Portuguese-American Literature

Dear Colleagues,

A special number of Humanities co-guest-edited by Professors Francisco Fagundes and Onésimo Almeida will focus attention on PORTUGUESE MIGRANT AND ETHNIC LITERATURE IN NORTH AMERICA (U.S. AND CANADA). There are close to 200,000 Portuguese nationals in the U.S. and just under 1,400,000 Americans in the country who claim total or partial Portuguese ancestry. The number of Portuguese nationals in Canada is estimated at approximately 90,000 and that of Portuguese Canadians as not quite 500,000. The North American literature spoken of here is attributable to this group of individuals and their ancestors. In addition, two major Portuguese writers self-exiled in the U.S., José Rodrigues Miguéis and Jorge de Sena, also wrote extensively about diasporic themes.

The first volume of poetry, Rimas de Ironia Alegre, was published in Boston by the Portuguese migrant Manuel Garcia Monteiro in 1896; the first migrant self-story of the two dozen or so life-stories in existence today is The Autobiography of Charles Peters, published in Sacramento in 1915. For several generations, Portuguese migrant- and ethnic-themed literature oscillated precariously between a few examples of scattered experiential verse awaiting an anthologizer, a few volumes of poems and loose poems published in Portuguese-language newspapers, a novel, and a trickling of memoirs every few years, until the 1960s. In this decade, a much greater number of Portuguese migrants sought an education in America, something that their ancestors, with some exceptions, had for the most part not been able to do or neglected to do. In the 1970s and 1980s other groups of educated individuals arrived from Portugal, and many Portuguese ethnics, avid of searching for their ancestral roots, instead of being ashamed of their ancestry as former Portuguese-Americans had been, initiated what can only be called the heyday of Portuguese migrant and ethnic literature in North America. This trend continues to this day. A number of migrant writers continue to write in Portuguese: Onésimo Teotónio Almeida, José Francisco Costa, or in Portuguese and English: Irene Marques, paulo da costa. Some of the most notable ethnic writers of today—from novelist and memoirist Charles Reis Felix to novelist and poet Frank X. Gaspar to novelist and short story writer Katherine Vaz, to Canadian novelists Erika de Vasconcelos and Anthony de Sa—have attained a considerable following and some have seen their works published by prestigious national presses. A number of “Portuguese” presses have also emerged in some universities with strong Portuguese programs, or in communities founded and maintained by individuals or associations: Gávea-Brown, Brown University; Tagus Press, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth; and, among others in the U.S. and Canada, Portuguese Heritage Publications of California.

Other Portuguese writers who were never migrants also wrote poetry, fiction, and travelogues dealing totally or partially with North American migrant and ethnic themes. All of these writers together—well over one hundred—penned the hundreds of works constituting the literature that the special issue of Humanities means to acknowledge and study.

Prof. Dr. Francisco Cota Fagundes
Prof. Dr. Onesimo Almeida
Guest Editors

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• Azores
• Madeira
• migrant
• migration
• (self-)exile
• ethnic
• diaspora
• autobiography
• memoir
• travelogue