Portuguese--Island Community

On Cambridge St. near Inman Square, Portuguese fish markets sell squid and saltwater delicacies; Portuguese bakeries send off the odor of fresh bread and pastries; community notices in the store windows are often in a Romance language. In fact, a good number of shoppers there probably don't know much English.

Cambridge has one of the larger Portuguese communities in New England, with 5-10,000 persons from Portugal or of Portuguese descent. The Portuguese have their own travel agencies, restaurants and department stores--and even a priest at St. Anthony's, the Portuguese parish church. And while the number of immigrants setting in Cambridge has risen over the past ten years, a lot of families have ancestors who settled in Cambridge more than a century ago.

The first families in East Cambridge came from the North End. They were cabinetmakers in a furniture factory, but later branched out to other unskilled factory jobs.

The influx of Portuguese grew around the turn of the century, when Portuguese Azoreans--traditionally fishermen--lost their jobs on Yankee whaling ships because of the declinie of the whaling industry. They moved from the coast to industrial towns like New Bedford and Fall River, where cotton mills provided work. From there, many Portuguese--particularly those from the eastern Azorean island of Sao Miguel--settled in Cambridge. Once settled, the Portuguese could bring their families over from the Azores, rural islands with an almost feudal government.

Drawing on the cheap labor of immigrants from New Bedford and Portugal were the Cambridge furniture, rubber, oil cloth and pork-packing industries. A few workers had skills as woodworkers or typesetters, but a majority of the 3000 Portuguese living in East Cambridge then were unskilled; the men earned about $12 a week, the women about half that. InThe Zone of Emergence,the Portuguese problems are catalogued:

They are handicapped, of course, by an ignorance of our language which often seems to denote a degree of diffidence and unaggressiveness that is easily mistaken for lack of energy, acuteness and ambition. For this reason also, their life has remained slightly distinct and colonized.

The Portuguese are now scattering from East Cambridge to the extent that a considerable number of older people come from the upper parts of Cambridge and from all over Somerville.

Azorean customs often led to cultural clashes in the United States. Even now, a report on Cambridge Portuguese shows that some families do not allow their daughters to date or attend many social functions unless they are planning to marry their escorts. This Portuguese custom has precipitated fights between the generations in immigrant households.

Another Portuguese custom, one often misunderstood by Americans, is family solidarity. Children are often expected to drop out of high school to help support the family; every ablebodied member is supposed to help bring in the money. This problem can be especially acute for Portuguese immigrants: they need education to get good jobs, but they need money in the meantime.

And many Portuguese immigrants in Cambridge high schools have difficulty in school, making them all the more likely to leave. In 1971, theCambridge Chronicleran the following complaints from immigrant students, many of them Portuguese:

They were forced to stay in an unattended, messy basement that smells of sewage;

They could not get instruction from guidance counselors;

There were no English courses during summer school;

Many teachers were insensitive to the problems of immigrant students;

They lost credits when moving from another country;

The schools did not offer Portuguese to students wantinig to increase their skills in their native language.

But despite problems like these, the Portugeuse have carved out a bustling niche in the city. Many of them live in crowded apartments in East Cambridge--but they are saving money to buy another home. The Portuguese community has an almost dual nature: it preseerves its own customs--which has led to some conflicts--but for more than 100 years, it has gradually been assimilated into the city.