Abstract

This essay explores how Charles Reis Felix’s autobiography, Through a Portagee Gate (2004), examines everyday practices within the Portuguese American domestic space. The analysis also explores the interaction of the domestic setting with elements outside of this space. In so doing, the essay examines how the description of the domestic space in Felix’s autobiography uncovers the unconscious construction, and negotiation, of place. Within this game of negotiating place, space, culture and identity, the essay explores how the domestic space in Felix’s autobiography represents a site where the daily interaction between the public and the private, and ultimately between societies, occurs. Exclusionary notions inherent within the ethnic discourse in the United States are highlighted by reading Felix’s text through the ethnic signs (Boelhower, Immigrant Autobiography) it generates. In so doing, the essay questions the validity and implications of taking a critical approach that centres on Felix’s autobiography being an ethnic text.

Highlights

  • Charles Reis Felix’s autobiography lends itself to a myriad of analytical approaches

  • In the preface to Charles Reis Felix’s Through a Portagee Gate (2004), George Monteiro points out that this text is a biography of Joe Felix, Charles Reis Felix’s father, and an autobiography of Felix himself (xii)

  • This essay will focus mainly on Part 2, where Felix’s depiction of the home will enable an analysis of one of the many ways in which he engages with an extra-national space created by the daily interactions between societies in the emigration setting of a Portuguese immigrant community in New England

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Summary

Introduction

Charles Reis Felix’s autobiography lends itself to a myriad of analytical approaches. The use of non-standard English causes a sense of estrangement for the reader who is not familiar with Portuguese culture.[5] This estrangement could be interpreted as a further way in which the autobiography shows the intersection and presence of Portuguese cultural signs within the private space of the immigrant home in the United States.

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