The east side of the small city of Cambridge (Massachusetts, USA), near MIT and Harvard University, has been the scene of intense transformations over the past decades. Since the late nineteenth century Portuguese, mostly Azoreans, arrived to work for industries that existed there and occupy the edge of the city; more recently, a Brazilian flow of immigrants come to this area and changed the traditional Portuguese taste with its own restaurants, beauty salons, Brazilian mass and festivities in the Portuguese church. Despite the most recent residential dispersion of former residents to suburban towns, due to gentrification, we can say that the Portuguese label got reinforced with these new arrivals. This area seems to attract Portuguese American and Brazilian events and public sociability, largely polarized by some former institutions rooted on previous local networks of families and neighbors. Based on an ethnographic study still in progress, this communication aims to analyze as an urban edge can be at the same time, a central place in the ethnic landscape of a metropolis - and wants to discuss how urban meanings of the place should be read at different temporal and spatial scales.

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Cambridge, MA; centro/periferia urbana; Portuguese