Museum Exhibits

After visiting the Portuguese Historical Museum in San Jose and reading through secondary sources like Stories Grandma Never Told, I think the biggest contribution I would like to see my research bring to a museum is the immigrant story of Azorean children and youths. This story seems to be mainly overlooked by historians, even though this is a valid and large segment of the population. Youth can provide insight into culture clashes, like education and making friends, as well as generational friction and family dynamics and how those were (or weren’t) affected by immigrating to the Bay Area.

Through my interviews with Mary and my uncle Joe, I was able to see the stark differences in views of immigration through the eyes of two different child immigrants. One focused on the positives of the immigration experience, like access to conveniences and entertainment, while the other focused on the realities of the immigration experience, like feeling alien, sitting in a classroom not understanding what was going on with no one to help you (in the days before schools had ESL programs), and having to become a translator for your parents as well as their friends. In Stories Grandma Never Told, there were interview with a few women who were school-aged children when they immigrated who also focused on different details. One talked about crying every day because of the frustrations and teasing she encountered at school, while another talked about her very real fears of her mother dying in child birth, which would force her into the role of her mother until her father remarried or she married. Still, another talked about culture struggles between her teachers at school, who saw her as a bright student who deserved at least a high school diploma, if not a college degree, and her parents, who only went to school the mandated amount of time in the Azores, so their daughter should only need the same amount of schooling they got and she should go to work like an adult. Each of these tales focuses on immigration from the perspective of a child and they all look at the immigration experience in a slightly different way. These stories are invaluable to the overall immigrant story of the Azoreans and should be given as much time and research as adults.

I think this topic could be integrated into a museum exhibit in several different ways. First, like the Portuguese Historical Museum in San Jose, stories could be posted in static, two-dimensional boards on the wall, with pictures to add to the story. To add to the traditional exhibit, I think it would be really interesting to have an audio segment, with oral histories to go along with the pictures and written accounts. I also think it would be interesting, but maybe only to me, to have examples of clothes actually worn by children in the Azores. The Portuguese Historical Museum had a section of folk clothes and band uniforms, but not clothes people would have actually worn, day in and day out. It stood out to me in my uncle’s story that when he came to America he got his second pair of shoes ever, and he was 11 when he got here! I personally think it would be interesting to see what type of shoes he would have worn when he was in the Azores and what condition they would have been in. This could really put into context the conveniences America had to offer not just children but adults as well. Another element the museum exhibit could add is textbooks from the Azores, as well as necessary written information, like students had to purchase the books themselves and take care of them because there wasn’t any money to buy a replacement. In Manuel Bettencourt’s interview with UC Berkeley’s Regional Oral History Office, he spoke about an incident where a student dropped is book in the outhouse and had to haul it out and try to clean it as best he could, but never being able to get rid of that smell. To speak to the immigrant youth’s experiences in California schools, I think it would be interesting to have a quiz in Portuguese, either through an audio segment or given by a docent, and ask the listener to give the correct answers, or even just to translate what was being said. This would give visitors to the museum a little taste of the alienation Azorean students faced when they came to school in America and didn’t have the resources available to them to learn English quickly. I mentioned docents earlier, and I think it would be interesting to have docents of different ages at the museum who could speak to their own immigration experiences, giving a well-rounded view of immigration from people who were different ages when the immigrated and who immigrated in different eras; clearly someone who immigrates now will have a much different experience from someone who immigrated in the 1950s or 1970s.

In conclusion, though childhood immigration experiences have been largely overlooked by historians of Azorean immigrants, I believe that their experiences are valid and create a well-rounded picture of the entire immigration experience for the Azorean culture. By including a historical exhibit focusing on the experiences of the children, we could gain more understanding of the experience and we could empathize with our own experiences with school, bullies, and generational differences.