Because the Greater New Bedford region has such a large and active Luso-American community, Baker Books gave several shelves over to Portugal, the Azores, Madeira, Cape Verde and the immigrant experience that connects all of them to this stretch of Massachusetts coast. It was one of the store's most-used sections and one of the hardest to keep stocked, because a good deal of the best material came from small and university presses that a chain would never have bothered to order.
Why here
The connection was made by whaling. New Bedford whaleships provisioned and recruited in the Azores and the Cape Verde islands, and generations of Azorean and Cape Verdean men shipped out of those islands aboard American whalers and stayed. When whaling collapsed, the textile mills absorbed the same families, and later the fishing fleet and the processing plants did. The result is a city and a set of surrounding towns where Portuguese is not a heritage language but a working one, and where the calendar is still shaped by the feasts.
The immigrant story in its own words
The book the store handed people first was Charles Reis Felix's Through a Portagee Gate, published in the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth's Portuguese in the Americas series. It is autobiography and biography at once: an unsparing self-portrait of growing up Portuguese in New Bedford, and a tribute to the author's father, an immigrant cobbler who arrived in 1915. What makes it last is that it holds two things at the same time — the deep desire to get out of the confines of the immigrant world, and the pull back toward it.
Alfred Lewis's posthumous novel Sixty Acres and a Barn, from the same series, follows an immigrant's coming of age in California dairy farming, in prose that is lyrical without being soft about the obstacles facing people living in the gap between two cultures. Lewis's first novel, Home Is an Island (1951), idealised the homeland; this one does not, and that shift makes him a genuine precursor to the Portuguese-American writers who followed.
The community and its feasts
Stephen Cabral's Tradition and Transformation: Portuguese Feasting in New Bedford is the scholarly account of the festivals — how the community organises them, what they carry, and where old-country values and American practice grind against each other. For anyone who has stood on Acushnet Avenue during the Feast and wondered what the structure behind it actually is, this is the book.
The Cape Verdean strand deserves particular attention, because it is frequently folded into the Portuguese one and should not be. Cape Verdean Americans arrived through the same whaling and packet-trade routes, sailing on their own schooners, and built a distinct community with its own music, language and institutions. Robert C. Hayden's African-Americans and Cape Verdean Americans in New Bedford, discussed on the New Bedford page, is the standard starting point.
Portugal itself
The shelf did not stop at the immigrant experience. José Saramago's Journey to Portugal, written before his Nobel, is a record of the author travelling his own country deliberately without guidebooks or road maps, looking at inaccessible medieval fortresses, wayside chapels and city mansions with the eye of someone fascinated by the myths and history of his own people. It is the best single book in English for a reader who wants the country rather than the diaspora. The Nobel Prize in Literature record is worth browsing for the same reason.
Pictorial histories of the Azorean cities — Ponta Delgada in particular, in dual Portuguese and English text — sold steadily to readers with family there, tracing a fishing town's progression into a modern city that has managed to keep its historic centre intact.
Reading it now
Much of this material is still in print through university presses, and the National Park Service's history and culture pages for New Bedford cover the Azorean and Cape Verdean contribution to the port. What the store added was simply that these books were on a shelf at eye level in a general bookshop, next to the bestsellers, where the community could find them without asking.