This weekend marks the 46th annual Rhode Island day of Portugal festival. There will be festivities in downtown Providence and Fox Point on Saturday and Sunday. But what is Rhode Island day of Portugal, and why is it celebrated?
One thing that draws Rhode Islanders to the day of Portugal festival is the food.
“It’s gonna be caçoila, chouriço and peppers, chicken, sardines, potatoes, french fries, bifanas, and the feijoada. Beans. Beans stew,” said chef Armando Cabral.
Cabral has been catering Portuguese food in Rhode Island for over three decades. In his industrial kitchen in Pawtucket, he carefully tended to a vat of lazily bubbling paprika-endowed broth with floating chunks of pulled pork in its yet un-pulled state.
“Portuguese caçoila. Everyone likes it. It comes in sandwiches,” Cabral said.
He’s making 600 pounds worth. Enough for a feast, which is, in its essence, what Rhode Island day of Portugal is.
“Portuguese feast has, above all, lots of foods. Food is a great way for the Portuguese to celebrate and make a happy event,” said Onésimo Almeida, a professor of Portuguese history at Brown.
According to Almeida, back in the old country, the original Day of Portugal, celebrated on June 10th, was created to help instill a sense of national pride and identity in Portuguese people.
“It’s not a political figure. It’s not a political date. It’s just a day to celebrate the country and the culture,” said Almeida.
The holiday officially began in 1944, during a darker chapter in Portugal’s history when then-dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar wanted to mark the death of one of Portugal’s most important literary figures to unite the Portuguese people as “one race.” He appropriated the poet Luis de Camões’ epic poem for the task.
Camões wrote Os Lusíadas in the 16th century. It has everything a good epic nationalist poem should have: adventures on the high seas, a one-eyed author, a celebration of a prominent figure (Vasco de Gama who found an important trade route from Portugal to India), and a legendary backstory. Camões is rumored to have been shipwrecked after having written the poem, and to have swum to safety with one arm while clutching his magnum opus in the other hand.
Almeida says this holiday did a lot more to instill a sense of national pride in Portuguese communities abroad than in Portugal itself.
“This is a very important thing because this is a day of affirmation of their culture in a foreign country,” said Almeida, who added that Portuguese-Americans add a Fourth of July-like flavor to their celebrations that wouldn’t happen in Portugal.
Planning for the festival is also more important here in the United States.
“These people take this as a very serious task. They start with one year in advance planning, and then meeting regularly taking care of so many details. This is totally unheard of in Portugal, So, it is a big deal,” said Almeida.
As president of the Rhode Island Day of Portugal, Ana Isabel dos Reis-Couto is one of the people in charge of this detailed planning.
Dos Reis-Couto has been involved on and off with the events since shortly after she first immigrated as a teenager to the United States from Mozambique, a former Portuguese colony. She’s also a former Miss Day of Portugal. And she says the festival is about a bit more than just the food.
“The Portuguese heritage, our lingua patria, which is our native language, our food, gastronomy, the music, the history, and all that goes along because honestly, we have contributed a lot to the rich fabric of what makes the United States and the state of Rhode Island,” said dos Reis-Couto.
This year, Dos Reis-Couto says she expects the weekend’s celebrations to draw up to four-thousand people.
One of the highlights is a ceremony in Fox Point. India Street is getting a new name. On Saturday at noon, Portuguese ambassador Francisco António Duarte Lopes and Fox Point representative John Goncalves will officially rename the street to Portugal Parkway.
The new name commemorates the history of the Portuguese community in Fox Point, where they began settling to work in local factories and the port in the late 1700s.
There’s also a parade on Sunday that starts at the state house at 1:30 pm.
But if you’re looking for Senhor Armando Cabral and his caçoila, you can find him at the main festival, which takes place in the park across from the Biltmore Hotel on Saturday from 2 pm to 11pm and on Sunday from 1:30 pm to 9 pm.
Metro reporter Olivia Ebertz can be reached at olivia@thepublicsradio.org. Follow her on Twitter @OliviaEbertz
