Portuguese Descendants Face Hurdles : Traditions: Offspring of early settlers across Ventura County find that hard work alone is no longer the key to prospering here.

It was 5:30 a.m. and the cries of a young woman kicking, swearing and weeping as she tried to start an old tractor could be heard from far away.

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More than 30 acres needed to be plowed. And, after that, the woman still had to do the laundry, cook dinner and pick up her five children from school.

The year was 1930 and the woman was a 34-year-old widow, Filomena Oliveira, a Portuguese immigrant who came to Ventura County alone.

By the time she died in 1989 she owned more than 60 acres in Ventura County, part of which has been named after her: the Oliveira Plaza in Port Hueneme.

Oliveira was one of the hundreds of Portuguese immigrants who came to Ventura County at the turn of the century, poor and uneducated. They worked as farm laborers and housekeepers, and many went on to later become successful landowners.

But many of today’s Portuguese immigrants are less fortunate.

They find that the land of opportunity that allowed Oliveira and her contemporaries of the early 20th Century to prosper now requires much more than hard work. To get ahead in the California of the 1990s, the immigrants say they find they need proficiency in English, advanced education and a bankroll behind them.

Oliveira paid $9,000 for 30 acres near the ocean in Port Hueneme. She got a loan from the Bank of A. Levy on a handshake and good faith on her character.

But today, even a single lot in the Oliveira Plaza would cost at least several hundred thousand dollars. And banks do not lend money without collateral.

Antonio A. Medeiros, 68, who has lived in Ventura County for 34 years and worked 14 hours a day to save enough to buy his own home in east Ventura, knows about the struggles of recent immigrants.

He longs to visit the country of his birth, but that dream fades with each passing year. Raising six children never allowed him that luxury.

“It has been a tough life,” said Medeiros, who arrived in Ventura in 1960 and worked full-time as an auto-body repairman for nearly 23 years in an auto shop in Ventura while doing all types of part-time work on the side. “If time allows, I will go back one day,” he said.

On a quiet weekday morning, in the Knights of Columbus clubhouse in downtown Ventura, Medeiros spoke proudly of his affiliation with the Catholic men’s organization that gives him the sense of fellowship he left in his native community so long ago.

“Working here (at the Knights of Columbus) has given meaning to my life,” said Medeiros, who has been a member and worked part time for the Knights of Columbus since 1964. “It would have been like this if I were part of the Cavalheiros de Columbus (Knights of Columbus) in Portugal.”

As he displayed pictures from a thick brown scrapbook, Medeiros slipped in and out of English and Portuguese, sometimes pausing to search for words in his native tongue.

“You know,” he said in a melancholy tone, “sometimes I feel as if I have never learned English and I have forgotten Portuguese.”

Half in Portuguese, half in English, he said, “I am the manager of the clubhouse.” He then stopped, his light blue eyes staring ahead, his gestures frozen in mid-word as he tried to remember how to say manager in Portuguese. “Manager? Chefe? Diretor? “

The stories of Oliveira and Medeiros reflect the hardship in the lives of Portuguese immigrants in Ventura County and the disparity over what two different generations can achieve.

The Portuguese began arriving in Ventura County in the late 1800s. Young men and women, mostly from the Azores--a group of six volcanic islands in the mid-Atlantic that were discovered and colonized by Portugal in the 15th Century.

The immigrants came in search of wealth and opportunity.

Some of the men hopped on whaling ships, both to seek adventure and to avoid mandatory service in the Portuguese army. Some of the women followed relatives, seeking better lives for themselves and their children.

Some settled first in New Bedford, Mass., a seaport city that became a jumping-off point for fortune-seekers, including the Portuguese. The California Gold Rush lured many of them west, and some came eventually to Ventura County, a land that reminded them of the home they had left behind, because of its mountains, beaches and warm, dry weather.

As they arrived, they began to work as farm laborers or maids. They saved money and soon they owned land throughout the county, including properties on Ventura’s beaches, the hills of Camarillo and Moorpark and the plains of Oxnard.

Among those earlier hard-working immigrants were Manuel da Terra Faria and Manuel Silva, who have become legends among the county’s Portuguese community.

Like many other Portuguese settlers, Faria left the Azores at age 20. He first lived with relatives in Massachusetts, then came to Ventura County in 1903.

He brought with him an old leather trunk, cash to last a few days and a heart filled with dreams.

One day, while taking a stroll on a stretch of oceanfront land, north of Ventura, Faria daydreamed that one day he would own that land, which reminded him so much of his home in the Azores.

Two years later his dream came true. He bought his first piece of land, that later came to bear his name, Faria Beach.

Manuel Silva was another settler who came to Ventura in 1920. He worked hard, and in 1935, after borrowing money from the Bank of A. Levy, he bought 122 acres on the Oxnard Plain.

By the time he died in 1975, Silva owned more than 900 acres in Ventura, Merced and Stanislaus counties.

“I am very proud of my parents,” said Silva’s only daughter, Mary Silva Gallagher, 60. “They did not have much education, but they were bright and very hard-working people.”

Gallagher said that while her mother, Amalia Silva, was never directly involved in the family’s businesses, she played a major role in its success because of her industrious personality.

“Sometimes she was more aggressive than my dad,” said Gallagher, who lives in east Ventura. “She used to say that she never wanted to marry in the Azores because she did not want to work that hard,” said Gallagher, who administers the family’s remaining land. “But the funny part is that she was a very hard-working person.”

Among many other early immigrant Portuguese women in Ventura County were settlers such as Laura Cananas Pallerino, whose life story is recorded in an oral history at the Ventura County Museum of Art and History.

Pallerino, the oldest of two children, became the family’s driver at age 12. According to her nephew, Robert Bianchi, 67, who lives in Ventura, Pallerino’s parents were afraid to drive. So young Pallerino became the family’s chauffeur.

Pallerino was a handywoman on the family rancho in Moorpark. In her oral history in the county’s museum, Pallerino said, “I worked plenty. I done everything that a man has ever done in a field: I cut beans and hoed weeds. I raked beans. I worked the thrashing machine and I sewed sacks--I done everything.”

Through the years, as the Portuguese community’s wealth blossomed, so did its culture. Its members formed a close-knit and low-key community, deeply rooted in their home traditions.

For at least 40 consecutive years, the community celebrated a Portuguese festival in Ventura County.

The festas , as the festivals were known, were part of a Catholic tradition that dated back to 1296 when Queen Isabel of Portugal was said to have invited the poorest man in town to a great feast in honor of the Holy Spirit.

Like the celebrations they had back home, Ventura County Portuguese carried that tradition from 1924 to 1964. During the four-day celebration, from Friday evening to Monday afternoon, people ate Portuguese food, danced to Portuguese music and attended a special Mass.

Tim Schiffer of the county’s Museum of History and Art, who has extensively researched the Portuguese in Ventura County, said the festas were the year’s most significant celebration for the Portuguese.

“The Portuguese were a hard-working people,” Schiffer said. “They would work seven days a week, the whole year, until the festas . That was their way of rewarding themselves for their hard work.”

The festas were so important to the Portuguese that in 1929, Antone Baptiste, a Portuguese immigrant, built a club at Bradley Road in Oxnard. The club, which came to be known as the Portuguese Hall, was used for the festas .

But as time went by, enthusiasm for the festas began to wane. By the 1940s, people had to pay a fee to participate. In 1964, because of a lack of interest, the Portuguese had their last celebration.

“The young people just didn’t have the interest that the old-timers did,” said Cecilia Nunes, 64, who was a secretary for the Portuguese Hall. “Some people were disappointed about it, but not enough to continue the festas .”

About the same time--during the late 1960s and ‘70s--many Portuguese immigrants and their descendants began to move away from Ventura County. Most of them went to San Luis Obispo County, where they still have a strong and active Portuguese community.

Schiffer said he believes the low cost of land in Central California enticed many Portuguese who were farmers and dairymen to move from Ventura County.

“The dairy business from all over Southern California moved to the Central Valley,” Schiffer said. “It is very likely that many moved away as the price of land in Ventura increased.”

Today, Ventura’s Portuguese community is only a shadow of what it used to be. Schiffer said it is no longer the close-knit community it once was. And the gatherings, which once were often, are now rare.

In an attempt to recapture glimpses of the county’s old Portuguese community, the county’s Museum of History and Art opened a photo exhibit in March that ends today. The museum also sponsored a Portuguese celebration last month, featuring Portuguese food, music and dance.

“This is the first Portuguese festival in Ventura that I can remember,” said Henriette Baptiste Edwards, 40, a fourth-generation Portuguese American.

On the museum’s open-air patio, a group of dancers who had come from Santa Maria for the occasion executed the steps of Chamaritas, a traditional Portuguese dance.

From a chair in the audience of about 200, Edwards who is the great-grand-daughter of the Antone Baptiste who built the Portuguese Hall, watched the dancers.

As the Portuguese descendants celebrated the past, there were others at the celebration who had just become aware of Ventura County’s Portuguese community.

“I had no idea that there was a Portuguese community in Ventura,” said Gail Walker, a Ventura resident for six years. “I just popped in and was taken by surprise. I did not expect this.”

Ted Markley, 75, said even though he has been married for 54 years to a second-generation Portuguese American, he was surprised with the number of Portuguese descendants in Ventura County.

“I did not know there were so many Portuguese people around here,” said Markley, who has lived in Ojai for 25 years. “Where do they come from?”

They come from all over the county, but mainly from Camarillo, Moorpark, Ojai, Oxnard and Ventura. According to the U. S. Census, 1,130 county residents have parents who both have Portuguese ancestry. Of those, 216 speak Portuguese at home.

Although the festas are no longer celebrated in Ventura County and many Portuguese have either moved north, died or blended into the mainstream culture, there is still a small group that gathers every month trying to maintain the Portuguese heritage.

Members of the Portuguese Protective Union of the State of California (UPPEC) have been meeting every month since 1939, when the Ventura County chapter was founded in Oxnard.

Cora Corella, 63, and a member of the club for 31 years, said it has been the group’s willingness to stick together that has kept the lodge going.

“If it weren’t for the lodge, the only time we would see each other would be in weddings and funerals,” Corella said. “It has held us together.”

Corella is one of nearly 30 women in Ventura County who are still members of the club. Besides providing its members with socializing opportunities, the lodge’s main purpose is to provide its members with life insurance policies.

The lodge was created in response to a custom in which the Portuguese immigrants would help each other, said Barbara L. Fraga, a spokeswoman for UPPEC’s state office.

For instance, when a woman was widowed and unable to pay for her husband’s funeral, the community would get together and help.

Thus, UPPEC was created. Its members would pay a small fee and be entitled to life insurance. UPPEC still exists today and has more than 9,000 members statewide, Fraga said.

But as the Ventura County members of UPPEC grow older, they have little hope that the new generations will continue their tradition.

Corella, who has enrolled her three grandchildren in the lodge, said the lodge nearly dissolved five years ago because no one wanted to take a position of leadership.

“But then people realized how important it was for us as a community,” Corella said. “So we continue having the meetings.”

But like many other members of Ventura County’s UPPEC, Corella said she does not expect the lodge to continue to be active for too long.

“The cultural interest has died with time,” Corella said. “Besides, things have changed, people now have television and the movies to entertain themselves.”

Change is what the descendants of the early immigrants have come to accept.

During the four years before her death in 1989, Filomena Oliveira fought hard to keep her land.

But after years of negotiations, on April 26, 1988, Oliveira turned over the first shovel of dirt during a ground-breaking ceremony where plans to build the Mandalay Village Market Place were completed.

And as the government and private investors vie to purchase the more than 274 acres of oceanfront land that still belongs to the Faria family, Virginia Faria Baptiste, the oldest daughter of Manuel da Terra Faria, tries to accept change.

Baptiste sold about 51 acres to the state government in the early 1960s for a portion of the Ventura Freeway north of Ventura.

“I fought, but it did not work,” Baptiste said, looking over the freeway and the ocean from the hillside rancho that her father built. “You have to move on with progress. It is a waste of time to fight it.”