Writer's Corner Writer's Corner: Cristiana Bastos: Interview on 97.3 WJFD-FM

Contraponto program series, originally broadcast on 27 April 2025

In 2024, Tagus Press published Migration, Mill Work, and Portuguese Communities in New England, edited by Cristiana Bastos, Bela Feldman-Bianco, and Miguel Moniz.

A century after the publication of the controversial Two Portuguese Communities in New England, this volume brought together analytical research essays, personal testimonies, poems, fiction, photos, and drawings on Portuguese and Portuguese-Americans in their predicaments, struggles, encounters, and achievements experienced under the pressures of upwards mobility, racialized tensions, politics of assimilation or multiculturalism, and labor and ethnic revival movements. Migration, Mill Work, and Portuguese Communities in New England is part of the Colour of Labour project, led by Cristiana Bastos, with funding from the European Research Council.

Cristiana Bastos (PhD CUNY 1996) is an anthropologist and a research professor at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais (Universidade de Lisboa). Her work intersects the disciplines of anthropology, history and the social studies of science, technology and medicine, having addressed population dynamics, transnational mobilities, colonial biopolitics, medicine and empire, the social history of health and well-being, and, in recent years, processes of racialization in plantation societies. In Spring 2013, she taught in the PhD program in Luso-Afro-Brazilian Studies at UMass Dartmouth as Hélio and Amélia Pedroso/Luso-American Foundation Endowed Chair in Portuguese Studies. She is currently president of the Portuguese Anthropology Association and held previous positions in the European Association of Social Anthropologists, the American Anthropological Association, the Brazilian Anthropology Association, and the Science and Empires commission.

Please join host Irene de Amaral and Cristiana Bastos for a discussion of Migration, Mill Work, and Portuguese Communities in New England on WJFD.

To purchase a print copy of Migration, Mill Work, and Portuguese Communities in New England, please visit the University of Massachusetts Press website.