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Formato, G. & Cordeiro, Graça Índias (2026). “Between Tremont Street and the Island of Santa Maria: Belonging and Identity in the Azorean Diaspora of Cambridge and Somerville, Massachusetts.  Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies Conference.

G. Formato and M. D. Cordeiro,  "“Between Tremont Street and the Island of Santa Maria: Belonging and Identity in the Azorean Diaspora of Cambridge and Somerville, Massachusetts", in  Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies Conf., Toronto, 2026

@misc{formato2026_1775343475954,
	author = "Formato, G. and Cordeiro, Graça Índias",
	title = "“Between Tremont Street and the Island of Santa Maria: Belonging and Identity in the Azorean Diaspora of Cambridge and Somerville, Massachusetts",
	year = "2026"
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - “Between Tremont Street and the Island of Santa Maria: Belonging and Identity in the Azorean Diaspora of Cambridge and Somerville, Massachusetts
T2  -  Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies Conference
AU  - Formato, G.
AU  - Cordeiro, Graça Índias
PY  - 2026
CY  - Toronto
AB  - This paper explores the experiences of Azorean immigrants and their descendants in
Cambridge and Somerville, Massachusetts, through a multidisciplinary dialogue that
weaves together ethnography, history, and sociolinguistics. At its center is the Monteiro
family, who left the island of Santa Maria in the early 1960s, during Portugal’s Estado
Novo dictatorship, and have lived for more than fifty years in several houses along
Tremont Street, divided by the border between two cities. Their story illustrates the
layered negotiations of identity and belonging within the Portuguese diaspora.
The research engages two interconnected geographies: the island of Santa Maria,
where family memory, heritage, and symbolic return remain vivid, and the
neighborhood streets of Cambridge and Somerville, where daily life, community, and
American belonging are firmly rooted. This dual orientation reveals how identity is lived
simultaneously as Azorean and American, with “Portugal” appearing more as an official
national framework than as the primary referent of cultural life.
Rather than framing displacement and urban change (such as gentrification) as the
central narrative, this study highlights how place, memory, and kinship shape a
distinctive sense of home that is at once transnational and profoundly local.
Methodologically, the paper is constructed as a dialogic conversation between an
anthropologist from Lisbon, a sociolinguist who belongs to the family, and the lived
voices of the community itself. It further incorporates family memory objects – photo
albums, diaries, hand-sewn clothing and accessories, recipes, altars, and other
domestic artifacts – as ethnographic materials that anchor identity and belonging
across generations. Through these materials, the politics of home emerge not only in
narrative and place, but also in the intimate textures of everyday life.
ER  -