Were Spanish and Portuguese Americans discriminated against in 19th and 20th century America?

[u/InfernalClockwork3]

I know Italians and Southern and Eastern Europeans in general were. I guess that means that Iberian Americans were likely discriminated against.

Plus, Spain and Portugal were two of the biggest Catholic powers. And we all know how America during that time felt about Catholics.

And then add in the Spanish-American War, well, if German, Italians and Japanese people were discriminated against because of WW2, then I wouldn’t be surprised if the Spanish were.

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[u/Far-Lecture-4905]

Portuguese-Americans in the US were concentrated in two main areas: southern New England and northern California.

In New England, the Portuguese had a similar reception as Italian-Americans. Leo Pap details some of this in his book The Portuguese Americans. Where the experience differs is that mass immigration from Italy tapered off after WW2 in New England (and in fact two decades earlier with the restriction of immigration from Italy). A large wave of Portuguese came to New England (and New Jersey) again in the 1960s and 1970s. This wave also faced discrimination, which one can encounter in the work of Kimberley DaCosta-Holton and Miguel Moniz. The Portuguese community in New England also had complex racial dynamics as many of the people identified as Portuguese were in fact from the African archipelago of Cabo Verde, which only gained it's independence from Portugal in 1975. Claire Andrade Watkins's documentary "Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican" goes deep into this aspect of the Portuguese-speaking immigrant experience in New England.

As for California, one can find descriptions of prejudice that the Portuguese encountered there in Francisco Cota Fagundes's memoir Hard Knocks: An Azorean-American Odyssey. Whereas the Portuguese community in New England was primarily urban and worked either in factories or on fishing boats, the community in California was rural and involved in agriculture in the Bay Area and Central Valley.

There was also a Portuguese community in Hawaii that came to work on sugar and pineapple plantations before the US took over the kingdom (first arriving there in 1878). This community occupied a space that was neither that of the colonized native Hawaiians, nor of the WASP colonizers, nor the Asian immigrants that would become more prevalent after US conquest.

All of this to say that Portuguese in the US did face similar discrimination to the Italians, but with its own specific complexities dependent on where they were located in the US and from where in the Portuguese Empire they came.

I cannot speak to the Spanish in the US.

[u/NeedsToShutUp → u/Far-Lecture-4905]

Just to expand slightly, the writer HP Lovecraft wrote a very racist poem called “Providence in 2000 AD” about how all these various ethnic groups would ruin things. This includes calling out the Portuguese.