Two discretely shaped yet interdependent narratives creating a family saga from the viewpoints of both maternal and paternal lines (a difficult and rarely successful strategy for fiction) comprise this large and capacious novel. Distant Music begins in the nineteenth-century and extends well into the twentieth, a diptych retelling the story of the Woods and Ramos families and their descents in rough-and-tumble California. In crisp, succinct, and often elegant prose, rich in deftly selected detail, Julian Silva celebrates not only the resilience of men and women confronted with failure...

Jerry Williams' history of Azorean immigration to the United States offers us valuable insight into the experience and culture of Portuguese immigrants and their descendents. This account fills a major gap in American immigration history and gives us a comprehensive overview of how Portuguese-Americans-now numbering close to a million people-have come to constitute a vibrant and highly visible presence within southeastern New England, the areas around San Francisco and San Diego, Hawaii, and the New Jersey/New York metropolitan area. Even though Azorean immigrants all came from similar...

Two Portuguese-American Plays, comprised of Through a Portagee Gate, adapted by Patricia A. Thomas from the Charles Reis Felix memoir of the same name, and Amarelo, by Paulo A. Pereira, dramatize immigrant experience in the mill-town of New Bedford, Massachusetts. Each play begins or ends there, along with visits to Escamil, California, or the tiny village of Covoada, on the island of Sao Miguel, the Azores. Employing contrasting dramatic techniques, both works portray unforgettable protagonics, at once charming and idiosyncratic. In Through a Portagee Gate, the Radio Ensemble at the WNBH...

Tony: A New England Boyhood is an autobiographical novel about growing up in Gaw (New Bedford), Massachusetts in the 1930s much in the same way that Thomas Bailey Aldrich's celebrated boyhood novel, The Story of a Bad Boy, recounts his adventures growing up in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. But there are sharp differences between the two novels. Instead of a Yankee in a small town, we have a Portuguese boy, Tony Alfama, in an industrial city. Felix presents a rounded-out picture of Tony. You see Tony at home with his mother. You see him with the gang on the street. You see him at school. You see...

This gripping memoir is both a personal story and a portrait of a distinctive New England place--Fall River, Massachusetts, once the cotton cloth capital of America. Growing up, Joseph Conforti's world was defined by rolling hills, granite mills, and forests of triple-deckers. Conforti, whose mother was Portuguese and whose father was Italian, recounts how he negotiated those identities in a city where ethnic heritage mattered. Paralleling his own account, Conforti shares the story of his family, three generations of Portuguese and Italians who made their way in this once-mighty textile...

Happy People in Tears is an award-winning tale of diaspora that takes the reader on a voyage through five worlds--the island home of Sao Miguel, mainland Portugal, California, New England, and Canada--experienced and suffered through the obsessive search for happiness of a poor Azorean family of nine. It is a polyphonic novel, in which the voices of three of seven siblings narrate their versions of the family saga in alternating chapters, culminating in a dialogue between the key narrator, Nuno Miguel, and his estranged wife, Marta, who tells the story from her point of view and sheds a harsh...