[…]

This volume’s assumptions of cultural heritage and intercultural cross-fertilization regard general areas of creativity (with a significant, but not exclusive, stress on literary artifacts), civic participation, language policy negotiation, social conviviality, and ideological confrontation. It labors on the conviction that Portuguese-American socioeconomic, political, and cultural achievements are actively stepping out of invisibility, gradually building a momentum of affirmation (Cid 2005). This has been spurred by the following circumstances: i) a general principle of immigration according to which the grandchildren will grow attached to what first and second generations had to forego (the ancestral culture) in order to integrate is applicable to the history of the Portuguese in North America (Scott and Pinho, n. pag.)—as such, especially up to the 1960s immigrant families were less able to resist the prejudice and discrimination that forced them either into closed ethnic communities or nonconspicuous acculturation, whereas current Portuguese descendants who are mostly assimilated Americans can also afford to identify as ethnic or hybrid on account of the concurrent factor explained next; ii) a gradually benign environment in the US for manifestations of cultural diversity encourages working-class immigrants to celebrate popular culture and ethnic traditions in a big way, and such celebrations are greatly supported also by the Azorean government and, to some extent, the Portuguese national government (e. g., the New England Great Feast of the Holy Ghost, in which Portuguese high-profile politicians participate every year); iii) the dissemination of Portuguese literate culture, and the development of Luso-American art forms and studies have been spurred by bilingual intellectuals as well as literate immigrants with expectations of higher education (often sought already in the US), who have contributed to the prestige of Luso-Americanness—in the numbers of immigration their weight is negligible, but at a time when the intelligentsia can benefit from modern forms of communication and travel, their impact is arguably higher than that of some predecessors (e.g., Jorge de Sena, José Rodrigues Miguéis, Laurinda C. Andrade, and Francis Rogers, among others). Scholars nowadays actively bridge English and Portuguese studies, and they converge more often with peers from the other side of the Atlantic (as in this volume), contributing also to the next factor; iv) the ongoing and changing dynamics of diaspora in its transnational scope, the globalization of knowledge and the reality of exchange students, scholarships, and visiting professorships, among others; v) the concurrent support of several institutions or organizations to Portuguese-American communities—from the above-mentioned structured efforts of the Governments of the Azores and Portugal (with the agency “Observatório de Emigração” being worthy of a special mention) to informal groups, and influential individuals. A growing number of civic associations, sites devoted to the enforcement of community ties or heritage archives, numerous new publications (highlighting the anthology Luso-American Literature by Moser and Tosta in 2011, and The Gávea-Brown Book of Portuguese-American Poetry by Clemente and Monteiro in 2013), cultural lobbying from such entities as, in the US, the publisher Dzanc Books and its Disquiet-International Literary Program held in Lisbon since 2011, or the Luso-American Foundation (FLAD) in Portugal, have all contributed to a modest but steady boom.
     In relation to scholarly attention, while for decades the foremost organized effort to consolidate the field was the courageous work of the Portuguese Studies Program at Brown University, the Portuguese-American condition is now an asset in many other Departments and Research Centers in North America: the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth with its Research Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture, the opening of the Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives, the creation of Tagus Press; Anderson University’s (Indiana) hosting of this very journal, IJPDS, also endorsed by Brock University in Canada. In Portugal, academic institutions have extended the scope of Luso-American research in the heritage culture. The joint venture in July 2013 of the first conference in continental Portugal exclusively dedicated to the Portuguese-American experience spread throughout the campus of the two public academic institutions devoted to the Humanities in Lisbon, the “Classic” and the “New” universities of Lisbon. The incentive to research on the area by the American Studies Group of ULICES (University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies) expanded nationally to other institutions, particularly via the partnership with CETAPS (Centre for English, Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies), and was boosted internationally by the affiliation with a “sister” conference held later in the same month of July, at Butler University, Indianapolis, “Exploring the Portuguese Diaspora in InterDISCIPLINARY and Comparative Perspectives,” which also counted a significant number of papers devoted to Portuguese-American matters.
     This volume is representative of the event held in Lisbon, “Neither Here Nor There, Yet Both: International Conference on the Luso-American Experience,” as well as of the ongoing inter-institutional collaboration outlined above. It is not a conference proceedings collection, but rather a peer-reviewed volume. Moreover, it features thought-over arguments, creative writing, and criticism by some of the most assiduous contributors to this field, both emerging researchers and writers, and scholars of related areas who have decided to venture into Portuguese and North-American relations. This collection concerns the legacy of European Portuguese —the essays compiled here follow an encompassing understanding of dispersal and harvesting of culture(s) within other culture(s). This is reflected in the choice of the expression, “Luso-American experience,” opening up avenues of research to bi-directional and transnational exchanges.