Portuguese Grandma Stories

Have you seen Avo' on YouTube?

2012-02-02T12:02:00.000-08:00

I was searching for perfectly serious information about Portuguese grandmothers when I stumbled upon the Portuguese Grandmother series on YouTube. I couldn't stop watching. Jeffrey Popsick of Toronto, Canada, has been filming his grandmother, Angelina, since Dec. 2007. In the short episodes, she is doing simple things like eating soup, sleeping or washing the dishes, but the way she does it is so familiar to anyone who actually has had a Portuguese grandmother and so funny. I don't understand all the Portuguese words. She says them so quickly, but boy, do I understand the gestures. Worse, in about 15, I'll probably look just like her.
You can "Like" Portuguese Grandmother on Facebook or search for her on YouTube. The website, given, www.popsick.com, was not working when I checked it today.
Moral of the story: even if you're a wrinkly Portuguese grandma in black, you can be famous on YouTube. Here's a sample.
Enjoy.

"Portuguese Grandma" to generations of journalists

2012-01-24T15:47:00.000-08:00

When I started working on Stories Grandma Never Told, one of the first women I contacted was Dolores Freitas Spurgeon.She was one of my journalism professors at San Jose State. She never used the "Freitas" part of her name, but I was pretty sure she was Portuguese. I soon learned that her father was born in Madeira, and her Hawaii-born mother was the daughter of immigrants from Madeira.

Like so many other Portuguese women I interviewed, Dolores didn't think she was important enough to be written about, but the story she told me at her home in Santa Clara was an inspiration for a young writer.

Dolores wanted to go to college, but her parents offered no help or support. They figured education was a waste of money for a girl because she'd just get married anyway. She received a $25 PTA scholarship,which in the 1930s was enough to pay for her first year, but not enough to buy books. She had to borrow her friends' books or do her reading at the library. Her parents' overprotectiveness was also a problem. In her senior year, when she became editor of the school newspaper, her parents wouldn't let her go to the print shop at night to check the proofs. "They just didn't see any reason why any girl should be running around at night."

But Dolores was determined. She managed to make passing grades and got jobs on campus to help pay for the rest of her schooling. She graduated in 1936 and started teaching at Jefferson Elementary School. When San Jose State established its journalism department, she got a job as secretary to the department chairman. Over the years, she moved up to assistant instructor and finally full professor. She earned a master's degree and a general secondary credential at Stanford.

By the time I got to SJSU in the 1970s, she was a veteran professor, specializing in magazine writing. She took me under her wing, helping me publish my first articles and earn a $100 scholarship to help pay my fees.

She was married to the late John Spurgeon, but in an age when most women stayed home and took care of their families, they had no children, and she continued to teach.

Growing up, she attended the festas and enjoyed connecting with her Portuguese heritage, although she never became fluent in the language. One of the great thrills of her life was when she finally got to visit the land of her ancestors, she said."I'm in Portugal! I'm in Portugal!" she shouted when she landed in Lisbon for the first time. She wished her parents were still alive so she could tell them how she felt.

Over the years, we have kept in touch. Dolores, who retired in 1975, has sent me proud letters congratulating me for my books and honors. She helped me join the California Writers Club and was still an active member when I became president of the South Bay branch in the early 1990s. While the world moved into the computer age, she continued to send notes written by hand or typed on her old typewriter. Just last month, I received a Christmas card from her.

Although Dolores never had children or grandchildren, she gave birth to several generations of journalists, making her a very special Portuguese grandma.

Remembering Marie Gambrel

2012-01-06T12:19:00.000-08:00

When I interviewed Marie Dutra Gambrel in 1997, I wasn't sure she'd live until Stories Grandma Never Told was published. The tiny 77-year-old peering at me through thick glasses had spent more time in the hospital over the previous year than she had at home. She suffered from heart problems and severe asthma. Widowed and living alone in a single-wide mobile home in Sacramento, she somehow survived on $700 a month. Not just survived, thrived. Marie was a bundle of energy, full of stories. I had trouble writing fast enough to keep up. Her memory for names and dates was amazing.

Our interview went on so long we both got hungry and continued talking at a fast-food place nearby. She insisted on paying, even though I knew she couldn't afford it. I was two hours late to my next interview, but when I told them who I was with, they laughed. They knew Marie. Everybody knew Marie and everybody loved her.

Marie had had a hard life full of loss, but she didn't let it weigh her down. Instead, she treasured her sons, her friends, and her Portuguese heritage. She never got a chance to participate in the Holy Ghost festas in her youth, but in recent years, she was active in Sacramento's Portuguese community, usually showing up in one of the Portuguese costumes she had made, red, green and yellow for Portugal, blue and white for the Azores. She was active in the annual Camellia Festival parades, winning the hat contest three times, helped raise funds for the Portuguese Community Park, and helped research the book Portuguese Pioneers of the Sacramento Area.

By the time I left her place, Marie and I were old friends. After all, our families both came from Faial. On our trips to California, my husband Fred and I visited, and he loved her as much as I did. Between visits, Marie telephoned and sent me cards loaded with notes and clippings. She continued to spend a lot of time at the hospital, but she seemed unstoppable.

She outlived many of the older women in the book, but Marie Gambrel passed away on March 19, 2009, finally at rest with the Lord she loved.

Remembering Edna Sousa and Elaine Avina Fagalde

2011-12-29T10:12:00.000-08:00

Ah, memories. One day when I was working on Stories Grandma Never Told, my mother, Elaine Avina Fagalde, invited her favorite aunt,Edna Freitas Sousa, over to go through the old photo albums that had been hidden in the cedar chest for years. The tiny black and white pictures were taken when my grandmother and the rest of the Sousa/Souza siblings were young, growing up in Santa Clara, California, surrounded by aunts, uncles and cousins.

"Is that...?" "Oh my God, look at Annie." "Is that you?" Mom, Aunt Edna, my Dad (in the background) and I laughed and smiled at the memories. Of course, all of these pictures were taken long before I was born. But for these photo albums and these wonderful Portuguese women at our kitchen table, the memories would have been lost.

My mother passed away in 2002 from cancer. Aunt Edna made it to 100 years old before leaving us in April 2009. Just this morning, I thought of a question to which only my mother would know the answer, but it's too late.

This holiday season,take out the photo albums--yes, the pre-digital pictures--and look through them with your loved ones. Share the memories.

Christmas Eve was about Grandma Anne

2011-12-22T17:31:00.000-08:00

Dec. 24 was all about Grandma Anne Sousa Avina. You might think it’s all about

Christmas Eve, but it was also my grandmother’s birthday.

Grandma, like all the women in the Sousa clan, was heavy, with dark eyes and a bumpy nose—like me. She grew up in an age when women devoted themselves to home and family. She never learned to drive, never worked outside the home after her children were born, and rarely went anywhere on her own. She tended a lush flower garden, sewed, crocheted, watched her “stories” in the afternoon on TV, cooked, went to church, and gossiped with/or about the neighbors. She was known as a character, sometimes hard to please, but she was a generous, loving grandmother.

Throughout my childhood, we spent Christmas Eve at my grandparent’s home in Santa Clara. The 1920s Queen Anne house seemed like a mansion at the time. It was actually smaller than the house I have now, but I loved all the dark woodwork, the sliding doors between the living room and dining room, and the funny nooks here and there. I loved the big windows with their window seats, the spacious pantry in the back, and the room full of flowers off the front porch. I loved exploring Grandma’s bedroom with its old-fashioned furniture, the smell of face powder and perfume, and the rosary beads hanging on the bedpost.

At Christmas, I especially loved the tree. Grandpa Al always put up a huge tree. It seemed 10 feet tall to me, but I was shorter then. They decorated the tree with shiny balls, tinsel, and long tubular lights that looked like they had bubbling water inside. Under the tree, they set up a village with tiny houses, little people,lakes made of mirrors, and a train that circled around it. My brother Mike and I could play there for hours.

When we arrived, Grandma would be in the kitchen, with its red ceiling and its old-fashioned stove, preparing our family’s traditional Christmas Eve feast of linguica, beans, potato salad and various side dishes. Bowls of nuts, fudge and rocky roads could be found on every flat surface. And of course, there was birthday cake.

I can still see Grandma on her green sofa surrounded by presents and children, grandchildren, and nieces and nephews who all called her what sounded like Ann-Tannie. In our family, all the aunt names were spoken that way. Ann-Tedna, Ann-Tmamie, Ann-Tnellie. It was part of the Portuguese accent I never noticed until I was an adult. Nor was it strange to me when people lapsed into Portuguese.

While Grandpa sat quietly smoking his pipe in the wing chair in the corner, Grandma would open her presents, exclaiming at each one in her gravelly voice, and we kids would get to open one thing, knowing we needed to wait until after Mass on Christmas Day for the big haul.

Before Christmas, Grandpa would come to our house laden with gifts for our family, most of them for my brother Mike and me. He brought so many presents it took several trips from the car to the living room to get them all in. On Christmas day, we knew the holiday had truly begun when Grandma and Grandpa arrived.

Grandma would have been 109 this Christmas Eve. She died in 1982 when she was 80. Grandpa had died 16 years earlier from cancer. He was only 66. Grandma never stopped grieving his loss. I pray they’re together now.

It’s almost Christmas Eve. Happy birthday, Grandma, and Merry Christmas to everyone.

More Portuguese grandma books are here

2011-12-19T17:11:00.000-08:00

I just picked up the latest printing of Stories Grandma Never Told: Portuguese Women in California. I'm so excited I came up with a late-breaking holiday special. If you order directly from me before Christmas, I will sell copies to you for $10, no shipping. That's less than half price! I will also sell my other books to you at the same price. If you're interested, e-mail me at suelick@charter.net.

I hate getting commercials in my blogs as much as you do, so I promise a real, non-advertising post is coming very soon. Obrigada.

Veronica's Diary tells story of Portuguese girlhood

2011-12-13T10:45:00.000-08:00

At a recent book fair in southern Oregon, I met Veronica Esagui, author of Veronica’s Diary: The Journey of Innocence. She grew up in Lisbon. At age 18, having known her cousin Alberto for only a few days, she married him and left her home and family to start a new life across the Atlantic.

The fair was held in a chilly exhibit hall on a rainy day when few people ventured out to buy books, but I did get to meet Veronica.I traded one of my Portuguese books for a copy of the first volume of Veronica's Diary: The Journey of Innocence, not knowing what I would find. What I found was a fascinating story with many intriguing tastes of places I had been or heard about in Portugal.

Veronica's family was Jewish, her father German, her mother Portuguese. They went from very rich to very poor, and her parents were extremely strict. She always felt like an outsider and dreamed of escaping to North America, where everyone was rich, beautiful and happy. When her family arranged for her to marry her American cousin Alberto, she agreed. Would this be a happy marriage? All she knew was that she wanted to move to the land of movie stars and rock ‘n roll. The first volume takes us from early childhood to her first days of marriage. Already it looks like things are not going to be quite like she imagined. Now I want to know what happens next.

Veronica's Diary: The Journey of Innocence is told as a diary written in the voice of a child and then a young woman. Many English-language mistakes can be found, but after a while the story takes over, and you just want to keep reading. The book offers a nice taste of Portuguese life in the post-World War II years.

Esagui, today a chiropractor and host of The Author's Forum TV talk show, has published a sequel, Veronica’s Diary II: Braving a New World. For information, visit her website, www.veronicaesagui.net.

Yes, that is my grandma on the cover

2011-12-07T10:02:00.000-08:00

The woman on the cover of Stories Grandma Never Told is my grandmother, Anne Souza Avina. This is her wedding picture. Don't you just love the hat?

I grew up hearing the Portuguese language all around me. My grandparents spoke English to us, but when they got together with older family members or friends, they reverted to Portuguese. They also used the language to curse or to say things without other people understanding

them. That wasn't always safe in Santa Clara, California, because so many Portuguese Americans lived there.

Lorraine Freitas,one of the ladies in my book told me about how she heard people at a store say something unkind about her, and she confronted them. "I understood every word." Boy, were they embarrassed.

I never thought about my grandparents being anything but American until I was an adult. When I studied Spanish in school, the language came easily because Portuguese and Spanish are so similar. I did ask Grandma about some words. "How do you say . . . ?" But I never asked about her experiences growing up in a single-parent home where her immigrant mother had very little education and never learned to speak English. I wish I had.

If your grandparents are still around this Christmas, ask them to tell their stories. Record them or write them down. It's the best gift they can give you.

Welcome to Portuguese Grandma Stories

2011-12-04T10:38:00.000-08:00

Greetings. First, I am not a Portuguese grandma myself, although I am of Portuguese descent. My mother's family came to the U.S. from the Azores islands of Pico and Faial in the late 1800s. The title comes from my book Stories Grandma Never Told: Portuguese Women in California.

It was originally published by Heyday Books in 1998. I brought out a new edition from my own Blue Hydrangea Productions in 2007. Today, in Dec. 2011, I have sold out my second printing of that edition and am about to do a third printing. The book continues to sell well. I hope to soon offer an ebook edition, too.

We will use this space to bring you up to date on the stories in the book and to share information about all things Portuguese. Meanwhile, feel free to look up the book and order a copy or check out my Portuguese resources page.