A collected volume on the political perspectives of Portuguese-Americans in Massachusetts that examines attitudes to such key issues as education and foreign language instruction, the economy and access to jobs and mobility, and a range of other social issues such as immigration policy, abortion, and school prayer.

Portuguese-Americans and Contemporary Civic Culture in Massachusetts (Portuguese in the Americas Series) (Volume 1)

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Tagus Press

Seen from the dawn of the twenty-first century, the essays of Eduardo Lourenço (b. 1923) are a philosophical arch that spans the twentieth century, analyzing it and revealing its imaginary borders, dreams, contradictions, ghosts and angels. The symbol the Portuguese essayist derives from the previous century, that is, the figure that best portrays the cultural oscillations of that century, is the labyrinth. The act of searching for knowledge impels a person to enter a labyrinth, insofar as he tends to grasp meanings from different sources and phenomena. The more he tries to find his way out of the labyrinth ― to transform doubts into certainty ― the more he finds himself immersed in contradiction, in a continuous re-memorization of his inner ghosts. Literary works are the best guides Lourenço has found to free himself from the maze of culture, although he is aware that his literary friends may also turn out to be his enemies and nightmares. His philosophical background allows him to deal with literature in an emotional, passionate way ― his literary analyses are, most of the time, starting points for mythological interpretations of Portugal and Europe that merge poetry, sociology, anthropology, political science, and art history.

Chaos and Splendor & Other Essays (Adamastor Series)

Literature & Fiction

Lourenço, Eduardo

History & Criticism

Um Passo Mais no Português Moderno: Gramática Avançada, Leituras, Composição e Conversação, by Francisco Cota Fagundes, of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is the first intermediate-advanced textbook ever published for the study of Portuguese as a second language. The book is comprised of 28 chapters each divided into 3 sections: Leitura, Gramática, and Composição.

Um Passo Mais no Português Moderno: Gramática Avançada, Leituras, Composição e Conversação (Portuguese Language Textbook Series)

Biographies & Memoirs

Fagundes, Francisco Cota

Professionals & Academics

Through a Portagee Gate is both an autobiography and a biography. It gives a remarkably honest self-portrait and an endearing tribute to the author's father, a Portuguese immigrant cobbler who came to America in 1915. The narrative reveals a deep desire to escape the confines of the immigrant, ethnic world, while also acknowledging a keen nostalgia about one's past, a need to remember and recognize those who came before. Felix accomplishes this through unforgettable dialogue and vivid characterizations worthy of Steinbeck―a prose sometimes poignant, at other times hilarious that strips human experience to its bare and powerful elements.

Through a Portagee Gate (Portuguese in the Americas Series)

Felix, Charles Reis

Felix, Chalres Reis

Community & Culture

Sixty Acres and a Barn tells the captivating coming-of-age story of Luis Sarmento, an immigrant from the Azores who finds in America tolerance, prosperity, and emotional fulfillment. This fascinating slice of immigrant life in California dairy farming explores in lyrical, realistic, and insightful prose the obstacles faced by those who live in insular enclaves between cultures. Sixty Acres and a Barn will appeal to readers interested in Portuguese American literature, ethnic literature, immigrant literature, California regional literature, and dairy farms.

Sixty Acres and a Barn: A Novel (Portuguese in the Americas Series)

Lewis, Alfred

United States

Da Gama, Cary Grant, and the Election of 1934 is the story of an election for mayor in a Massachusetts mill town in 1934 as seen through the eyes of a ten-year-old Portuguese boy, Seraphin. The incumbent, a Yankee, is challenged by candidates from five different ethnic groups–Irish, French Canadian, Polish, Portuguese, and Jewish. A portrait of each candidate is subtly drawn and we meet campaign workers like Teddy, who has enlisted to help secure a teaching position for his daughter, and Jimmy, a numbers runner who proudly passes out cards announcing his appointment as Assistant Campaign Manager, North End. But the novel is more than just the story of an election. The specter of the Depression hovers over every scene. Laura, Seraphin's big sister, describes her job as a fruit-store clerk in every excruciatingly painful detail. And the allure of America is always present for Seraphin in his desire and longing to lead an American life. America also affects the remarkable Secundo B. Alves, the Portuguese candidate. Secundo's memories of the Azores are honest, authentic, and touching. But when he is defeated in the primary, he quickly bounces back as a supporter of the Frenchman's candidacy and rewrites his Vasco da Gama imagery. Secundo is showing the adaptability it takes to succeed in America. Da Gama, Cary Grant, and the Election of 1934 is a valuable historical document and an artistic triumph.

Da Gama, Cary Grant, and the Election of 1934 (Volume 5) (Portuguese in the Americas Series)

Two discretely shaped yet interdependent narratives creating a family saga from the viewpoints of both maternal and paternal lines (a difficult and rarely successful strategy for fiction) comprise this large and capacious novel. Distant Music begins in the nineteenth-century and extends well into the twentieth, a diptych retelling the story of the Woods and Ramos families and their descents in rough-and-tumble California. In crisp, succinct, and often elegant prose, rich in deftly selected detail, Julian Silva celebrates not only the resilience of men and women confronted with failure but–even more important–he adumbrates the compromised morality of their achievement. The Gunnysack Castle was first published by Ohio University Press in 1983. A study of the character of Belle Bettencourt was published by Cosmopolitan Magazine in March 1964. The second section of The Death of Mae Ramos, "Vasco and the Other," was originally published in 1979 under a different title and in a slightly different form in the University of Colorado's Writer's Forum 6.

Distant Music: Two Novels: The Gunnysack Castle and The Death of Mae Ramos (Volume 6) (Portuguese in the Americas Series)

Silva, Julian

Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies is a multilingual, peer-reviewed journal published twice a year by the Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. The journal addresses the literatures and cultures of the diverse and vast communities of the Portuguese-speaking world, composed of approximately 200 million people in seven countries in three continents, and the many other Lusophone communities in the United States and throughout the world. The journal encourages a wide diversity of theoretical and critical approaches, not being limited to any school of thought or political orientation. Cultural studies, as suggested in the title, is intended to be understood in its widest sense as the study of a variety of cultural expressions from a broad range of perspectives.

Fronteiras / Borders (Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies) (Volume 1)

The impetus for this volume, “The Other Nineteenth Century,” stems from the homonymous conference that was held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in April 2005. Over twenty scholars from the United States and Portugal delivered papers, and expanded versions of nineteen of these studies, along with five other relevant articles, constitute the present volume of Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies. The conference itself was designed to provide a forum to discuss works, authors and themes that are usually excluded from the repertoires of Lusophone literary and cultural history, and only seldom addressed in academic venues. Indeed, as the original conference presentations and the final published articles demonstrate, behind the more “canonized” nineteenth century lies another nineteenth century that has not always been duly recognized in literary and cultural histories.

The Other Nineteenth Century (Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies) (Volume 12)

Religion & Spirituality

"Money does not bring happiness." For Roberto Da Matta, in Carnivals, Rogues, and Heroes (1979), this saying embodies the ambivalence surrounding money in Brazil, a legacy of a Lusophone cultural tradition that privileges personal relationships over impersonal commodified exchange. This volume of Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies questions this tradition from the perspective of different disciplines. Does money stand in contrast to personal relations? And, if so, is this really particular to Lusophone or, more widely, Latin cultures―as opposed to, say, Anglo-American cultures or Protestantism generally? This book will be of interest to scholars in anthropology, history, literary criticism and Luso-Brazilian studies.

Economies of Relation: Money and Personalism in the Lusophone World (Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies)

Essays & Correspondence

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