, they often sought out the same areas that friends and relatives from their home villages had settled in. Because of this practice, San Leandro, CA became the Azorean home away from home. It was here that, in response to racial discrimination, the Uniao Portugesa do Estado da California (UPEC - Portuguese Union of the State of California) was established. This gave Azoreans a social and support network and made San Leandro a destination for Azoreans (31). To this day, San Leandro is still has a huge Azorean community. UPEC not only stood as a sense of community for the Azoreans, but it was also a network of protection for families, offering death benefits, similar to social security (55). Most of the Azorean immigrants chose the San Leandro area to settle in not only for community bonds, but also for the job opportunities. Many of the Azoreans sought out San Leandro’s fertile agriculture to work in (31). Agriculture was something almost all Azoreans participated in, so coming to a fertile area would be an easy job transition.

This book was a very dry, straightforward approach to history. The author looked at generalities of Portuguese immigrants, rather than looking at specific stories, or even including names of prominent Portuguese-Americans. Thankfully, the next book I read was really interesting and took a lot of individual stories to make up their narrative.

Lick, Sue Fagalde. Stories Grandma Never Told: Portuguese Women in California. Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1998.

This book, as I said, focused and relied almost completely on interviews with Azorean immigrant women. The author chose to interview immigrants, their first generation children, second-generation grandchildren, and even third generation great grandchildren. Not everyone in the book was related, but many were, which offered several different views of the same issues. This also allowed Lick to trace how attitudes changed through the generations.

To begin with, Lick addresses the historical researcher’s absolute nightmare—changing names. In the Azores, the islands, especially the smaller ones, were basically like small villages where everyone knew everyone. Also, in all honesty, there aren’t many names in Portuguese, so when you have a family with 17 kids, names start to repeat themselves, and nicknames are relied on to identify people. In my extended family alone, there is an Old Joe and a Young Joe, and Old Tony and a Young Tony, and a woman named Mary who, because Mary/Maria is such a popular name, goes by Conceicao. Last names could also be arbitrary. Of course there would be the family last name, but if there was a situation where, say, a man’s wife died and he remarried and continued to have children, he would name those children after their mother, like Dela Rosa. There is even an example from my family of a son who was born on Christmas, so he was given the last name Nascimento instead of the family name. Despite the arbitrary nature, the small community would still know who you were and wouldn’t have a problem finding you even if your name was wrong. Once the Azoreans began coming to America, they encountered another name problem. Of course there were the immigrants who changed their names to more Anglo sounding last names, but there were also immigrants who ran into some different problems. Because many immigrants were illiterate, they weren’t able to spell their names, and often ended up with a spelling different from the traditional spelling. Lick gives the example of Sousa becoming Souza and even Souxa (xv). Another problem immigrants ran into was having to give their names to clerks who aren’t fluent in Portuguese. Lick gives the example of Joaquim whose name became Joe King because that’s what it sounded like to the American ear (xv). As I already stated, this arbitrary nature of names on the island, combine with problems of illiteracy and language barriers upon immigration, lead to a lot of dead ends in historical research.

Stories Grandma Never Told looked at different aspects of life from the Portuguese woman’s perspective. Lick looks at work, domestic duties, education, and even issues of disparity between sons and daughters. According to Lick and her interviews, Portuguese women have pretty much always done hard manual labor, on top of their domestic duties. In the Azores, the ideal was to have a stay at home wife, but that often, because of financial needs, the wife had to work as well. One particularly sad story was about a woman who’s mother got pregnant when she was 16, and she was convinced her mother would die in childbirth and that she would be stuck taking care of the child and her other siblings until her father remarried. The story wasn’t very clear, but it sounded like even though the mother didn’t die, the daughter was still stuck taking care of her brother; so much so that her brother began calling her mom. A similar thread though many of the stories of these young women shouldered with adult responsibilities from a very young age was very young marriage. My assessment from this fact is that, to escape the sometimes-borderline abusive control of their fathers, the young women married at really young ages so that they could have some form of autonomy. This made me really sad for the women, and made me think of my grandmother’s life, and how it most likely mirrored this story pretty closely, at least from what I’ve heard (my family tends to be very quiet about aspects of life and really not elaborate on their stories unless poked and prodded into it, so I know very little about my grandparents lives).

Lick had some interesting facts in her book that stuck out to me. First, she noted that “today, there are more people of Azorean descent in California than on all nine islands. In 1996, the Azorean population was 240,000 while there were nearly one million Californians of Portuguese ancestry” (43). This would probably be an even more extreme fact if she noted the populations of each island, giving a comparable American city. Another interesting fact was that “in the old country, everyone married in the Catholic Church. To do otherwise was a sin” (80). According to my mom, when she and my dad were going to get married, one of his crazy aunts told them they were going to Hell because they were getting married in a Lutheran church. Oh well, who’d wanna be in Heaven with that nut anyway?! This and other parts of the book were kind of a confirmation of aspects of culture, rather than people just being weird. The last little bit of Lick’s book was about the relationship with the Azores after immigration. Many women never made it back to the Azores, either because they didn’t want to go or because they couldn’t afford to go. Families drifted far apart in that time, but the familial ties still held for children and grandchildren who had the opportunity to go back and visit long lost relatives. My dad, grandpa, and one of my dad’s cousins went back to the Azores when I was a baby, but my grandmother wouldn’t even think about going back. She was convinced that my grandfather would decide to stay in the Azores and that she would have no choice and be forced to go back to hand washing laundry in the river and taking hours to cook dinner.

Goulart, Tony P. Editor. The Holy Ghost Festas: A Historical Perspective of the Portuguese in California. San Jose: Portuguese Heritage Publications of California, 2003.

The third book I worked with was The Holy Ghost Festas: A Historical Perspective of the Portuguese in California. Unfortunately, I think this book was written with the idea that it’s readers would be Portuguese people who like hearing about themselves and want to know what goes on in other parts of California, because the book didn’t even have a concise description of the history of and basis for the festas. I think it would do an injustice to just assume everyone reading my blog knows the back story or will go and look it up themselves, so I’m going to try to provided that story. Just be forewarned—my parents aren’t Catholic, I’ve only ever been to Catholic churches for funerals, and I don’t speak Portuguese. I’ve also been given several varied accounts of the story at different times from different people—my dad trying to explain it, one of the queens at a festa tried to explain it, and even in reading there are varied accounts. I ended up turning to the website for the Sausalito Portuguese Hall to help me, and I’ll add in some of the pieces I have heard but weren’t included on this website. The basic element every person knows is that there was a famine in Portugal. The farmers weren’t producing enough to feed everyone, and the poor didn’t have enough to buy the food. Of course, the rich upper class royalty weren’t starving. The people prayed to the Holy Ghost to save them from the famine, and Queen Isabel took it upon herself to be the savior. She sold her gold and jewels to pay for food for the hungry. To honor her charity, Queen Isabel actually became a saint, and the festas celebrate the miracle that she brought in unselfishly helping her people to survive the famine. In festa celebrations, a local girl is chosen to be the queen of the festa, representing Queen Isabel. I have been told that there is a story to this as well—that Queen Isabel chose a girl from the village to be queen for a day each year, and that’s why there are queens of the festas. However, the festas are patron saint celebrations too, so it’s a mix of history and religion. Like I said, I haven’t been able to find a concise telling of the story anywhere really, so another person would probably tell you a slightly different account of events than I did. The main thing you need to know to understand festas is this: it’s basically a community celebration with religious undertones revolving around feeding the community and dancing. On the islands, the celebrations look slightly different depending on where you are. For example, the island Tereceira’s festa feature a running of the bulls and bullfights, but other islands don’t do this. According to a 2003 article from Via Magazine, the town of Gustine, CA still takes part in bloodless bullfights. Depending on where you go in California, festas can be really different. I’ve only ever been to one festa in Fort Bragg, and that one keeps just the essential elements of the festa—the sopas dinner for the community, the parade with the queens, and dancing the chamarrita (a traditional folk dance).

Festas in California, like on the Azores, are community events. The whole point is to bring as many people together for good old country food, dancing, and socializing. What’s special about California is that the festas are all scheduled from April-September and each Portuguese Hall has a different date in that period, so for the entire summer you could feasibly travel up and down California, hitting a festa every weekend. This fosters a really great sense of community within a state that’s larger than all 9 Azores islands combine! Queens will travel to different areas with their sashes and crowns just to take part in the other celebrations. Like I said, I don’t speak Portuguese and I don’t know many of my extended family (grandma and grandpa both had 16 brothers and sisters!), but it is pretty amazing to go to a festa with one relative and have them just work the room, finding people we are vaguely related to, or who come from the same village we are from, or who has a mutual friend. It’s like an interactive family tree. Probably the most interesting part of the book was their really detailed accounts of California festas, current and former. I read through the Fort Bragg section and learned that the Portuguese Hall was actually going to be a Catholic church, but the church abandoned the site and the Portuguese decided to buy it and use it as their hall for festas, weddings, and other community events. The section also listed several last names that I recognized and had to wonder if we were related. One picture was listed as courtesy of Mary Rodrigues. My grandmother’s maiden name was Rodrigues—could this Mary be a distant relative. Another last name I noticed was Moura. Could this person be related to Mrs. Moura, my grandma’s best friend at the nursing home, who spoke only Portuguese and didn’t listen if you told her you only spoke English? The book was very thorough and included a lot of information that would entice anyone who has been to a festa to learn more about their history and culture. 

This was a really long post, so I'll try to give a concise conclusion. The basic point of this post was to show how Azorean Portuguese immigrants in California changed the culture of California and were changed by California. Events like the festas changed California culture by adding a huge, multi-city Portuguese cultural event to the summer of the state and becoming a destination for many non-Portuguese Californians. The article in Via Magazine was about the author bringing members of her family to the big festa in Gustine, in the Central Valley. One fact I didn't actually have earlier in the blog is that San Jose has a 3 day Portuguese cultural event every June. Its not a festa, but its a cultural celebration including traditional food and folk music and dancing. While the festas changed California, they were also changed by California. With Portuguese people so spread out throughout our large state, festas became a cultural destination event, with people traveling to the festas of different communities, but still being able to find people they can identify with at these events hundreds of miles away. Azoreans also changed the look of San Leandro by making it a Portuguese "home away from home". San Leandro became a destination for Azoreans and a home base for those living in California. I'm not sure of the current make up of San Leandro, but tat one time there was a proliferation of Portuguese businesses catering to the Portuguese people in the community. I know for sure that Fremont has a liquor store owned by a Portuguese guy that is a destination for my dad because he sells good linguica (Portuguese sausage) and Azorean cheeses. Finally, in Sue Fagalde Lick's book, she really examines the struggles of the young Portuguese immigrants, or the first generation children of immigrants and how hard it was to want to assimilate into American culture, but coming across barriers of either inability to assimilate, or not being allowed to assimilate by hostile parents.

Newspapers and Genealogy Sites Are Teases!

As the title says, the Internet has frustrated me to no end these past two weeks! It was like I would find bits and pieces, but not what I needed, or I would be one click away from a document I wanted, and then a little error message would pop up, saying I needed to be a member to access the information and for only $35 I can have access to public documents like immigration records, census reports, and newspaper articles. Doesn’t the word “public” denote that it should be accessible to anyone? I don’t see public restrooms at parks with signs saying $1 per flush!

Anyway, because I hit so many roadblocks in searching for things like immigration records, census reports, and news articles from the 1950s, I have instead decided to focus on the Azores this week, since many people have probably never heard of them. As I said last week, the Azores are a chain of 9 small islands in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, owned by Portugal. American actually has a military base on Terceria, because these islands are a pretty logical midway stop in the Atlantic. The climate on the islands is comparable to Hawaii, and they actually look slightly similar. The islands are at the intersection of three tectonic plates—the North American Plate, the Eurasian Plate, and the African Plate. As we know from other regions like the Himalayas and our own west coast, this leads to mountain ranges, earthquakes, and volcanoes. Most of the islands have calderas which, similar to Oregon’s Crater Lake, have been filled in with rain water and are now lakes. 

This is an example of one of the crater lakes on Flores (www.azores-islands.info.uk). Notice the hydrangeas in the foreground of the picture? These are pretty much everywhere on the islands and most homes of Azoreans in the US have hydrangeas planted somewhere in the yard. 

One of the main things that first attracted Americans to the Azores was whaling. Whaling was a huge industry on the islands, with plants for processing the whale into blubber and even a scrimshaw industry. In fact, on the island of Faial, you can find an entire museum of scrimshaw art (Azores.com/faial). On the island of Flores, a popular local swimming hole is actually where the whalers would bring a whale up out of the ocean to be processed. The island of Pico actually has a statue of a whaler, dedicated to the memory of the Azores past boom industry (www.intltravelnews.com)

Because of their skill in whaling, many Azoreans moved to the East coast, particularly Massachusetts and Rhode Island, to work in the American whaling industry. However, there was a whaling industry along the California coast, and many Azoreans also moved to California for that very reason. When the whaling industry died out in America, Azoreans took to other jobs, like fishing and agriculture, which were popular occupations on the islands as well. In the case of my family, my grandparents came from the island Flores in 1951 or 1953 and moved to Antioch. I always thought this was kind of weird, because most migration patterns had the Azoreans moving to either the central valley or closer to the coast, particularly in Monterey, San Jose, and San Leandro. While I was scouring the internet for anything and everything I thought could relate to my blog, I found an article on JSTOR about current works by Portuguese authors. One of these authors was Mateus L. Fraga, who came from Flores in 1951 to Antioch. Because the islands are so small, Fraga and my grandfather’s ages so close, and because the dates matched up so closely, I knew there had to be a connection here. My dad was home so I asked him what he knew about this guy. He said my grandparents knew him and were friends with him, and that he even had a copy of the book. That was exciting, because the book is out of print and Pleasanton’s rinky-dink library caters almost exclusively to children’s books. Unfortunately, my dad right away added “and I have no idea where the book is”. So now its not just the internet that’s acting like a complete tease! So far I have been unable to find the book online or find it in a library, but I will ask my dad’s cousin and uncle, because they are kind of the family record keepers and I know they will have a lead on this book!

Lastly, I’ll talk a little about architecture. The Azores have a really specific look to their homes and their churches. Homes are typically built with stone, with white plaster on the walls. Older homes are more stone than plaster, and newer homes are more plaster than stone (facebook.com). I took this photo from my cousin's facebook page (I texted her and she said it was ok!). She visited a few of the islands over the summer, and this is actually our grandparent's old house. You can see in places where the plaster was (its now peeling off), and you can see a newer house in the background with pretty much all plaster. 

Home architecture doesn’t seem to have made it to the Bay Area, but church architecture, at least in one place, did. The typical church in the Azores has white plaster walls, with dark brown wood (blog.ratestogo.com). This photo is actually a former convent on Sao Miguel, but this is pretty representative of church architecture. 

 In the Bay Area, we don’t see many examples of this specific type of architecture, except in San Jose. (www.123rf.com).

 This is Five Wounds Portuguese National Church, a Catholic church in San Jose, and it features the typical Azorean style of church architecture. The colors are slightly different, but you can see the similarities between the Azorean and the Californian church.