Portuguese Americans

PORTUGUESE AMERICANS. Although few in overall numbers, Portuguese American radicals exerted a significant effect on economic and political life in southeastern New England, especially within the textile unions. They reached the apex of their influence just after World War II and declined sharply thereafter.

Before 1924, a quarter-million Portuguese immigrants came to the United States. More than eighty percent came from the islands: the Azores, Madeira, and Cape Verde, which were overcrowded and exhausted peasant economies. These immigrants settled mainly in two areas: California, where they became farm workers and then landowners, and New Bedford and Fall River, Massachusetts, where they formed a majority of the textile workers. As with most other immigrant groups, the Left community was concentrated among the industrial workers, and their leaders came from the more industrialized areas in the homeland; in this case, the Left was concentrated around Fall River and New Bedford and its leaders were from the mainland, especially from Lisbon.

The Portuguese Left in the United States was strongest between World War I and the immediate post–World War II years. The US movement was influenced by politics in Portugal: the alternating Right and Left governments during and after World War I and the dictatorship of Antonio Salazar, who ruled from 1928 to 1968. Many progressive labor leaders came to the United States during the 1920s and played a major role in the 1928 textile strike.

For six months in 1928, 30,000 New Bedford textile workers struck in the only organized opposition against the general wage cuts in New England during the late 1920s. The backbone of the strike was the Portuguese workers who followed the leadership of the Communist Party and other socialist groups. Their goals were progressive, tactics were militant, and organization was democratic. A number of the young Portuguese workers—including Augusto Pinto (who was deported to Portugal soon after the strike, and who died under mysterious conditions en route to prison in Cape Verde), Eula Figueiredo (also later deported), and Joe Figueiredo—emerged from the strike as leaders of the Left. Despite impressive community support during the strike’s early days, it was lost because of general economic conditions, the antagonism of the established, conservative craft unions toward the newer, more progressive industrial unions, and red-baiting tactics by the mill owners through the newspapers, courts, and government.

The Great Depression immediately followed the strike, and the Portuguese leadership, as with other national groups, split into a Left, which participated in the National Textile Workers Union (NTWU), and a Right, which joined the United Textile Workers (UTW). The two groups united and competed for leadership when the NTWU merged into the UTW in 1934. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA) under the Congress of Industrial Organizations organized the mills in the area. While the top leaders were the more conservative labor leaders from Fall River, the rank-and-file leaders were Portuguese workers active in the 1928 strike.

The showdown came in 1947 over the anticommunist affidavit provision in the Taft-Hartley Act. The leadership of the TWUA favored signing, but the Left ran opposing slates in many of the mills and won a few key elections. The top leaders of the national union, seeking a compromise, agreed to replace the anticommunist director of the joint board with a more progressive leader in return for tacit acceptance of the provision. This was the high point of the Left’s influence in the TWUA.

While most of the activity of the Portuguese Left was in the labor movement during the 1930s and 1940s, they also did community and political organizing. Just after the 1928 strike, Joe Figueiredo and others formed a Portuguese Alliance of two hundred to five hundred members, which during the Great Depression fought evictions, demanded and received food and clothing from government agencies, and organized support for the antifascist forces in Spain. Following World War II, Figueiredo and other Communist Party members within the alliance had a weekly radio program in Fall River. The program continued through 1948 despite the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s putting pressure on the station manager to cancel it.

The fall during the anticommunist era was rapid and relentless. As with other immigrant groups, the chief weapon used was fear of deportation. Eula Figueiredo, long a leader of the Portuguese Left, was arrested in 1950, harassed for many years, and finally deported as an undesirable alien in 1953 under the McCarren-Walter Act. This had a chilling effect on the Portuguese community.

Fueled by the new immigration since 1965, the Left revived somewhat within this generally conservative ethnic group. Portuguese fishermen and boat owners, whose leaders had been union organizers in opposition to Salazar, organized an effective tie-up against the fish buyers in 1980, although a fishermen’s strike in 1986 against boat owners split the community.

Aaronson, Roberta Hazen, and Daniel Georgianna. “Here We Come—Thousands Strong.” Spinner 2 (1982).

Georgianna, Daniel, and Roberta Hazen Aaronson. The Strike of 28’. New Bedford, Mass.: Spinner Publications, 1993.

Pap, Leo. The Portuguese-Americans. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981.