Signs, Symbols and Stones: The Portuguese American Urban Ethnic Landscape #4

Jim Fonseca
6 min readMay 24, 2021
The Galo de Barcelos on a Portuguese restaurant in New Bedford. Photo from antoniosnewbedford.com

Are your feet sore yet? We’re continuing our expedition through an urban ethnic landscape, learning about a different culture, that of Portuguese Americans in southeastern New England.

I grew up in this area and in the Portuguese American culture. Now I’m a retired geography professor and I’ve outlined these ideas in detail in my book Making History — Creating a Landscape: The Portuguese American Community of Southeastern New England. https://www.amazon.com/Making-History-Creating-Landscape-Southeastern-ebook/dp/B07HG68BGY

Signs, symbols and stones (monuments). What can we learn today about the cultural signifiers or ethnic landscape signatures of this community? In the last post we looked at the Portuguese flag and its rich symbolism. Today we’ll look at some other names, signs and symbols starting with the Portuguese Cross.

Portuguese Crosses on the steeple of St. John of God in Somerset. Photo by the author.

Let’s look at St. John of God’s Catholic Church located in a suburban setting in Somerset, Massachusetts, across the Taunton River from Fall River. The church gives no obvious clues to its ethnic connections. Even the name of the church does not give an apparent hint. Yet this…

--

--

Jim Fonseca

Geography professor (retired) writes The One Minute Geographer featuring This Fragile Earth. Top writer in Transportation and, in past months, Travel.