Mapping: Portuguese Immigration, Cultural and University Centers in the United States

            Between 1999 and 2008, I attended a Portuguese school in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. For eighteen years, my mother taught myself, my brother, and over a hundred students how to read and write Portuguese. Perth Amboy was a mixed neighborhood with a heavy concentration of Portuguese immigrants, many of whom came to the United States during the oppressive Salazar regime, which was overthrown in the spring of 1974. I was interested to see how Portuguese immigrants were distributed throughout the United States. To map Portuguese communities in the U.S., I researched Portuguese cultural centers much like the one the one I grew up near in Perth Amboy. I began by using rounded red place markers because they were one of the larger icons that would draw the viewer’s attention to these places.         

https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=zAM9F1dSXIh8.kG4ad6hKCu8E

A large view of the map I created to understand Portuguese settlement in the United States. The red markers indicate various Portuguese-American centers; the green circles indicate universities that offer Portuguese cultural studies programs; and the yellow flags represent Portuguese embassies and consulates. 

             What I found was not at all that surprising, at least initially. The heaviest concentration of Portuguese immigrants and communities is in New England, particularly in Massachusetts. There are also several communities spread out throughout California, but the Northeast is the most heavily concentrated area. This makes sense, seeing as Portugal bookends the other side of the Atlantic. The Azores and Madeira islands, situated in the Atlantic, were also the site of large numbers of Portuguese immigration. For this reason, I was intrigued about the frequency and reasoning for Portuguese settlement in California.

A map of northeastern United States, it has the highest concentration of Portuguese immigration. This is just a small sample of Portuguese communities scattered throughout the region. 

California boasts a large Portuguese community as well, particularly in the San Francisco area. What propelled Portuguese immigrants from the mainland as well as Azores and Madeira to relocate past the Northeast?

       While mapping these various cultural centers, I saw that many were founded between the 1920s and 1930s. This raises some interesting questions considering that immigration to the United States was curbed in the aftermath of the First World War. These centers are much more spread out in California, while the map shows that they are very heavily concentrated in New England. I wonder about any sort of collaboration, if any, that may have transpired among nearby centers. 

         After layering this first part of the map, I thought it would further enhance my overall understanding of this distribution by researching universities that offered Portuguese Cultural Studies programs. These programs are near local Portuguese cultural centers, found at universities such as Brown and the University of Massachusetts. Several campuses of the University of California also predominately offer such programs. After researching the programs, I saw that many of them had been founded in the 1970s. I tentatively argue that this may be due to a large wave of immigration to the U.S. from Portugal immediately before and after Portuguese independence in the spring of 1974. However, I venture that there may other reasons to support this, such as the counterculture revolutions within the United States that championed different and more varies types of cultural scholarship. 

        On a larger scale, I finally decided to map the various Portuguese consulates throughout the U.S. My suspicions were confirmed. The major consulate in the western U.S. is in San Francisco, but the remaining consulates are in the Northeast, with two in Massachusetts. I mapped these using yellow flag icons to represent them as a government entity.

         The process of mapping these various sites in layers raised several questions that would serve as fascinating research topics. Namely, what led to the creation of Portuguese cultural centers in the 1920s and 1930s? How did these community centers interact with the larger American culture? It would be interesting to see if and how writing this type of narrative would change how we think about the Northeastern United States during this period.  

            This semester, I am conducting research for a paper that examines the National Park Service (NPS), particularly between 1950 and 1970. I am really interested in how the idea of nationalism is infused in the NPS’s very existence. Following World War II, many of the nation’s parks were in disarray. Due to lack of funding, high visitor rates, and lack of national concern about its future, some questioned the longevity of what the historian and novelist Wallace Stegner had once considered “America’s best idea.”[1] In 1953 Harper’s Weekly published the historian Bernard DeVoto’s “Let’s Close the National Parks.” [2]

DeVoto was alarmed by the state of the nation’s various parks, and cautioned that if Congress would not increase funding, the Parks should close down. I was fascinated by this plea because I had assumed that there would in fact be a more impassioned nationalism to maintain the Parks in place. To analyze DeVoto’s motivations, thoughts, and word choice, I created a word cloud of his appeal.

         

        I selected a brown, yellow, and green theme because simply, it represents the colors of the NPS. But on second thought, it’s much more complex. The colors that the NPS chose for itself was a form of branding and by extension, nation-building. Furthermore, the word cloud revealed that DeVoto may not have been a believer of his own words that the NPS close down. Rather, it was a dramatic attempt to call Congress’s attention to the issues of the NPS. I contend this because of the lack of words with negative connotations within the word cloud. Furthermore, there is an emphasis on the national and the federal government. I organized the cloud so that the smaller words on the left appeared to be feeding into the larger words on the right. I hoped that this would create the effect of DeVoto’s words (“budget,” “Congress,” “housing,” “money,” “job”) servicing and financing the NPS through the large words of “Service,” “national,” “National,” “one.”

            Just a few years later, Conrad Wirth, director of the NPS, approached Congress with his Mission 66 plan. Essentially, he asked for a large budget between 1956 and 1966 in time to commemorate the revamp the NPS in time for its fiftieth anniversary. To compare Wirth’s Mission 66 plan to DeVoto’s plea, I created a word cloud of Wirth’s plan.[3]  

While DeVoto’s essay did not mention the word “Americans,” Wirth’s statement mentions quite a bit the plural and singular versions of “American(s)”.” Wirth invokes similar language to DeVoto, but Wirth’s use of the words “government,” “benefits,” and “business” suggest a more concerted effort to remind the federal government of its power and responsibility to build the NPS in a time of major national growth.

The United States entered a new period following the war that required it to revise the very terms of its nationhood. As the new global leader, it was in a process of rebranding and nation building. Mission 66 and the NPS in this period reflect these growing changes. These word clouds help us to see that the NPS had a direct role in redefining and strengthening American nationalism in this period. It was not only affected by the nation’s growing nationalism post-1945, but it was also contributing to and defining it.  

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[1] Wallace Stegner, “The Best Idea We Ever Had,” Marking the Sparrow’s Fall: The Making of the American West, Page Stegner, ed (New York, Henry Holt and Company, 1998), 137.

[2] http://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/anps/anps_4d.htm

[3] http://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/anps/anps_4f.htm

Digital History Storytelling - Project Proposal

           During the summer of 2013, I interned at the New Jersey Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial. Sarah Hagarty, the Memorial’s curator, had been doing a lot of great work organizing forums comprised of veterans and historians alike to educate the public about various topics of scholarship about the Vietnam War. In one of our conversations, she mentioned that she was organizing a forum that would address American women’s experiences in the military during the Vietnam War. I was immediately intrigued, and submitted a proposal to write my senior thesis on this topic.

            Through this Omeka project, I hope to transform my thesis for a digital platform. Between 10-15,000 women served in the military in Vietnam, but their experiences have all but remained on the periphery of historical scholarship. It is my hope to make my research and the research of historians on this topic available online for a larger audience.

            The 1960s and 1970s on the American home front was a time of social change and activism for various groups, including women. Through the site, I hope to infuse an understanding of these changes in how women understood themselves and their decision to go to Vietnam. I also hope to spark a conversation about what women’s experiences said about the relationship between the military and women. By including already published oral histories (both audio and transcript files), pictures, military pamphlets, and short narrative pieces about women’s lives before, during, and after their tours of duty, I hope to make this story an accessible one. I seek to use spatial mapping tools to place women's experiences on a map in various of areas served in Vietnam. Ultimately, I hope to make this Omeka site a starting point for citizen historians, veterans, and academics alike who want to learn more about the topic outside of my project.