Representations of the Portuguese in American Literature (review)

Reinaldo Silva's book is the most ambitious study to date on the representations of the Portuguese in Anglo-American literature. Although two studies had preceded his, Maria T. Vermette's The Image of Azoreans: Portrayals in Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century Writing (defended in 1975 as a PhD dissertation at Harvard University and published in 1984) and George Monteiro's 32-page article "The Poor, Shiftless, Lazy Azoreans': American Literary Attitudes Toward the Portuguese" (1979), the first of these studies did not have the focus that Silva's book possesses, and the second understandably lacked this study's broad scope. The book is divided into six chapters: "Locating the Portuguese at the Margins of American Literature"; "Scientific Racism and the Origins of Anti-Portuguese Stereotypes"; "Violence and the Portuguese"; "The Portuguese and Sexual License"; "Dirt, Alcoholism, Ignorance, Buffoonery, and the Portuguese"; and "Views from the Other Side: The Portuguese Speaking to the Mainstream."

Representations of the Portuguese focuses on the largely stereotypical representations of Portuguese in Anglo-American literature, from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The last chapter of the book dwells on representations of the Portuguese, as well as Anglo-Americans, by expatriate Portuguese, immigrant, and ethnic writers. One of the most innovative aspects of this study is the distinction drawn among writers from different parts of the country in the depiction of the Portuguese. The examples studied include writers from the three major areas where the Portuguese have settled: New England (with some attention also given to New York), California, and Hawaii. Most of the writers considered are regional writers, many of whom very little known and mostly unread today. As far as the depictions of Portuguese in the works of canonical writers, most of them are fairly well known. Most of the Portuguese characters in the fictional and dramatic works represented (there are no mentions of poetical works, except by Portuguese expatriate writer Jorge de Sena and Portuguese-American poets Thomas Braga and Frank Gaspar) are minor characters. No major or minor work of Anglo-American literature studied by Reinaldo Silva is totally dedicated to the Portuguese. The book provides insights as to why the Portuguese have been stereotyped by Anglo-American writers. As the author states, "most of these writers exhibit little if any interest in such things as the culture, way of life, anxieties, or inner desires of Portuguese characters, thus appearing overwhelmingly biased, unreliable, and superficial" (1).

In Chapter 2 the focus is on the racist depiction of the Portuguese. The main reasons for this racism are social Darwinism, the exalted patriotism of Anglo-Americans following the victory in the Spanish-American War, and the traditionally ethnocentric attitudes on the part of native-born Americans towards immigrants, particularly those with dark complexions. Ignorance plays an important role in these racist attitudes. The Portuguese and Cape Verdeans were often mistaken for one another – they are all Portagee, Black Portagee or some other variant of these slurs. The nature of bigotry with which Portuguese characters are depicted varies from region to region of the country, reflecting attitudes more circumscribed to that area, for example, New England Puritanism and its notoriously negative attitudes towards practitioners of Catholicism. In California, on the other hand, despite racist attitudes on the part of writers like Frank Norris, other writers do strike notes of admiration for some traits of their Portuguese characters, a case in point being Jack London. The greater economic success of some of the Portuguese in the farming and dairying industry in California vis-à-vis factory workers in the East probably contributed to ameliorate negative attitudes towards them based on physical or cultural traits.

Silva dwells on the tale entitled "The Guees," by Melville. His analysis includes a brief but balanced survey of criticism on this fictional text, some of it pointing towards Melville's alleged "racist" views, with a considerable body of it defending Melville's alleged attempt in the text to criticize Anglo-American...