Aspects of Portuguese ethnic and immigrant experiences remain largely undocumented in a small urban area adjacent to Boston, in the intersection of the cities of Cambridge and Somerville, Massachusetts. Despite their metropolitan centrality, this permanence has been largely neglected in mainstream research on Portuguese ethnicity in New England, having been more concerned with areas in Southeastern Massachusetts and Rhodes Island (Smith, 1974; Holton & Klimt, 2009; Fonseca, 2018). However, Portuguese ancestry still characterizes the sociocultural and linguistic landscape of these two small cities which host a small, yet visible, Portuguese, and largely Azorean, community. For more than 100 years, this neighborhood has been a thriving ethnic Portuguese cluster (Wood & Kennedy, 1969; Ito-Adler, 1980; Pap, 1981; Boyer, 2005; Cordeiro, 2023), yet now faces the risk of urban erasure. Through a collaborative ethnography (Cordeiro & Formato, 2022) within the scope of a multidisciplinary approach, combining aspects of urban anthropology and sociolinguistics, the researchers aim to discuss how the process of ethnic erosion provoked by accelerated gentrification is concomitant with signs of heritage resilience of an Azorean Portuguese landscape north of Boston, reflecting how present generations of Portuguese Americans construct common memories towards an uncertain future.

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This publication is an output of the following project(s):

• Ethnic heritage in the shadows: a collaborative ethnography of Azorean American resilience in Cambridge and Somerville, Massachusetts, USA