Of a Borderless Luso-Americanness
(December 25, 2011)
Vamberto Freitas

The monumental anthology Luso-American Literature: Writings by Portuguese-Speaking Authors in North America, recently released by the distinguished Rutgers University Press and edited by Professors Robert Henry Moser (University of Georgia) and Antonio Luciano de Andrade Tosta (University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign), stands as a singular literary milestone—bold, sweeping, and unprecedented in both its thematic reach and its national breadth. It opens new ethno-literary horizons by gathering together a wide spectrum of voices writing in Portuguese and English, all of them bound, in one way or another, to Lusophony as a historical and cultural axis stretching across three continents and the archipelagos of the Azores and Cape Verde.

This is, without exaggeration, a groundbreaking contribution to Lusophone diasporic studies. The volume assembles essays, chronicles, short fiction, and poetry, mapping a rich terrain of expression. Organized into three major sections, it begins with Luso-American writers and immigrants, moves to Brazilian voices, and concludes with Cape Verdean authors. Every text appears in English—whether originally composed in that language or carefully translated—clearly addressing readers who may know little, if anything, about this vast yet largely invisible world woven into the immense literary and cultural tapestry of North America.

In the opening section, “Luso-American Literature,” we encounter nearly all the names long familiar within our transatlantic circles, from Katherine Vaz, Frank X. Gaspar, and George Monteiro—who also provides the anthology’s introduction—to Francisco Cota Fagundes, Onésimo T. Almeida, José Francisco Costa, Eduardo Bettencourt Pinto, and Álamo Oliveira.

The Brazilian section, “Brazilian Voices,” brings together towering figures from the canonical literature of the largest Portuguese-speaking nation—among them Erico Veríssimo, Monteiro Lobato, Moacyr Scliar, Luís Fernando Veríssimo, Gilberto Freyre, Roberto DaMatta, and former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso—authors who spent time in North America and whose works bear the imprint of that passage. The immigrant Brazilian experience is further enriched by writers and poets working in Portuguese and English, gathered under the playfully evocative subtitle “Brazuca and Beyond.” Though some may be lesser known, their literary merit and cultural resonance are unquestionable.

From Cape Verde, “Cape Verdean Voices” gathers both canonical and emerging figures, from the poet Jorge Barbosa to writers such as Viriato Gonçalves and Donaldo P. Macedo.

Of course, some fundamental names may be absent from one section or another. Any anthology of this magnitude must contend with the constraints of space, and the editorial vision cannot possibly mirror the expectations of every reader. For my purposes here, I will concentrate primarily on the section devoted to Luso-American writers and others connected to our own history of emigration. It is worth remembering that while an anthology may consecrate authors within a recognized or emerging canon, it must also serve as a pioneering text—one that charts new creative territories still in motion. In this regard, Luso-American Literature fulfills its mission admirably.

Its publication could not be more timely. The Portuguese-speaking world has drawn closer together, in part through the currents of cultural globalization. Today, from what was once a remote corner of the Azores, one may watch a Brazilian or African newscast in real time, sharing in collective urgencies and aspirations across continents. For active readers in these countries and diasporic communities, literary production has become increasingly accessible through digital platforms and online bookstores.

For me personally, one of the anthology’s most gratifying revelations was the encounter with Brazilian-American writing and a more expansive roster of Cape Verdean authors—voices that, in both languages, transform the experience of being “hyphenated” citizens in a nation composed of nations. They remind us that their imaginative worlds remain deeply anchored in our common homeland: the Portuguese language, in all its sociocultural, geographic, and historical variations—or simply in ancestral memory. Though every text appears here in English, what emerges, line by line and stanza by stanza, is the tender ache of saudade—voiced in a chorus of accents—mourning lost worlds while grappling with the anxiety of reinvention, of shedding memory and remaking oneself in a new society, whether compelled by economic necessity or drawn by the allure of radical difference.

One of the most compelling “Brazuca” pieces in the collection—“Disha for Four Hours,” by Sérgio Vilas-Boas—recounts the author’s arrival in New York and his first job washing dishes in a Portuguese restaurant. The narrator navigates and discharges the inherited anti-Portuguese resentment of his homeland, inviting laughter tempered by recognition: the irony of emigrating from Brazil only to find the old colonizer resurrected as the eternal employer. In this, he echoes sentiments long articulated by writers closer to our own emigrant experience.

Elsewhere—whether in chronicle, fiction, or verse—this warm tropical prose transplanted to colder northern latitudes celebrates and laments in equal measure the cost of reinvention: the construction of new worlds atop the ashes of old ones. Ironically, in some of these pages, Brazil itself becomes a lost world, even though much of Brazilian migration to the United States began in the 1980s, precisely when the nation was emerging from years of repression.

The late Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante, reflecting on his own years of European exile, once observed that what irritated him most about certain strains of so-called magical realism was how readily they conjured the cliché of a dancer adorned with flowers and bananas—an image designed to satisfy the exotic fantasies of more powerful outsiders. Luso-American Literature includes an excerpt from Kathleen de Azevedo’s novel Samba Dreamers, which revisits this theme through the eyes of a Southern Californian protagonist acutely aware of Hollywood’s machinery of stereotype and its long production of distorted imaginaries about the “others” to the south.

The editors justify their expansive definition of “Luso-American” by arguing that the term must now embrace other North American communities whose origins are rooted in the broader Lusophone world—these “new social realities” of a shared diaspora—just as the label “Hispanic” encompasses those from Spanish-speaking countries. If Brazilians and Cape Verdeans accept this designation, then from our vantage point we can only welcome this widening of our historical, linguistic, and cultural embrace.

Reference

Luso-American Literature: Writings by Portuguese-Speaking Authors in North America. Selected, edited, and introduced by Robert Henry Moser and Antonio Luciano de Andrade Tosta. New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2011.

Vamberto Freitas at Seventy-Five

The Long Work of Critically Listening to and writing about  Dispersed Voices

Filamentos – arts and letters
Bruma Publications | Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute (PBBI),
California State University, Fresno

Introduction

For more than three decades, Vamberto Freitas has practiced literary criticism as a form of sustained attention—patient, rigorous, and ethically alert. His work has traced the quiet, often overlooked trajectories of writers shaped by migration, insularity, and memory, especially those of American and Canadian authors with roots in the Azores. At seventy-five, his critical legacy stands not as a monument but as an ongoing conversation: a life of letters placed in the service of literature itself, where reading becomes an act of responsibility and criticism as a way of listening deeply to voices dispersed across geographies, languages, and generations.

Throughout the month of February, Filamentos – arts and letters, an initiative of Bruma Publications at the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute (PBBI), California State University, Fresno, will honor this legacy with daily segments published from February 1 through February 28. Each entry will revisit, reflect upon, and extend the critical pathways opened by Vamberto Freitas, reaffirming the enduring relevance of his work within Atlantic, diasporic, and transnational literary studies.

Vision

To honor literary criticism as a form of cultural stewardship—one that listens across distance, preserves intellectual memory, and affirms the centrality of diasporic voices within the broader landscape of contemporary literature.

Mission

Through this February series, Filamentos – arts and letters seeks to celebrate the life and work of Vamberto Freitas by foregrounding criticism as a practice of care, rigor, and continuity. By publishing daily reflections, excerpts, and critical engagements, this initiative reaffirms Filamentos’ commitment to literature that crosses borders, sustains dialogue between islands and continents, and recognizes reading as an ethical act—one capable of holding dispersed voices in thoughtful, enduring relation.