My whole life has been about straddling two different worlds. Living in two distinctive cultures, the Portuguese and the American, where I was expected to thrive. In the world that I was born into, it was deeply marked with culture. A home filled with love, family, camaraderie, friendships, language, music, religion, and the smells of wonderful foods emanating from our kitchen. A life filled with laughter and the occasional debate between my father and I at the dinner table. He was a great listener, even if he didn't agree with me, which was most of the time, he always let me speak my peace. I would lay out my side of it, and then he would lay out his side, and we would meet somewhere in the middle. He gave me my voice.
My home was an extension of a home that was set in a faraway place thousands of miles away. My Dad kept an extensive vegetable garden with fruit trees, mainly peaches and figs. Many friends and family would come and pick from his garden, a garden that filled him with pride. A passion that would propel his life until the very end. We always had an abundance of vegetables and my Dad would offer it to everyone. We also had plenty of animals over the years, including chickens, and rabbits.
My first language was not English. When I was born, my Mom didn't speak a word. She had only been here a year at that time. So, when I started primary school I barely knew how to communicate with the other children or teacher, aside from my name, numbers, letters, and shapes. I spent a few years in the ESL room, learning how to speak the language. I also spent a lot of that time learning how to sound more "American". This sounds comical to me now, because I was American, the whole time. Mostly, I felt different from everyone in my class. Although my class was pretty diverse at the time, I was the only one that couldn't speak the language, and the only one who's parents spoke broken English. I remind my boys often, that when they see someone who is having a difficult time with the language, just remember that your Mom used to be in their shoes.
Speaking Portuguese was a given. We were all raised, my cousins and I, around family, and community, so we had no choice. Most of the adults that were part of our lives didn't speak English either. I also spent time overseas visiting my grandparents and other family members, so keeping our language alive was very important to our culture and to our relationships with other family members. So it only made sense that my Dad would start teaching me how to read and write Portuguese as well in his spare time. At the time, I couldn't grasp why he was forcing me to spend a few hours on Saturdays conjugating verbs and writing as he dictated, but now I am so grateful that he did.
We've all spent so much time together. One of the greatest things about being part of a big family is you're always surrounded by them. We were always at someone's house, or traveling together, my Aunts and Uncles were like extended parents, always looking out for all of us. My Dad used to always say that his nephews and nieces were like his own children. My cousins were my best friends, they were like my siblings even. There were plenty of big sisters and big brothers to go around. We've also been to our fair share of weddings, christenings, communions, and birthdays. Unfortunately, now that we are all older, we are starting to see more and more funerals.
The Portuguese community was a big part of my life growing up. We frequented the Portuguese Church where I spent most of my time as a child, my parents were very much involved there. My Dad was the director of the catechism program, and every year he would put together a field day of sorts. He would plan a whole day of games, food, and fun at a local park, Cooke Field in Yonkers. Every year he would also put together the most beautiful seasonal Christmas displays I have yet to see again. He and my mother put so much time into putting that all together. As a teenager, I also taught catechism at the church, and I played the organ during mass and special holidays.
We also frequented the Portuguese Community Center where we spent many weekends dancing the night away, where I made many of my friends. Portuguese Club hopping was also a thing, we'd get together and drive over to other clubs in the vicinity and hang with friends from other towns. I feel blessed to have made so many worthwhile friends that I am still in contact with. It was a wonderful community to grow up in. Portuguese picnics where you knew everyone, where you had to make sure you weren't doing anything too scandalous because you knew it would get back to your parents, Portuguese food set up all over, and Portuguese music. Boy were we a proudful bunch, pride in our culture, pride in our roots. We still are.
You'd be surprised to know that I hadn't tried many of the usual American staples until I was well into my teens. Something as commonplace as having pizza on Fridays or visiting the local Chinese restaurant for some takeout was foreign to me. See what I did there? Foreign. We didn't eat out much, most of our meals were culturally based and both of my parents did the cooking. It was a good way to save money at the time too, I'm sure. My parents spent years working opposite schedules, Dad worked nights, Mom worked days and she would usually work every other weekend. On the weekends that my Mom worked, my Dad would take my brother and I to a local park, Tibbets Brook Park, in Yonkers, and we would spend the whole day there. My Dad would set out his chair and read his newspaper while my brother and I rode our bikes throughout the entire park, on our own mind you. I remember being on the other side of the park and my Dad would whistle to get our attention, and we knew it was time to go. Great memories.
As I got older, I realized that I was also being exposed to American culture, it was also becoming a part of me, while in school, with school friends, participating in different activities, even at the grocery store. I was being molded by a different set of cultural ideals and traditions that would also become a part of me. Two cultures woven and intertwined within me, two cultures that made me who I am today.
We were all very much aware of how much of a privilege it was to be able to live in the US. We were all raised to assimilate into this new place, this new home, even though most of us were born here. Assimilation outside of our homes, in a world that was very different from what our parents were accustomed to. My family loved this country because we knew how much it meant to be here.
It all started many years ago by a very determined, extraordinary woman, that I was blessed with meeting when I was just 2 years old. Realistically, I shouldn't remember this woman, I was so young at the time but it was a meaningful and loving time spent with a grandmother that I would never forget. Unfortunately for me and for all of us, she died a few days after our time together. The impression that she left with me lives on. I remember everything we did together during our visit, how she put an apron on me and gave me some kernels of corn to put in my apron and we proceeded to go outside and feed the chickens, the pictures we looked at and the meal we had. I remember what she looked like, what she sounded like, I still love to listen to anyone who speaks her native tongue. My Dad said that he couldn't believe how much I remembered about her. My Dad remembered something that had happened soon after our return home.. After we returned home after our visit, we were in the car waiting for my Mom, who was learning to speak English at a local public school. I was sitting in the back seat of the car and I started to yell for my grandmother, an older woman who I had noticed walking across the street. I was convinced that it was her. One encounter and she had left such an impression on me, and I've carried that with me all my life. I think of her often and I've always believed that our time together had always transcended time. I thank my Dad for that, because he had kept her alive for me, in his stories about his time together with her while growing up.. The retelling of the stories that she had shared with him about her life, her childhood, the family she had left behind so long ago that were still so vividly placed in her memories.
Back then, the only means of contact in between families on different continents was through letters and my grandmother did not know how to read or write, no one in her immediate family knew. So there was no communication for many years. She found out from someone who had traveled to Brazil of the passing of her parents, 10 years after it happened. The way my Dad tells it.. she grieved as if she had just lost them, the pain of not knowing all that time that her parents were no longer on this earth was heartbreaking for her. The realization from so long ago that she would never see her parents again had become reality.
My father said, that back then during the height of immigration. When someone left their families and villages to immigrate to new continents, it was like a funeral. Parents would cry and scream as they left because they knew that the odds of seeing them again were very small. Trips were very expensive, most weren't able to even write a letter. Once they left, they would hear nothing else about them, not even if they reached their destination safely.
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