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Reviewed by:
  • Community, Culture, and the Makings of Identity: Portuguese-Americans along the Eastern Seaboard
  • Kate Vieira
DaCosta Holton, Kimberly, and Andrea Klint, eds. Community, Culture, and the Makings of Identity: Portuguese-Americans along the Eastern Seaboard. Portuguese in the Americas Series. Vol. 11. Series Ed. Frank F. Sousa. North Dartmouth, Massachusetts: U of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture, 2009. 650 pp.

This latest volume published by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth's Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture offers a thematically and theoretically rich contribution to the fields of Lusophone and Migration Studies. Comprised of 20 essays, this edited collection features new, often stunning, work alongside carefully selected classics of Portuguese-American Studies. The result is that the book can benefit two audiences: those new to Portuguese-American Studies and those already working in the field.

Some of the most innovative essays use a comparative perspective to examine Portuguese migration, teasing out how national context (in, for example, Canada and Germany, as opposed to the U.S). can influence patterns of political and social incorporation. Other highlights include chapters on the way that expressive culture, including folk dancing, art exhibits, music, and newspapers, function transnationally and politically. Moreover, this volume's carefully argued sociological and historical essays on issues of class, education, and social mobility provide thorough correctives to stereotypes of Portuguese-Americans. In addition to filling gaps in our knowledge of Portuguese-American culture, these essays also contribute to pressing conversations in migration studies about immigrant adaptation and the transnational creation (and circulation) of culture.

Especially compelling are the chapters in the final of the five sections, entitled Race, Post-Colonialism, and Diasporic Contexts. In this section, the very category of analysis that organizes the volume, "Portuguese-American," is called into question. Miguel Moniz, for example, historicizes Portuguese-Americans' exclusion from the federal minority category. His essay complicates the category of "Portuguese" by showing how the identities of "Azorean islanders, Madeirans, continentals, and Cape Verdeans" are constructed in relation to official codifications and to each other (427).

The other essays in this section also fruitfully explore how Luso-American racial identities are often formed in relation to other Luso-Americans. Ana Yolanda Ramos-Zaya's ethnographic article argues that in New Jersey's Ironbound neighborhood Portuguese-Americans' "fragile whiteness" is threatened by the presence of another Portugese-speaking group, Brazilians. Portuguese female whiteness is in part consolidated, Ramos-Zaya argues, through eroticized stereotypes of Brazilian women. Gina Sanchez Gibau's and Marilyn Halter's essays on U.S. Cape Verdeans further demonstrate the ways that identity is formed in relation to existing U.S. racial structures and to the legacy of Portuguese colonization. And Kimberly DaCosta Holton's ethnography of New Jersey's Portuguese Angolan retornados examines how their complex role in Portugal's colonial history is implicated in their relationships with the Portuguese, Latin-Americans, Caribbeans, and Africans living in their midst. In whiteness and [End Page 152] ethnic studies, it has long been understood that racial categories and affiliation can be highly contingent. These essays extend such theories by showing precisely how inter-group relations, historical forces, social stratification, identification, and gender converge to racialize (or whiten) various Luso-American groups. Taken together, these theoretical interventions achieve what the editors hope for in the introduction: "to deepen and productively complicate the scholarly portrayal of 20th-century immigration to the U.S." (10).

I worry, however, that the volume's rhetorical organization does not do justice to this complexity. The editors suggest it would be desirable to "move past the analytically-limiting image of Portuguese-Americans as a homogenous group" (15). But the book leaves essays about Cape Verdeans, Brazilians, and Portuguese Angolans for the last section, rhetorically framing them as outsiders. A more integrated organization—for example, placing Moniz' essay in the section on political culture—might allow readers to more deeply experience the fluidity and complexity of Luso-American identities in diasporic contexts.

Moreover, while the book does include two essays on religious culture, I had expected to see more on the role of religion and religious institutions in Portuguese-American lives. Both chapters—one about the Newark Museum's exhibit on...

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