California is still the state with the largest number of Portuguese immigrants and Portuguese descendants and the Massachusetts-Connecticut-Rhode Island cluster is the US area with the largest community, but the 1.3 million people who identify as Portuguese or their descendants are in increasingly geographically dispersed. This is one of the conclusions of the study “Immigrants and Portuguese descendants in the US in the 21st century”, now published by the Luso-American Development Foundation (FLAD). The same survey, covering the years 2006 to 2020, shows that the number of Portuguese speakers is growing and that they have a higher level of education than the rest of the community.
“We cannot act for and with the community without knowing how many members there are, who they are, under what circumstances, and in what states and cities we find them,” writes Rita Faden, president of FLAD, in the introduction to the study . To study this community, researchers led by Alda Botelho Azevedo, of the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lisbon, divided it into four groups: Portuguese immigrants, naturalized immigrants, Portuguese descendants who speak Portuguese, and Portuguese descendants who do not speak a language . Portuguese. .
Historically, a feature of the Portuguese community has been its geographic concentration, both on the East Coast (Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Connecticut) and in California. But in recent decades, “there are indeed signs of a change in the pattern of geographic distribution of Portuguese-speaking Portuguese descendants,” researchers Alda Azevedo and Lara Tavares tell DN, confirming that “the decline of this group is observed in states of traditional settlement of the Portuguese in the US and growth in other states (Florida, Texas, Georgia and New York).
But let’s look back to see how we got here. The oldest phase of Portuguese emigration to the US dates from 1800 to 1870 and is mainly related to whaling, which primarily involved the population of the Azores. “The main destination of this immigration, dominated by a poor farming population with very little education, corresponded to locations in New England, such as New Bedford or Nantucket (Massachusetts), but also had some locations in California (Sacramento, Monterey) or Hawaii as relevant destinations,” the study reads. A second phase corresponds to the period 1870/1880-1920, with intense migration flows to Hawaii (work on sugar cane plantations), Rhode Island and Massachusetts (the textile industry needed labor), and California (primarily agriculture and cattle breeding).The third phase takes place between 1920 and the mid-1950s, characterized by a decline in Portuguese emigration, a trend that would be reversed in the following decades with the Azorean Refugee Act, after the eruption of the Capelinhos volcano on Faial, but it returned after 1985, when the arrival of Portuguese to the US declined again.
Today, one of the conclusions of the study is that Portuguese-speaking Portuguese-speaking people are growing, while all other groups are declining. A reality that the researchers admit was “to some extent a surprise”, but which, according to Alda Azevedo and Lara Tavares, “has several explanatory factors, first of all, the efforts of the Portuguese community and the Portuguese proximity to teaching Portuguese at American schools”. The study also found that of the total number of U.S. residents born in or of Portuguese descent, more than one-fifth (22.49%) spoke Portuguese at home, in addition to English, a factor that, it reads, ” the preservation of cultural identity.”
One of the reasons for the decline in the population of Portuguese immigrants is their aging, the result on the one hand of “weak rejuvenation due to the reduction of the immigration flow and on the other hand of population aging”. says the study.
In terms of education, a new fact is the fact that 40% of Portuguese-speaking descendants who speak Portuguese have received higher education – almost 10 percentage points above the average for other US residents. The different groups in the community also behave differently in terms of economic activities. For example, one in five Portuguese immigrants works in construction. Portuguese descendants, especially those who speak Portuguese, have a higher percentage of employees in consulting, scientific, and technical activities than other US residents.
Source: DN
