A wave of immigration

This is the first in a continuing series on Brazilian immigration and how it has transformed the Island. A flipbook version of this story is available at the end of this post.

MINAS GERAIS, Brazil – The man with kind eyes and a gentle face presents an old Polaroid photo, its color already fading, rusty spots revealing its age. The image captures his hometown here in this region in Brazil’s interior as it looked back in 1985: dirt roads, open sewage, modest white-painted homes, and a lone Kombi, the iconic Volkswagen vans made in Brazil, parked on the corner. Horses, he says, were still the main mode of transportation back then. 

This snapshot of Goiabeira, which was then just a tiny village in Brazil’s mineral-rich interior, was taken in the fateful year when Brazil’s U.S.-backed military dictatorship ended after 20 years of rule, and the country took on the strains of transitioning back to democracy. Like many rural places 40 years ago, Goiabeira struggled economically through what became known as “the lost decade” caused by the huge debt and hyperinflation driven by massive infrastructure projects taken on during military rule.

This 61-year-old man sharing the Polaroid starts on his story, which began in September 1985, just a month after the photo was taken. That journey would take him from his rural hometown in this Brazilian state of Minas Gerais all the way to Orlando, and eventually to the small, distant Island of Martha’s Vineyard, where he sought to achieve a better quality of life. It was a relatively brief stint working on Martha’s Vineyard, but it would earn him a unique place in history as the first known Brazilian immigrant to work on Martha’s Vineyard. His decision to work on this Island, which he had never heard of before, set in motion a wave of immigration that started small, and steadily surged to become a king tide of immigrants flowing here to find work, many of whom would stay on to establish second- and third-generation Brazilian families who have transformed the Island.

His name is Lyndon Johnson Pereira. He was born in 1963 in a modest home made of clay bricks and rustic plank floors. His parents named him after the 36th president of the U.S., who had just been sworn in after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. His mother heard the name on the radio, and liked the sound of the name “Lyndon,” and it was something of a custom across Latin America at that time to name children after world leaders.

“When I went to work on the Island, I searched for other Brazilians in many places, but couldn’t find any,” he began his story. “It was a life of loneliness; I walked by myself at the beach, I found no one to play soccer with me.” 

Pereira was 22 when the tourist visa was stamped on Sept. 28, 1985 as he planned his trip to the U.S. He bought a plane ticket \and then overstayed his visa to work. 

Soon after Pereira took a chance on a job on Martha’s Vineyard, a wave of Brazilians would follow. First it was his two friends, who he recommended for work in 1988. He knew them both from a neighboring town of his. Then about 20 more from the two neighboring towns followed them the next year. The word spread so fast that in 1999, nearly 10 percent of the babies born at the Vineyard hospital had a Brazilian mother, and in 2009, estimates counted 3,000 Brazilians living on the Island. More people followed in the next decades, resulting in a change in the Island’s demographics. 

Today, the total Brazilian population is estimated to be 20 percent of the Island’s year-round population, and the second most spoken language after English is Portuguese, according to the 2021 Dukes County rural health assessment. Today, roughly a third of all babies born at the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital are of Brazilian descent, according to hospital staff. And an estimated 40 percent of the students in the Island’s public schools speak Portuguese as the first language in their homes, according to school officials. 

A majority of these immigrants to the Island, and those sprinkled across Massachusetts in towns like Framingham and Falmouth, are from the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, which is roughly the size of Spain. The state is known for its mining and rural economy, as well as its flavorful food — like cheese bread — and its warm hospitality. Goiabeira is among more than 50 municipalities with the highest international immigration rate proportionally in all Brazil. 

When Pereira arrived in Massachusetts, he found his first job at Bond & Buckhart in Newton, a gourmet carryout famous for its awardwinning pecan rolls. Then one of the shop’s cooks, Jo Maxwell, invited him to work at a restaurant that she would co-manage on Martha’s Vineyard: David Ryan’s, a modern American restaurant in Edgartown.

He had never heard of this Island called Martha’s Vineyard before, but he saw a chance to earn more money, and he thought it would be an adventure. 

Pereira started working on the island in January 1987, cleaning for the restaurant’s seasonal opening, and he would stay on to work as a dishwasher. He worked double shifts despite leaving with his legs hurting: “In Boston, I could save about $1,000 and there, $5,000.”

Maxwell remembers how hard Pereira worked, and she remembered him as “very cheerful, one of those affable people always with a giant smile.” 

She would later become co-owner of Chesca’s, also in Edgartown, a popular fine-dining restaurant, for 26 years. She watched how the Island’s workforce that hails from Brazil has transformed the Island and become a vital part of its economy. 

On reflection, Maxwell said she does not believe the service industries, including restaurants, would have survived on Martha’s Vineyard without the extraordinary work ethic of the Brazilian community. She said that in her many years working with Brazilian immigrants, she has observed that they do not ask for time off, and are completely focused on their work. 

“We had to tell them to take a day for themselves,” said Maxwell.

Maxwell was not aware of her unexpected historical role as the first employer to hire the first Brazilian immigrant, but she said, “I feel glad to have been a part of being welcoming and treating people fairly, and appreciating people.” 

The need for a workforce did not go unnoticed by Pereira, and he explained what drives most Brazilians: “I’d do my best to be good at work because I needed to keep that job and earn money. You need to be like that when you’re already in a country you don’t speak the language, you don’t have documents, nothing, you have at least to be good to be successful to achieve what you need.”

The immigration pipeline from Brazil follows patterns similar to other historic migrations of ethnic groups that represent the history of America. Locally, they include the surge of Irish immigrants to Boston and New York in the mid 19th century to the Portuguese immigrants who came before them in the 17th and 18th centuries, particularly to the Cape and Islands to work in the lucrative whaling industry. 

Like so many waves of immigrants, the hard work does not resolve the melancholy that many feel for their loved ones back home. Pereira remembers how disappointed he was when his girlfriend in Brazil ended their long-distance relationship after a year, and he remembers how lonely he felt as the only Brazilian on the Island. But he wanted to stay longer, and he wanted to save up more money. To stay closer to loved ones and his beloved hometown, Pereira would send postcards, letters, and even VHS tapes he recorded on a Panasonic video camera. 

He felt welcomed, and was treated well on the Island, but everything changed when his father suffered a stroke. He returned to Goiabeira in January 1988, after just about a year on the island, to become his father’s caretaker for 12 years.

When he left the Vineyard, he recommended another Brazilian for his job. After that, four more people were hired. Quickly, the word spread about this Island where pay was higher and the American dream could be achieved more quickly. The next year, around 20 Brazilians embarked on the ferry to find work on the island.

 

A time of immigration reform 

As this new immigration pipeline from Brazil to the Island was just getting underway in the mid-1980s, the U.S. Congress was discussing major reform of immigration law. The legislative efforts culminated with President Ronald Reagan signing the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) in November 1986. The act offered a path to legalization through amnesty, and created an employment verification system. The effect of this law was the largest single legalization in the U.S., regularizing the immigration status of nearly 3 million people.

That shift in policy, among other factors such as high job availability in the U.S. and few pathways for those immigrants to bring family members, contributed to increasing the immigrant wave to the U.S.

Pereira’s pioneering role for Martha’s Vineyard impacted mainly two of Goiabeiras’ neighboring towns: Cuparaque in Minas Gerais state, and Mantenópolis in the bordering state of Espírito Santo. At a first glance, these towns couldn’t be more different from the Vineyard.

About a four-hour drive from the nearest ocean, they look more like towns in rural Kentucky, set in valleys and surrounded by steep mountains. These towns’ income levels are low, with an average annual salary under $4,000 per year, compared with the exclusivity and wealth of the Island with an average gross income per year of $107,400, or 25 times that of Minas Gerais.

Predictably, the money earned by Brazilian immigrants on the Vineyard was mostly sent home, and it transformed small rural towns in Minas Gerais. Today, local people point to large, multistory, often brightly colored green, yellow, blue, or pink large houses, and contrast them with the more modest homes that surround them. They often say, “That’s American money.” 

In Cuparaque, there is a horse-breeding farm that embodies this newfound wealth. At a grand entry to the farm, there are two ornate statues of majestic horses, each with a flagpole: one for the Brazilian flag and the other for the American flag. In many of the more elegant homes, there are backyard gardens that seem inspired by the landscaping that has become a signature of the mansions of Martha’s Vineyard, adorned with tropical plants like orchids and desert roses, as well as coconut, palm, and mango trees. There are shops and restaurants that draw inspiration from the Island, including a small local bakery serving chocolate glazed doughnuts with birthday cake sprinkles that look straight out of Backdoor Donuts. 

Everyone I spoke to during my visit said they either had lived in the Vineyard or have a family member who lives or had lived there. The Island is in people’s memories and strongest emotions: A man showed me with pride the last house he helped build before heading back to Brazil several years ago; another says that if he closes his eyes, he can remember all the roads in Edgartown; a mother got emotional just hearing “Martha’s Vineyard,” because her 19-year-old daughter has been living there for a year; a businessman shows all the buildings he bought with his hard work on the Island — and while the current Mantenópolis mayor is also an American citizen, three out of seven Cuparaque mayors have lived on the Island.

For a long time, until 2009, Pereira was unaware of his historical role. “I myself didn’t know [I was the first immigrant],” he said. It was Daniela Gerson, a professor at California State University who specializes in immigrant and multiethnic populations, who found him during her master’s-degree research at the University of Southern California, and documented the story for the Financial Times.

It was only when Gerson asked him about his unique claim to fame as the first Brazilian immigrant to Martha’s Vineyard that Pereira realized the role he had played in history. “I started remembering that actually there was nobody else besides me,” he said.

Making history back in Brazil

In early 1988, when he got back home, Pereira went back to school, became a math teacher, and also invested in a few properties. And he made history in Goiabeira, too, where he championed the campaign to raise the village to a town status in 1995. That way, the town’s main revenues started coming from public jobs in the town hall, schools, and health centers — as well as from remittances from abroad that injected money into local commerce, farming, and cattle. 

While immigration to the Vineyard changed Pereira’s life, and the life of people in Goiabeira and nearby towns, he has also honored the migration history of his ancestors to the region. As in the myth of the conquest of the American West, people celebrate their settler past in a big rodeo party, with several parades, every year: children with their hobbyhorses and adults with horse wagons and bull carts. Pereira is one of the founders of the celebration called “Festa do Carreiro,” or “Bull Cart Riders Party,” running since 1996. 

In the week I visited him in spring, the four-day party drew hundreds of people from nearby towns for the daily events, and especially the night concerts. In the afternoon, a parade of dozens of horse wagons set off at the town entrance, where shining silver letters write “Goiabeira” next to a statue of a man leading a bull cart and four black and white spotted oxes. The procession then headed to the town center, where people waved and took pictures of different generations of families riding together, some carrying traditional Minas Gerais milk brasses.

“In the early 1900s, my great-grandfather owned coffee farms and a fleet of bull carts,” Pereira said, comparing the carts to trucks of today, as they transported goods in the small towns in the area when migrants like his ancestors arrived from the coastal towns.

Like the American West, that region of the state was one of the last to be settled by the Portuguese in the 1800s. And like American cowboy culture, the rodeo harks back to a frontier era with a dark side: wars that enslaved and exterminated local indigenous communities. Like the Aquinnah Wampanoag on Martha’s Vineyard, only the Krenak survive there today.

Economic extractive cycles of timber, iron ore, and by World War II, mica — which was exported exclusively to the U.S. — drained the region’s resources. Sueli Siqueira, a professor at Vale do Rio Doce University in Minas Gerais, investigated how this region became the origin of a pipeline for immigration to the U.S. 

She found that it all started when an American engineering company called Morrison was fixing the Vitória-Minas railroad in the 1960s. One of the engineers, known as Mr. Simpson, had married a Portuguese immigrant, and they decided to stay in Governador Valadares after the project ended. The spouse, Geraldina Simpson, opened an English school, and from 1964, encouraged her students to do cultural exchanges in the U.S. as English students in Dumas, Texas.

“The first immigrants were the children of the local elite, who went to study English and found out they could work and earn money. When they got back, they spread the word,” Siqueira said. And as the region’s economy declined, more and more started traveling to the U.S. with visas.

After establishing “Little Brazil” in midtown Manhattan, those immigrants found other markets in need of labor, like Boston and beyond. By the mid-’80s and ’90s, Siqueira said, it was the local middle class’ turn to emigrate. “The ones who had gone before started financing others to move and work for them,” Siqueira said.

In Brazil, Governador Valadares is a regional economic center, and transformed also into an immigration regional center, spreading its influence to dozens of towns like Goiabeira, Cuparaque, and Mantenópolis. Today, in Brazil, the words “Governador Valadares” are a synonym of Brazilian immigration to the U.S. Valadares even became Framingham’s sister city in 2004.

Pereira thought about going back to Martha’s Vineyard to raise money when his job situation was not stable in Brazil. He had reconnected with an old crush upon arriving back home: Maria Aparecida de Freitas, at a Catholic youth group.

They got married on the last day of 1988 — he left the Vineyard in the beginning of that year. Both were teachers, but didn’t have stable jobs, as they had to wait and see if there would be openings they could apply for. 

At the time, young men migrated alone for a few years to raise money and go back home. In Pereira’s case, when he left the Vineyard, he was able to buy a piece of land near Cuparaque and a house in the town center, but at the time it was not enough for the newly married couple.

“One day he got home and said he was thinking about going back to the U.S. to improve our life,” Maria Aparecida Pereira said. “I remember I was very adamant. I said, ‘If the idea is for you to go and for me to stay here, I prefer that we divorce then.’” After that, he never mentioned going back to the U.S. again.

Later, both got stable teaching jobs: He was a math teacher for 29 years, and she was a Portuguese teacher for 28 years, plus seven years as school principal.

“Thankfully, we overcame everything. We have a modest but comfortable life. And now we are enjoying the grandchildren that keep coming,” she said. They had three children, and are expecting the arrival of their sixth grandchild.

Pereira himself never traveled back to the U.S., but his son Cássio, 34, a journalist, visited the Vineyard in 2017, and took pictures of places he had heard his father talk about. Pereira himself is uncertain about visiting the Island, but he said he would like to reconnect with the people he met in the U.S., who welcomed him in the two years and eight months he lived in Boston and the Vineyard. 

Maria Aparecida Pereira said she’s proud of her husband’s story: “I think he opened doors for many others, who had even better opportunities than his. It’s also a story of friendships; he tells us about being treated well by his employers, and speaks highly of the Americans he worked for and with. I would love to visit those places.” 

Back in Goiabeira, we stop at the top of a hill so Pereira can show me the exact place he took the Polaroid 39 years ago. The streets are now paved, and it’s hard to see downtown’s square with its stores and parked cars from there, because of the many multistory large houses on the horizon. 

Pereira is proud of Goiabeira and likes enjoying a small-town quiet life — living a short distance from his mother, his whole family, and his wife’s family in a town where he knows almost everybody, enjoying a level of safety not all in Brazil are able to have. 

He calls his hometown a paradise: His house is one of the largest in the neighborhood, and he enjoys a quiet life as a retired math teacher, often attending the local Catholic church, dedicating time to his family, and hosting community radio shows in a small studio he built for himself. In the afternoon, he is surrounded by his canaries, dozens of feathered friends that he feeds in his backyard.

“Many were able to grow and earn a lot of money; some were very poor,” he said about people who immigrated to the Vineyard. “I’m very happy they transformed their lives, changed for the better. Today, they can give a better future to their children,” he said.

The author of this inaugural piece of our series exploring how Brazilian immigrants transformed Martha’s Vineyard, Paula Moura is a Brazilian journalist working in Massachusetts and an MV Times regular contributor. She’s originally from Minas Gerais, but because the state is huge, it was her first time traveling to those towns and villages where so many immigrants to the Island come from. She said everyone there was very welcoming and, in traditional Minas Gerais fashion, offered coffee and cheese bread.