The Portuguese American Community of Southeastern New England
Before I started writing the One Minute Geographer I wrote a series of 11 posts about the Portuguese American community of southeastern New England and the urban ethnic landscape that the Portuguese helped shape. I’ve organized and consolidated those posts with a preview of each below.
Portuguese immigrants New England primarily settled in the area between Providence and Cape Cod, especially in the three cities of Fall River and New Bedford, Massachusetts and East Providence, Rhode Island.
Today, persons reporting some Portuguese ancestry make up almost a half-million residents of the tri-state region of southern New England — Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut.
In the cities of Fall River and New Bedford residents with Portuguese or related ancestry (such as Brazilians and Cape Verdeans) make up 45% the city populations. These are larger proportions of an ethnic group than almost anywhere else in the United States. We think of Italians in New York City, Irish in Boston and Germans in Milwaukee, but the Portuguese percentages locally are higher than all those better-known examples. In fact, of American ethnic groups, only Hispanics in cities along the US-Mexico border and in some other metropolitan areas make up larger percentages of a single ethnic/linguistic group.
