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Our Lady of Miracles: Tradition and Piety Among Portuguese-Americans
| Article
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19684 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1991 |
3,821 Words |
| Author
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Andrei Simic
Andrei Simic, professor of anthropology at the University of
Southern California, is a specialist in Mediterranean and East
European cultures, Euro-American ethnic groups, social
gerontology, peasant societies, and visual anthropology. He
served for several years as a consultant to the Portuguese
Ethnic Studies Project of Alameda County. |
Once a year, during the second week of September, the usual quiet pace of life in the small agricultural town of Gustine, in California's fertile San Joaquin Valley, is interrupted by thousands of Portuguese-Americans who gather for the Festa da Nossa Senhora dos Milagres (Feast of Our Lady of Miracles). A week of prayer is culminated by four days of festivities and religious pageantry, reaffirming the deeply pious nature of these Azorean Catholic immigrants and their descendants, as well as their continuing ties to ancestral traditions and value. In this respect, Gustine has become an important religious and ethnic pilgrimage center.
Although in many ways Gustine is a typical rural California community, with its well-maintained wood-frame cottages and its broad, shop-lined main street, the influence of the Portuguese--who constitute a significant proportion of Gustine's population of more than three thousand--is pervasive, though subtle. Wandering through its peaceful neighborhoods, one can identify many of the Portuguese homes by their well-tended gardens, with rows of couves (kale) shaded by fig and loquat trees, and by the statues of the Blessed Virgin that here and there grace a front lawn. Local markets offer a variety of ethnic specialties such as linguica (a pork sausage laced with red pepper and garlic), morcelas (a spicy blood sausage), bacalhao (dried cod, long a staple food of Portugal and the Azores), and a pungent white cheese produced locally according to a recipe from the island of Sao Jorge. In the surrounding countryside, the Azorean presence is further evidenced by names such as Gomes, Borba, and Rocha on signs marking the entrances to lovingly cared for dairy farms.
Festa da Nossa Senhora dos Milagres
By Friday afternoon, large numbers of Azoreans from all over California, as well as some from more distant places, have converged on Gustine. In the evening they gather with family and friends to enjoy the folk music and dance presentations in the Portuguese Hall and at the nearby park. Especially popular are the cantarias, extemporaneous, competitive songs performed by pairs of men who take turns composing rhymed verses. These may deal with almost any subjects of common interest. Some praise the organizers of the festival or pay homage to Our Lady of Miracles. Others take the form of good-humored teasing, pitting the poetic skills of the two singers against each other--to the delight of the spectators. Other genres of songs, the melancholy fados, for example, express what the Portuguese call saudade, a word that can be translated roughly as "a sense of sentimentality and
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