Portuguese Heritage Publications of California

Impact of Acculturation on the Family Dynamics of Portuguese Immigrants in the US

Portuguese Heritage Publications — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:52:24 +0000

Aurora Meneses da Silva, B.S., Graduate Student at the Marriage and Family Therapy M.S. Program, Purdue University Calumet, is developing a study on the impact of acculturation on the family dynamics of Portuguese immigrants in the U.S.. The purpose of the study is to understand how acculturating to the U.S. affects/affected Portuguese immigrants and their families, and how the therapist can better support immigrant families. The survey will be available until March 6th 2012. Therefore, I would like to request your help in spreading this email among Portuguese and Portuguese-Americans that might fit the criteria of participation.

Criteria to participate:

1) to be at least 18 years of age;
2) to be permanent resident in the U. S. (students/scholars on temporary visas do not qualify);
3) to have immigrated from Portugal OR, at least, one of your parents immigrated from Portugal; and,
4) to be original either from Portugal mainland, the Azores or Madeira archipelagos.

Participants will be given the opportunity to answer the survey either in Portuguese or English. At the end of the survey you will have the opportunity to enter a drawing for eight of $25 gift cards. Please follow this link to access the survey: https://www.psychdata.com/s.asp?SID=146125

A paper-based version of the survey is also available. If participants prefer to receive the survey in their homes, an email with their address can be sent to ameneses@purduecal.edu, and the survey, as well as a stamped envelope with the address at which the survey can be returned, will be mailed to the participants.

If you have any questions about the study, please feel free to email me at ameneses@purduecal.edu or the principal investigator, Professor David Nalbone, at dnalbone@purduecal.edu.

I would also appreciate if you could email this information to other Portuguese living in the U.S. who might be interested in participating in this study.

Aurora Meneses da Silva, B.S.
Graduate Student at the Marriage and Family Therapy M.S. Program
Teaching Assistant
Purdue University Calumet

Job Opportunities for Portuguese-Speaking Candidates, California and Texas

Portuguese Heritage Publications — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:37:59 +0000

As a follow up to our blog of February 2nd. on a similar subject, this time we are able

to provide specific information regarding the States where these employment opportunities exist – California and Texas. In addition, we are also able to provide the direct contact information where you might find more details about these opportunities. To learn more please contact Alta Miller:

e-mail: amiller.nbe@blizzard.com

Phone: 512-485-7589

Good luck!

Great Job Opportunities for Portuguese Speaking Candidates

Portuguese Heritage Publications — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 21:36:51 +0000

The business world has become increasingly global as multi-national companies expand their reach worldwide. As these companies strategically position their footprint to take advantage of the global economy, the demand in the last ten years for skilled multi-lingual candidates also increased.

Several of these opportunities are currently posted on www.careerbuilder.com . We invite you to check out the URL below for several job opportunities available to Portuguese speaking candidates:

http://www.careerbuilder.com/Jobseeker/Jobs/JobResults.aspx?IPath=QH&ch&rs&_ctl0%3A_ctl1%3AucQuickBar%3As_rawwords=portuguese&_ctl0%3A_ctl1%3AucQuickBar%3As_freeloc&_ctl0%3A_ctl1%3AucQuickBar%3As_jobtypes=ALL&qsbButton=Find+Jobs

We wish all the applicants the best of luck and success in their career endeahvors. Please drop us a note if you find this blog helpful.

Portuguese Heritage Publications of California, Inc. is a non-profit organization 501 c (3), created to research, preserve and disseminate vanishing memories and current relevant events about the Portuguese presence in California.

For more about PHPC, please visit us at: www.PortugueseBooks.Org and on Facebook at Portuguese Heritage Publications.

Adventures of a Portuguese Poet

Portuguese Heritage Publications — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 18:28:57 +0000

Wild-hearted Luis Vaz de Camoes’ years abroad are not well-known but that hasn’t lessened his legend…

Poets have always been a little crazy: They admit it themselves: “The lunatic, the lover and the poet/Are of imagination all compact”, William Shakespeare wrote in 1590s.

A few decades before those words were penned, they were embodied in the life of a young man named Luis Vaz de Camoes, now revered as one of Portugal’s greatest poets and celebrated both there and in Macau, where he may have spent a few years.

Though time has obscured the details of Camoes’ biography, glimpses of a crazy romantic still wink through the heavy dust of history. His personal plotline swings from royal favor to banishment and back again—spanning several countries and including a street brawl, a shipwreck, and several scandalous love affairs.

Camoes was born to an aristocratic family in Lisbon around 1524, and his youth was apparently “less than subdued,” as Britannica’s online encyclopedia dryly notes. The historian Edmond Taylor was less cautious in his 1972 description: “He was brilliant, wild, and handsome… he became a gay though penniless young roisterer-at-large in the capital.”

After banishment from Lisbon in his twenties—it’s not clear why, although there were rumors of an indecorous romance with a princess or lady-in-waiting, or both—Camoes set sail with the Portuguese navy to defend colonial territory. He was blinded in one eye during a skirmish with Moors somewhere along the North African coast, a detail that adds to his mystique in later portraits.

Camoes returned to Lisbon around 1551 and soon tangled with trouble again, this time landing in prison for injuring a royal officer during a street fight. His sentence was reduced to three years of forced military service, and in 1553 he was shipped off to Goa, India. When his service there was over, he reportedly sailed for Macau and took up a post with the colonial administration.

Perhaps it was all this time at sea that inspired Camoes to write Os Lusiadas (The Lusiads), an epic poem about the voyages of Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama to the East. (Camoes and da Gama were also distantly related.) Many people believe Camoes began composing the poem while in Macau, though probably not in the exact grotto that now bears his name there.

The paucity of firm facts about Camoes’ years abroad hasn’t stopped biographers from casting him in plenty of misadventures. Some say the poet’s stay in Macau ended when he was charged with corruption and sent to Goa for trial, suffering a shipwreck in the Mekong Delta en route. Others add an extra touch of drama to the tale, claiming that Camoes carried his manuscript to shore on his head but lost his latest girlfriend in the disaster.

The wild-hearted, one-eyed poet finally seemed to settle down in his last decade, after a friend paid for his passage back to Lisbon from Mozambique (it’s unclear what Camoes was doing there). When Os Lusiadas was published in 1572, the poet dedicated it to King Sebastian, who apparently liked it enough to grant him a modest pension.

Camoes died in 1580, around age 56. As with many poets, death seemed to be a good career move—his popularity has surged posthumously, and most sources now refer to him as the “national poet” of Portugal. But perhaps he would not even have cared, judging from this line of his most famous work:

“O Glory of Commanding! O vain thirst / Of that same empty nothing, we call fame!”

By Amanda Bensen, courtesy www.smithsonian.com/news, Sept. 01, 2008

Portuguese Heritage Publicaions: www.PortugueseBooks.Org.

Corvo – The Smallest Azores Island in Movies

Portuguese Heritage Publications — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 03:46:25 +0000

It’s never easy to get to Corvo Island. It´s the most isolated point in Europe and the most inaccessible, located on the western extremity of the Azorean Islands – Portugal, in mid Atlantic Ocean.

Since the beginning of the human colonization in Corvo until the end of the 20th century, this island lived secluded and totally self-dependent. A closed agricultural community with ancestral rituals and codes but open to the sea. Historical are the stories about their relationships, economical and social, with the sailors and the pirates that sailed around the coast of the island. The state of Portugal was distant, the world for Corvo was the international sea trade and Corvo was in the center of that trade.

Maybe there’s no place anymore for a film that wants to portray a society with specific habits and rituals, preserved and left untouched by time. The fascination about Corvo now is to be able to present a strange portrayal, maybe through excess, of the we

A cameraman and a soundman arrived in Corvo in 2007, the smallest island in the archipelago of the Azores. Right in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, Corvo is a large rock, 6km high and 4km long, with the crater of a volcano and a single tiny village of 440 people. Gradually, this small filming crew was accepted by the island’s population as its new inhabitants, two people to add to a civilization almost 500 years old, whose history is hardly discernible, such is the lack of records and written memories.

Shot at a vertiginous pace throughout a few years, self‐produced between arrivals, departures and coming‐backs, “It’s the Earth not the Moon” develops as the logbook of a ship, and turns out as a patchwork of discoveries and experiences, which follow the contemporary life of a civilization isolated in the middle of the sea.

A long atlantic film‐odissey that combines anthropological records, literature, lost archives, mythological and autobiographical stories. Portuguese director Goncalo Tocha’s movie “It’s the Earth Not the Moon” (www.naterranaonalua.com) will be featured at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria NY), on Sunday January 8th.

The film won several awards in 2011:

Official Selection:

Festival Internacional de Cinema de Lisboa

Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival

Vancouver International Film Festival

Valdivia International Film Festival

Vienna International Film Festival

Winner:

Festival Locarno

Prize for Best Feature Film in International Competition – Lisboa

(Courtesy: PortugueseCircle.com/news)

Holiday Book Basket

Portuguese Heritage Publications — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 17:05:25 +0000

Don’t let this opportunity pass you by!!!
Forget about Food Baskets, Treat Baskets, or even Wine Baskets. This Holiday Season give the gift that will last a lifetime.

Portuguese Heritage Publications of California, PHPC is launching its Holiday Book Basket. A one time special offer good through December 31, 2011, consisting of the following books and CD:

2 Portuguese Shore Whalers of California, wonderfully documented and illustrated stories, of the Portuguese in the whaling industry.
1 Holy Ghost Festas, a CD of all 508 pages of the out of print book for family members to treasure.
1 Capelinhos: A Volcano of Synergies – Azorean Immigration to America, includes the touching stories of friends and neighbors who experienced a dramatic change of life, whether they stayed or immigrated.
1 IV International Conference on the Holy Spirit Festas, beautifully color ilustrated account of the conference which took place last year, for the first time in San Jose, California.

Four hard cover, full color, DeLuxe edition books and one CD, a $150.00 value, now for only $87.00 plus tax. This special offer applies only to orders to be shipped within the continental USA. For more information on the content of each book and instructions on how to order, please visit: www.PortugueseBooks.Org

If you are paying online with PayPal or your credit card, you can add this special item to your cart with the button below. If you are submitting our online order form to arrange payment by check or money order, there is a field you can use to add this item.

New York Boy’s Message in a Bottle Reaches Azores

Portuguese Heritage Publications — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 20:46:31 +0000

An 11-year-old US boy was stunned to get a reply to his message in a bottle from Portugal’s Azores Islands – via the more surefire medium of email.

Curtis Kipple wrote a letter about himself and his hometown in New York state, and put it in a bottle which was dropped into the Atlantic in March. The message was found last week by Ana Ponte, 25, from a fishing village in the island of Terceira, on the Azores archipelago.

The fifth-grader’s bottle had travelled 2,600 miles (4,190km). “My brother and my father wake up earlier today and went to sea to catch a seafood very common here, and found a bottle with a message from a boy Curtis Kipple,” said Ms Ponte’s email -written in both English and Portuguese – to Curtis’s school.

The bottle was set adrift 10 months ago by a fisherman off North Carolina’s
Outer Banks. Chris Albrecht – Curtis’s teacher at Fred W Hill School in Brockport, New
York state – said the project had really caught the children’s imagination.”Curtis had tears in his eyes when I told him the news,” said Mr Albrecht.

The boy’s bottled message was not the first to be found – another was discovered in Nova Scotia in June – but Curtis’s has travelled the farthest.

Mr Albrecht, who teaches language, arts and science, said it was a useful
exercise for teaching children about geography and how to write formal
letters.

President Lincoln Seamstress from Madeira?

Portuguese Heritage Publications — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 01:41:20 +0000

We definitely need your help on this one!

It has come to our attention that President Lincoln’s seamstress was an immigrant from the Portuguese island of Madeira. We are engaged in the process of researching whether this is accurate information or hear say. We could certainly use your help if you possess solid evidence that will confirm such assertion, or know someone who might.

If you are able to provide such evidence, PHPC will be pleased to award you a free copy of our popular “Portuguese Shore Whalers of California” publication, in recognition of your effort.

Thank you!

J. A. Freitas Library – A Precious Nugget of Portuguese History

Portuguese Heritage Publications — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 17:58:37 +0000

Are you looking for information on your Portuguese family ancestors who have immigrated to California? Are you interested in researching the history of Portuguese throughout the world? If so, this blog is for you!

Often PHPC website visitors researching family ancestry, or simply curious about the history of the Portuguese in California, will inquire as to where they may be able to find resources to help in their research.

Today we are bringing to you an extremely valuable and helpful resource to those research jocks interested in Portuguese history in general and Portuguese immigration to California in particular.

We are talking about a precious nugget in the vastness of California’s libraries. The J. A Freitas Library was founded in 1964 and it is privately owned by the Supreme Council of the Portuguese Fraternal Society of America (PFSA). The library is located on 1120-24 East 14th. Street, San Leandro, CA 94577 and it is open to the public Monday through Friday 9 AM – 4:30 PM

Today the J.A Freitas Library is home to a book collection consisting of 11,914 works dealing with the Portuguese throughout the world, including many titles documenting the Azorean immigration to California. Library visitors will also find an extremely valuable, and fairly complete, sample of periodicals published by the Portuguese in California, some dating back to the 1800′s.

We hope that you find this information useful in your research efforts.

Publishing your Master or PhD Thesis

Portuguese Heritage Publications — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 15:35:21 +0000

The presence of the Portuguese in California, beginning in the mid 1800′s is an integral part of the state’s history.

Portuguese Heritage Publications of California’s primary objective is to capture and document this rich history for future generations.

If you are planning to start, are currently working on, or have already completed your Master’s or PhD thesis project, PHPC may be interested in helping you publish it.

If the subject of your project relates directly or indirectly, to PHPC’s primary objective, as mentioned above, and you need support in publishing your work, our Book Review Committee is interested in talking with you.

For more details, please contact us at: info@portuguesebooks.org

Thank you!