Boston’s Brazilian roots run deep

And Portuguese is the third-most-spoken language in the Commonwealth, after English and Spanish, thanks to the influx of immigrants from not only Brazil but Portugal and Cape Verde, too.

Most Brazilians living in the state, like Vitorino, have been here for decades. They have long fought for cultural visibility and political representation — with some success. There are today three first-generation Brazilian representatives in the Massachusetts State House: Priscila Sousa, Rita Mendes, and Dan Sena. There are also nearly 25,000 Brazilian-owned businesses across the state, and counting. There’s a neighborhood in Medford where you can stand on a street corner and see a Brazilian bakery, restaurant, and supermarket. In Northampton, there’s a Brazilian choro beat scene. In Framingham, forró dance halls and gatherings are common. In 2022, Brazilian immigrant workers contributed around $8 billion to the gross state product. In Salem and Newton, visual artists Julia Csekö and Raquel Fornasaro draw inspiration from Brazilian culture in their installations.

Their influence is seemingly everywhere, yet many non-Brazilians remain unaware of how deep Brazilian roots run in the state.

I am originally from Minas Gerais, a large state that lies just north of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. When I arrived in Boston four years ago from New York City, I immediately noticed my home state’s influence — in the high quality of the pão de queijo (a kind of cheesy bread), fresh Minas-style cheeses, and even pamonha, a Brazilian tamale, just like the ones my family makes. If I miss my mom’s food, I can choose from any number of affordable buffets — and that means a lot when you live almost 5,000 miles from home.

It’s no coincidence that so much reminds me of Minas here: It was immigrants from Minas Gerais who laid the cultural foundation for the Brazilian community in Massachusetts.

In the 1960s, an American railroad engineer today known only as Mr. Simpson and his Portuguese wife, Geraldina Simpson, opened an English school in Governador Valadares, the largest city in eastern Minas Gerais. The students, children of local elites, began traveling for cultural exchange, first to Texas and then to New York. When an economic crisis anthem Minas, many of those students moved to New York — eventually forming a “Little Brazil” that still stands today in midtown Manhattan.

The economic crisis anthem low-income families like Vitorino’s too, and he decided to emigrate.

Vitorino first arrived in New York, but the Big Apple was too big and too expensive, and it didn’t have enough jobs for all of the recent arrivals.

But word about Boston as a smaller and cheaper city quickly spread among the recently arrived Brazilians. A fellow immigrant from Minas helped Vitorino find his first job, in Cambridge.

Vitorino spent the next 15 years working in restaurants before deciding to open one of the city’s first Brazilian restaurants: Café Brazil, at 421 Cambridge Street in Allston. The year was 1985 — the beginning of a five-year period in which Brazilian migration to the United States peaked following an economic crisis initiated by a US-backed dictatorship.

Vitorino’s restaurant quickly became a meeting point for the Brazilian community that flourished in Allston-Brighton at the time. Vitorino worked seven days a week, serving typical Brazilian food like fejioada, a rich bean stew considered by some to be Brazil’s national dish, and traditional Minas dishes, such as frango com quiabo (chicken with okra) and rabada (braised oxtail stew), to Brazilian and American customers — including Boston’s mayor, Thomas Menino, and the Brazilian singer Roberto Carlos.

As the community grew, so did the types of ventures started by Vitorino’s countrymen. The Brazilian Times, which today covers Brazilian communities across the United States, was started in Massachusetts in 1988 by Edirson Paiva, an English teacher from Virgolândia, Minas Gerais.

At the time, the weekly newspaper was the first paper in the country to cover the growing Brazilian community, starting with Boston. The walls of the small newsroom, still based in Somerville, are covered with profiles and pictures of Brazilians who have contributed to the community since the 1960s. Beside his desk, Paiva proudly displays a Lifetime Achievement Award he received from President Joe Biden in 2023.

He shows me the newspaper’s first cover: an interview with the first Brazilian priest to celebrate a mass in Cambridge. Religion is a major part of Minas Gerais culture and a significant part of life for the Brazilian community in Massachusetts. The Brazilian festa junina event at St. Anthony’s Church in Somerville has been a major celebration for the community every year, Paiva says. But this year, this event and others were canceled due to concerns about immigration raids.

Heloisa Galvão, an archaeologist from Rio de Janeiro state who landed in Boston for graduate school in 1988, is among those worried about the effects of immigration enforcement on the community. She founded the Brazilian Women’s Group in 1995 to advance immigrant and labor rights. “At that time, the visibility we needed was that people recognized we were part of Latin America but that we didn’t speak Spanish, that we had a different language and culture. … Today, the visibility we need is political; migrants need the basic recognition that they are people and have rights,” she says. “People are being arrested, violently, by masked men, and families are not able to visit them in detention.”

According to the Immigration Enforcement Dashboard, a tool built using immigration data obtained and analyzed by the Deportation Data Project, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 767 Brazilians in Massachusetts from Jan. 20 to July 29 — 27.5 percent of all ICE arrests in the state. People are getting arrested on their way to work, at home, and during immigration check-ins. The Brazilian consulate in Boston has seen a significant increase in requests for documents to facilitate returns to Brazil.

At the Brazilian Independence Day Festival in Somerville on Sept. 21, the crowd was much smaller than in past years, partly due to weather — but a major reason was fear of an ICE raid. Several festival attendees told me people they know are going only from home to work and back, to limit the chances of being detained.

Fewer immigrants are going to Brazilian restaurants and markets, too. On a recent Sunday, Vitorino and I had lunch at our favorite Brazilian restaurant in Cambridge, Muqueca. The restaurant plays a similar role to Vitorino’s Cafe Brazil, serving comfort food reminiscent of home, attracting Brazilians from all over Massachusetts.

Muqueca’s founder and owner, Maria de Fátima Langa, came by to greet Vitorino. She used to scramble to get lines of people seated at Sunday lunchtime and would bring appetizers to those waiting. today many tables are empty.