Charles Reis Felix's Through a Portagee Gate: Lives Parceled Out in Stories

Abstract

The recent publication of Charles Reis Felix's Through a Portagee Gate (2004) is a unique addition to Portuguese American Literature, a still relatively small field but one that, in the last twenty-five years, has experienced what amounts to a flurry of critical and artistic activity.1 Both an autobiography of the author and a biography of the author's father, Through a Portagee Gate is remarkable because ideologically and thematically it blurs generic boundaries; further, it employs a highly creative mode of storytelling to articulate its autobiographical content. Although there are about a dozen Portuguese immigrant and ethnic autobiographies by US writers, none attain the level of literary sophistication and mastery of the representation of orality that Felix's work manifests.2 Through a Portagee Gate is comprised of two life stories or intercultural itineraries: that of the ethnic narrator Charles Felix, and that of the immigrant Joe Felix, Charles's father. The book does not have a subtitle or any other designation identifying it as an autobiography, a biography, or a combination of the two. As George Monteiro argues, the book is both an autobiography and a biography (Preface xii). What I would like to propose, however, is that Felix's work embodies several interrelated subjectivities: that of the immigrant father, who is allowed to tell his own life story in his own voice; that of the individual of Portuguese descent, who distanced himself from the ancestral culture and initially was