In his essay "Portuguese Immigrant Experience in America in Autobiography" Francisco Cota Fagundes writes:

 "There are at least twelve published book-form, although not all book-length, autobiographies by Portuguese immigrants[1] in the United States I hasten to add that, since the overwhelming majority of these texts are self-published or published by small presses, the possibility of there being others I never heard of is probably fairly high. In chronological order of publication they are: The Autobiography of Charles Peters (1915); Higino Faria's Retalhos de uma vida incrível (1963; Scrapbook of an incredible life); João J. Vieira Jr.'s Eu falo por mim mesmo (1963; Speaking for myself); Laurinda Andrade's The Open Door (1968); Lawrence Oliver's Never Backward (1972); Anna Martins Gouveia's From Madeira to the Sandwich Islands (1975); Josephine B. Korth's Wind Chimes in My Apple Tree (1978);  Building His Bridges: The Life and Times of John P. Rio (1980); Serafim Alves de Carvalho's Emigrar... emigrar: as contas do meu rosário! (1985; Emigrating... emigrating: a life parceled out in pieces); Mateus L. Fraga's An Immigrant's Story(1985); and Charles Reis Felix's Through a Portagee Gate (2004). The twelfth Portuguese immigrant autobiography is my own Hard Knocks: An Azorean-American Odyssey (2000)"




                            




For this posting I would like to extract an excerpt of the essay which focuses on Charles Felix's biography/memoir, Through a Portagee Gate (2004), and reads as follows:

     "The most recent of Luso-American autobiographies, Through a Portagee Gate is, in several respects, not easily classifiable. It is largely an immigrant story but, as such, it is perhaps best characterized, as George Monteiro also points out in his critical Preface, as a biography of the author's father, the figure most prominently featured in the book; it is, also in part, a novelized historical account of the profound changes, in the 1920s and 1930s, of a New Bedford neighborhood (the North End), whose main ethnic group for decades had been the Portuguese. The transformations undergone by this quiet neighborhood of small businesses, where everyone seemed to know everyone else, is recreated, with a great deal of nostalgia, by means of the privileging of a number of well-drawn sketches of human characters, but especially through the sustained biographical portrait of the author's father and his cobbler's shop-a microcosm of the entire North End-and its at first progressive and then rapid changes as a result of economic forces and, especially, of the arrival in the community of other ethnic groups. The biography of Charles Reis Felix's father, Joe Felix, who immigrated from Setúbal, Portugal, in 1915, and the transformation of a neighborhood are thus two of the strands of this biography/history of a man and a city. Since Joe Felix helped create his neighborhood, it is understandable that his death should come to coincide with the "death" of that part of the city. Lastly, Through a Portagee Gate is the memoir of the author, but a memoir of very selective episodes or strands of that life: glimpses of a story of growing up an American-born child of a Portuguese immigrant couple in New Bedford; the story of a boy who goes to school and discovers the pain of being different from the children of the inhabitants of the more privileged sections of the city; the apprenticeship story of the son who clearly admires his father and whose depiction of his mother will probably surprise feminists-and non-feminists alike-for the mother is often reduced to the level of a foil character for the father, even though the parents seemingly adversarial or confrontational relationship constitutes, for the narrator, as it most likely will for many readers, an unusual mask for the parents' love for each other. Charles's itinerary, in this story told in medias res, starts out on a Portuguese-owned farm in California (the Portagee Gate of the title is related to an experience on this farm); it includes the author's experiences as a teacher, and his painful attempts to hide his Portuguese identity, which inevitably he accepts and  embraces; his often painful experiences, as a primary school teacher, of having to deal with incompetent administrators. For one of the most endearing-and to some readers perhaps even disconcerting aspects-of Charles Reis Felix's memoir is his absolutely brutal sincerity. It is a book written from the standpoint of an author who does not care to curry favor with anyone-whether it be the unidentified ethnic group who are, to the author, the catalysts for the destruction of the neighborhood where his father's cobbler shop was located, and who are unapologetically called "barbarians," to the incompetent school administrators who are bestowed epithets that constitute expletives. Most significant of all, perhaps, as far as the  resolution of the biographical/ autobiographical polarity of the text, is the autobiographer's yielding of his autobiographical right to be on stage to the loving biographical pull exerted upon him by the figure of his father as character and of his cobbler's shop as stage.
     Clearly the most literary of the Portuguese immigrant/ethnic memoirs briefly discussed here, Charles Reis Felix is a master of the vignette, of storytelling, and of dialogue. His vignettes range from the title vignette that lends the book its title to numerous vignettes that take place in the cobbler's shop to the vignettes that have as setting the Felix home or a street of the neighborhood, or a classroom of Charles the student, or a classroom of Charles the teacher, or the office of one of his school principals. To this reader, however, the most outstanding feature of this impressive memoir is its storytelling component. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that Through a Portagee Gate is a story made up of stories, the gate of the title being construable as a metaphor for a threshold that the reader passes through on his or her way to a world of storytellers and storytelling. It is as a storyteller, perhaps as much as by any other of his many qualities and virtues as a person, that Joe Felix is remembered. It is largely as a storyteller that Charles Reis Felix pays homage to his father. And it is as a storyteller that Charles, as a writer, shows himself to be his father's son: the literary re-creator and imitator of his father's oral storytelling capabilities:


      Actually, I never felt any impatience with my father's stories. I knew that, given time, he would get to the point. I was always perfectly relaxed with him. He was never in a hurry and he gave me the feeling, he had all day to tell the story. I like that. I hated hurried things. By temperament I was the opposite of the fellow in the ad rushing through the airport, barking out commands, and then the fine car waiting for him at the curb, this is the kind of car such a man drives. "A man on the move." I was inert, not moving anywhere. (89)


     This passage, although not necessarily meant to be self-referential, does definitely characterize the type of storyteller his father was-as much as it characterizes the author's own fascination with, and mastery of, the art of the patient, unrushed weaving of integrated tales that tell an overall powerful story. Another element of this book that clearly places it outside the more conventional immigrant memoir discussed here is its abundance of intensely dramatic and often lyrical dialogues. Many of the vignettes, and a considerable number of the stories told by the narrator and especially by his main character, the father, are actually interspersed with dialogue, making many of the stories in the book good examples of conversational storytelling. Inasmuch as this may be thought to detract from the realistic or historical or veridical nature of the biographical or autobiographical experiences presented, it is, from a literary standpoint, one of the elements, together with the creation of vignettes and narrative storytelling as such, what makes this memoir a historical document about Portuguese immigrant and ethnic experience in the first few decades of the 20^th century but also an undeniably significant work of literary art."

Charles Reis Felix was born in 1923 to Portuguese immigrant parents in New Bedford, Mass.  He graduated from New Bedford High School, attended the University of Michigan, and received a B.A. in history from Stanford University.  He became an elementary-school teacher and spent 31 years in the school districts of San Carlos and Pescadero, Calif., retiring in 1984.  His published works include Crossing the Sauer (a memoir of WWII), Through a Portagee Gate (a combination biography-autobiography), Da Gama, Cary Grant, and the Election of 1934 (a novel), and Tony: A New England Boyhood (a novel). 

Francisco Cota Fagundes is a full professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

     [1] The list of memoirs studied here include two written by American-born authors. They are included because they deal largely with immigrant, as opposed to ethnic, experiences.

               
                       Domingos Pereira Coelho - Art Coelho ©





        As a poet I sing and honor my own family just like I do everything else when art inspires me directly from life's experiences. I am always encouraged to follow my Azorean roots. It's the discovery element in our destiny that spurs us on towards knowing more about where we have come from...because we are always going and being reborn. 
        One of the reasons I write poetry and short stories, even novels about my ancestors and my immediate family is I know them very well when intimacy's ambiance comes shining through our blood ties of fifty generations, including my sixteenth grandparents Pedro Correa, Capitão da Ilha Graciosa, and his wife Izeu perestrelo de Mendonça. Through this couple my genealogy links me to Charlmagne, Hugh Carpet, and Ferdinand I of Leon de Castile.  
        What fleshes out my family is being able to absorb firsthand what makes them saudade tick, and how their personalities have influenced my own by tradition. It is this showering of words and mirror-imaging of who they are that gives me the gifts of their thought, how they feel today and long ago and all of this leads to an immediate and intimate texture of how they evolved as they lived their lives on our island archipelago. I get to gather up in spirit tribute poem-songs of what their work and dreams accomplished as basket maker, whaler, immigrant, farmer, mechanic, folksinger and artist, hairdresser, trucker, young man of sorrows, housewife; and yes of course all of them as my family heroes.
        I feel like I'd met before my Great Grandpa Domingos Pereira Coelho from Santa Luzia, Pico Island. I say this because I've visited his old earthquake shaken basalt house a short distance behind the Pereira Café in his village. It's sad because it'll never be restored and was the only ancestral home sold outside of my four island families.
        One of my Grandpa's brothers stayed behind for some reason.  And under mysterious reasons, my Coelho cousins still living there don't know why their grandfather took the last name of Silva.  I joke about it to them, saying you changed your name to Silva so the rabbit in you, the coelho, can hide behind the bush and be safe from any and all harm.
        My Great Grandpa Domingos gave me a wonderful unexpected gift when my Grandpa Francisco sent his father to Fresno County for a year.  I thought I only had two photographs of Domingos; one of him alone, and another with part of his family in a formal portrait.  Formal for Pico Island at the time because they just put up a dark curtain outside between two stick poles as the cameraman's backdrop.  But recently and without me knowing it my first cousin Janice had a lot more of our old family photos taken in San Joaquin Valley of Central California at the time of my great grandfather's visit.  In amongst these I found my third photo of Domingos standing in between two sons; and even my father born in 1912, here at ten years old is present.
        Always the little memories we do have of our ancestors are precious and treasured.  And of course to be able to have enough material to write about Domingos in a poem is the best way I know how to understand this blood-on-blood kinship, which for me is a real hands-on heritage I love and respect.  That's why I did the painting of my Great Grandpa Domingos.  Because to make him a part of my art is to know him more intimately by shaping the features of his face with island colors in the background. I mean to give back my inheritance to him directly for what he did and for what oral history has preserved; there is no deeper satisfaction for a great grandson than this.

                            The Basket Maker

                                                    for Domingos Pereira Coelho

 
                 The sea talks to us
                 in nightly links of sound,
                 bashing her rude fingers
                 against the torrents of tide.
                 We sleep sticky
                 as two cagarros
                 dipped in maple syrup.

                 But there are charities
                 to living in a fish shack
                 cottage where solitude
                 makes history and this
                 ancient basalt rock-house
                 of lava offers the ambiance
                 of the ocean's girth;
                 and the plumes in waves rise
                 to speak and salt spray
                 a familiar language
                 of kale patch and almost
                 forgotten blood-ties lost
                 in my Grandpa's immigration.

                 Here the bold outline
                 of Pico Mountain teaches us
                 to add our isolation to the sky;
                 and a shoreline reappears at
                 Great Grandfather's summer house;
                 this trail leads to old gnarled
                 limbs and still ripening fig trees;
                 his grape vineyards and his adega
                 where he made brandy and wine-
                 it holds all the secrets of laughter
                 together for a great-grandson listening,
                 hearing again the new bottles filling
                 to the brim out of pride for the past.
                 And smiles from songs Domingos once sang
                 in that other time of sailing schooners
                 now burning up through my pant legs
                 and down to my sandals the paternal side-
                 where the heritage of fields were sold
                 and the whale-hunting stopped at Cais.

                 The boys of Domingos left,
                 stealing away with youth and
                 reaching the span of the Golden Gate;
                 four except for Manuel-his death
                 hurled from a Crow's Nest
                 when harpoon canoes were at their best.

                 California remained that strange
                 place Domingos visited only once,
                 bored stiff on son Francisco's dairy farm;
                 the tule cattail blades that he gathered
                 at the slough bottom wouldn't bind together.
                 There was nothing here for his fingers,
                 a great sin for a village man who made
                 his livelihood happen through his hands.

                 My Grandpa Francisco refused to let
                 his father return to Santa Luzia.
                 He'd paid his Atlantic passage
                 and longing rolled its dice
                 to spend more time with him.
                 So Old Domingos was forced
                 to stay six more terrible months
                 with saudade thick in his throat-
                 a lifetime to him away from home.

                 Domingos hated this foggy plain,
                 this furnace of summer dust-devils,
                 this Valley of the San Joaquin;
                 he told stories about it at Cabrito-
                 how he was marooned and lonesome
                 with no dry vines to tie, with no
                 baskets to weave in the evening sun
                 and without the shadow of Pico on his back;
                 without his good fishing buddies
                 and watching his grandsons swim;
                 all his companheiros grande
                 and nips of amora and águardente,
                 and without boats filled with congrel
                 coming to shore each morning
                 everything seemed against him.

                 Oh Jesus how he thanked God when
                 his life's dream was given back;
                 and his heart soaring to Pico Pequeno
                 just from knowing he's home
                 and his hands so busy with
                 his working fingers saying Amen;
                 he found his old glory as a man
                 witnessing his new wine baskets
                 selling in Arcos and Madalena again.

                 Art Coelho
                 March 2010

Art Coelho poet, novelist, painter, and 7 Buffaloes Press publisher(Rural & Working Class Literature), lives in Big Timber, Montana, but grew up rural on two family farms in Fresno County's Central California.  His grandparents immigrated from The Azores.  Art is currently writing two Diaspora novels.  Art Coelho's ten-year gypsy period included a work, My Own Brand, in the Macmillan anthology Traveling America with Today's Poets. A short story, My First Kill, was selected for Fiction 100, a Prentice-Hall university textbook.  Coelho won the Pushcart Prize in 1976 with the poem Like a Good Unknown Poet. 

NOTE: Painting of Domingos Coelho by Art Coelho



artcoelho@cablemt.net    www.artcoelho.com
P.O. Box 249, Big Timber, Montana   59011 

NA GRUTA

À sombra destas frondosas
Criptomérias,
Altas e vistosas,
Em cujas entranhas
Se escondem as misérias
Humanas, descanso.
A cada passo,
Meus olhos divisam
A nobreza
Encantadora
Da natureza.
Aquém, vejo agora
Uma roseira
De cor diferente
Das outras que me rodeiam...
Além, uma hortênsia
Azul marino,
Me sorriu!
Ao lado, uma alva como a neve,
Se exibe na magnificência
Premente
Do Criador.

E, neste ambiente
Deslumbrante
De paz e de amor,
Adormeço.
Neste sono leve
Que me esqueço
De mim mesmo,
Sonho de estrelas cadentes,
De esbeltas sereias
Bailando sobre as vagas,
Até mesmo sonho de serpentes
Multicores
Que a esmo
Se rastejam no deserto
Da minha infância.
Ao acordar,
Sinto as dores
Da distância
Que nos separa. De certo
Tudo isto é sonho
Do que fui e já não sou!
Quase me envergonho
A pensar
No que da vida me restou.

Lá longe o sol desponta
Sobre a montanha.
É manhã.
Silêncio profundo.
Só eu e uma garça que voa
Irrequieta,
Tonta,
Estranha,
Nas margens da lagoa
E, num segundo,
Me vem à mente
Do teu sorrir a beleza,
De teus lábios a doçura,
O calor
Ardente
Do nosso amor.
Mas, oh tristeza,
Tudo isto não é mais do que amargura.
                        
                      Machado Ribeiro, Sol Posto