News News: Publication of In America, I Discovered I Was European by Natália Correia

In partnership with the Government of the Azores, Tagus Press announces the publication of In America, I Discovered I Was European by Natália Correia, edited by Mario Pereira, translated by Katharine F. Baker and Emanuel Melo, and introduced by Onésimo T. Almeida.

It was said with reason that Natália Correia lived one of the most productive and flamboyant lives in the history of Portuguese culture. In America, I Discovered I Was European is Correia’s account of her first visit at the age of twenty-six to the United States in June 1950. It was a historic month, bracketed by Senator Margaret Chase Smith’s denunciation of McCarthyism and the outbreak of the Korean conflict. Correia visited Boston, coastal Maine, New Bedford, MA, New York City, and Washington, DC. She mingled with intellectual and political figures, visited art museums, frequented nightclubs, watched Russian films, spoke on Portuguese-language radio, met with small town locals in Maine and with Luso-Americans in New Bedford, and attended soirées in Manhattan. In these pages we see the attractions and contradictions of 1950s America, the land of opportunity for so many immigrants, from a fresh perspective, through the experiences, discoveries, perceptive observations and critical reflections of a life-long enfant terrible.

Natália Correia was born in 1923 on São Miguel, Azores, but moved to Lisbon at age eleven. After briefly attending university, she embarked upon a literary career, writing poetry, fiction, plays, criticism, and journalism. A political activist and defender of women’s rights, the charismatic and combative Correia challenged preconceptions and defied conventions. She composed the lyrics to the regional anthem of the Azores. In the 1960s she spent two years under house arrest for resisting Portugal’s dictatorship. In 1971 she and two friends established Lisbon’s Bar Botequim as a venue for music and intellectual and political conversation. She was first elected to Portugal’s Parliament in 1980. One of the most prominent voices of Portuguese literature and culture in the second half of the twentieth century, she died in Lisbon in 1993.

Mario Pereira is Executive Editor of Tagus Press in the Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Katharine F. Baker attended the University of California-Berkeley, University of Maryland, and University of Pittsburgh. She has translated books by Álamo Oliveira, Gabriela Silva, Eduardo Mayone Dias, Vasco Pereira da Costa, Adelaide Freitas, and Joel Neto. She contributes to Gávea-Brown, Filamentos, and The Portuguese Tribune. Emanuel Melo immigrated to Canada at age nine from the Azores. His writing has been published in anthologies of Luso-Canadian writers, in Cleaver Magazine, Gávea-Brown, and Filamentos; other writings are on his website. Onésimo T. Almeida is Professor Emeritus of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown University.

Published with the support of the Government of the Azores, In America, I Discovered I Was European is volume 5 of the Bellis Azorica Series, edited by Onésimo T. Almeida (Brown University) and Mario Pereira (UMass Dartmouth), and a co-publication with Gávea-Brown Publications in the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown University.

To purchase In America, I Discovered I Was European, please visit the University of Massachusetts Press website.

Publication of In America, I Discovered I Was European by Natália Correia

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