Education: Azores vs. California

            For this blog post, I wanted to focus on the experiences of immigrant children. Mainly, the contrast between life in the Azores and life in California, and the trials and triumphs that came along with that part of the immigrant experience. I interviewed my uncle, my dad’s cousin, and I used an oral interview with Manuel Bettencourt from The Bancroft Library’s Regional Oral History Office at UC Berkeley. I came into this blog with the assumptions that, based on what I have seen within the Portuguese families I am related to through my Dad, education was not important to the Portuguese, and I also assumed that because of the education system, most people were uneducated and therefore unintelligent. What I found actually made me feel stupid for ever assuming that.

            The first thing I wanted to know was how old my Uncle Joe and my cousin Mary were when they immigrated to the U.S., to get a feel for how much they could have experienced. Joe was 11, Mary was 12, and, though it doesn’t specifically state this in the interview, Manuel Bettencourt was about somewhere in his late teens/early twenties (he was born in 1943 and was here at least in 1963, if not earlier than 1963). I was glad to hear they were all over 10 years old because I knew I could rely on their memories and that they were old enough to be able to compare and contrast the different lifestyles between the countries. Joe, Mary, and Manuel all went to school in the Azores, and their experiences there are very similar. Joe and Mary both lived on the island of Flores, and Manuel lived on the island of Graciosa (in fact, Manuel is slightly younger than my Uncle Joe, so they would have been in school around the same time, as compared to Mary who was about 20 years younger and experiencing school in the 1950s and 60s.

           

            Life in the Azorean school system was very different from our conception of school. Every island has its own school, but those schools, similar to our elementary schools, only go up through about 4^th grade, and then you would have to pay (pay for room, board, and the education) to be sent to another island for the upper grades, and then to be sent to the mainland for university. As Azoreans are not very rich people, with most of them living a pastoral, agricultural life and needing the help of their children’s labor, most people on the smaller islands did not go any farther than 4^th grade. The school was set up so that you started when you were about 7 and finished when you were about 11, and school was Monday through Saturday, with Saturday as a half day, but all other days you were in school about 9-5, with very few breaks in the day. So you can see here that, while they only finished 4^th grade, these students probably had the same education level of about a 6^th grader in America.

School in the Azores was run quite differently than school in America. The basic set-up reminds me of a turn of the century rural schoolhouse. All four grades were in the same room, taught by the same teacher, and separated by sex—so girls were in one building, boys in another. According to Manuel, rainwater leaked in, there was no running water, and the bathroom was just a big hole in the ground in an outhouse. The teachers in the Azores were the ultimate authority, and ruled with an iron fist. Punishments for forgetting to complete homework, or disturbing the class, were severe, and often encouraged by the parents, and Manuel points out. According to Mary, the punishments could range from having your hand hit with a 2” ruler, to having to stand behind the blackboard until the teacher allowed you to come back and join the class, to having to sit in the corner with a dunce cap on, or as Mary put it, “Jackass ears”. Parents were very strict and would reinforce any punishment given out in the classroom at their home. There was no idea of “the teacher is just mean and out to get me” or that the teacher is wrong—the teacher was the ultimate authority and what they said was as close to Biblical truth as it got. From this information, I now can see how education could become very important in America as well, with good grades being the ultimate sign of success to a parent who was used to the Azorean educational system.

Both Mary and Joe came to America in time to experience public education here, and both had very different views on that education. For Joe, he saw school in California (Antioch) to be a lot easier than school in the Azores.  Though he came here knowing only Portuguese, Joe was 2 years ahead of his classmates in math, so he was able to spend and entire year learning English and perfecting his reading and writing skills, without losing any of his math skills. He describes the American schools as more relaxed, and easier to excel in without as much effort. He points out the fact that Americans had P.E. and cookie breaks as a main difference between the schools. Joe also said that, although school was easier for him, he still had to work twice as hard to get up to grade level with his English. For Mary, this transition was not as easy. Mary said that despite not knowing English and having the focus of subjects (such as history) being completely different in America, the strict discipline she faced in the Azores and her commitment to her studies helped her to make it to the honor roll in 12^th grade, when she only started school here at the end of 6^th grade!

Both Mary and Joe stated that their children’s education was of the upmost importance to them. Despite the fact that neither sets of parents were educated past 4^th grade, they all wanted their children to do their best and be the best. Joe states that his parents (my grandparents) would get very upset even if he had an A- rather than an A or A+. Joe also says that his father believed that, with an education, there was no limit on what you could achieve (he makes a note here to point out that this is why my grandfather wouldn’t let my dad or uncles participate in frivolous pass times like sports). While Joe focused on the positives of schooling, Mary brings in some of the realities of being a foreigner in a 1960s California school. She talks about the embarrassment of having to have a relative sign you up for school when you’re already 12 years old, and then having to translate everything for your parents all the time. She also talks about how hard it was to sit in a classroom day in and day out with only English being spoken, because there was no such thing as ESL or sheltered English learners in those days. The teacher really didn’t offer any help in teaching English, but another Portuguese student eventually came forward to help tutor Mary in English, but it still wasn’t until about a year later that Mary felt comfortable speaking English in school. Mary also talked about her loss of freedom. She lost all of her friends when she left the Azores, and she also had to become a translator for her parents, going wherever they needed her, whenever they needed her.  She then began translating for other family members when they needed her, which is a far cry from what the typical 13 year old would want to be spending her time on!

For Joe, America and California were full of so many new and different things that were an improvement over his life in the Azores, that there wasn’t any time to focus on differences or be culture shocked. He was more interested in becoming an American and enjoying all that there is to enjoy here. One of the biggest changes he noted was that, in coming from an agrarian society, they lived a life of sustainable farming and bartering for whatever you needed that you didn’t already have. Here, we had indoor plumbing, running water, electricity, cars, abundant food and clothes, etc. Things were so different, but from his view so great, that he didn’t really focus on the transition or any struggles, but just focused on how much he could gain from living here. As for Mary, her struggles were eased by moving into a community that was close to her relatives, and as Joe said, becoming immersed into a culture that had so much to offer that was new and exciting, like new foods and entertainment, and a climate that was better all year round.

As I said before, this blog forced me to confront some of my own assumptions about the Portuguese. Before I did these interviews, I said to my dad “clearly education isn’t important to Portuguese people, because you and your brothers have the highest education of all of your relatives, and your parents were barely educated at all!” This was really far from the case. In the Azores, what you did in life was more out of necessity than anything else. If you wanted to eat, you had to grow your own food, raise your own livestock, and barter for anything else you needed. Because life was so much more difficult there, it was also harder to focus on school when your parents needed help at home. Children would stay in school for as long as they could, but often parents needed help sooner rather than later. That all changed once they came to America, and doing the absolute best you could in school became the only job children could have. I had always assumed that the only reason my dad went to college was because his older brothers, Joe and Dave, had gone and therefore had pushed him toward that goal as well. Instead, it was also his own parents telling him how important education was and pushing him toward college. In terms of Azoreans and the older generations, like Joe and Mary’s parents, I can see that it wasn’t a fact of being intelligent or unintelligent, but just basically the work ethic that mattered most. Both Mary and Joe’s fathers were carpenters and farmers, and Joe’s father was also a fisherman when the ocean allowed it. Their mothers both worked in the fields and took care of livestock, like pigs and chickens, as well as making the clothes for their families and their meals. Just because their parents weren’t educated to our modern, American standards, doesn’t mean they were unintelligent. These people had to work hard day in, day out, from the time that they were small children, and they survived and thrived. That in itself is an achievement and a sign of intelligence.

In conclusion, these interviews helped me to learn a lot about the educational differences from the Azores to California’s greater bay area. I was able to confront assumptions I made about Azoreans. I now know that, if the tables were reversed, and my family immigrated back to the Azores, I’d probably be dead within a week! Those people had to work hard all their lives to give themselves and their children a good life, and for Joe, Mary, and Manuel, their families decided to leave their home and come to America for a better life. I also thought it was interesting that, contrary to the common immigrant experience, Joe was really interested in assimilating quickly into American culture and felt very little culture shock, while Mary did feel a lot of culture shock from not knowing English, she also was eager to join in on the convenience and excitement of America.