New Bedford has embraced the ‘tired, poor, huddled masses’ throughout its history

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Since colonial times, the oceans have always been New Bedford’s highways to the world.

Early merchants trading in timber and food helped develop European sugar colonies in the Caribbean — and trading routes across the Atlantic — before the fleet was destroyed in Grey’s Raid. 

After independence, a 329-vessel whaling fleet expanded those routes through the Azores and Cabo Verde islands, and, by 1857, were valued at almost $460 million in today’s money. 

By the turn of the 20th century, the Industrial Revolution had firmly established itself in the city, as thousands of immigrants from Canada and Europe flocked to its factories. 

Even today, Central Americans, who began to land on the city’s shores in the 1990s, labor in fish houses to process hundreds of millions of dollars in catch. 

“One of the ways I look at immigration in New Bedford is through economic development,” said Lee Blake, president of the New Bedford Historical Society. “When New Bedford was one of the richest cities in the world in the 1850s, it’s because of the labor of immigrants.”

Whaling became the city’s center of gravity in the opening decades of the 19th century, as the industry outgrew its original center on Nantucket. The city’s larger and more protected harbor on the mainland attracted companies and boats. 

A massive fire in 1846 that destroyed a third of Nantucket cemented the whaling industry’s place at the center of New Bedford’s culture, economy, and history.

“Whaling really attracted people from around the world, but no one wants to be a whaler their whole life,” Blake said. A sense of equality prevalent in whaling, unfound in other economic sectors, attracted many African Americans alongside immigrants to New Bedford. 

“African Americans were essentially paid the same as white individuals,” she continued. “You didn’t need to be a high-skilled individual. … It was very delineated and equal, and a lot of the ship’s captains didn’t care what color you were as long as you wanted to do the work.” 

From East Asia to Portugal and Cabo Verde, men (and they were mostly men in the early days) came to the city to work on the boats. Eventually, one of those would become a key — largely unknown — figure in the histories of two worlds. 

Manjiro: Japanese 

An estimated 1.6 million people of Japanese descent now call the U.S. home. According to estimates from 2010 Census posted by the City of New Bedford, only 19 of them are in New Bedford. 

Yet the Greater New Bedford area is a key location in the history of Japanese immigration to the U.S. in the form of a fisherman rescued by a whaling ship.

In 1841, 14-year-old Manjiro — widely recognized as the first Japanese person to reside in the U.S. — worked at a rice packing plant on Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four main islands. One day, he approached his boss with a business suggestion. 

“He had some ideas about how to pack it better,” said Gerry Rooney, president and CEO of the Fairhaven-based Whitfield Manjiro Friendship Society. “He had a big fight and ended up running away to the next town and staying in a temple.”

Manjiro came from a lower socioeconomic class in Japan’s highly stratified Tokugawa Shogunate. Manjiro, whose class had no surnames, was his family’s main breadwinner. His father passed away when he was 9, leaving behind Manjiro alongside his sickly elder brother, two younger sisters, and his mother. 

According to Rooney, Manjiro’s mother found him the next day and got him a job on a friend’s fishing boat. In short order, the crew got caught in a storm and drifted in the Pacific Ocean for several days before landing on Torishima Island, almost 600 kilometers southeast of Tokyo.

“They had to wait for almost six months before a whaler from New Bedford captained by William Whitfield rescued them,” Rooney said.

Manjiro and the surviving crew worked on Whitfield’s ship for the next year and half until its return to New Bedford Harbor, on May 6, 1843. Whitfield, who struck up a friendship with Manjiro at sea, offered him lodging at his home on Cherry Street in Fairhaven — now the location of the society’s museum.

“At the time, it would be very rare for someone to come from Japan,” Rooney said. “It was not so rare [for visitors] from other parts of the world because the whaling ships out of here stopped in all kinds of places.” 

Manjiro stayed at that house for three months before Whitfield bought a new property on Sconticut Neck, prompting the pair to move there with the captain’s new wife. There, Manjiro learned English, arithmetic, and celestial navigation, skills he perfected on whaling voyages.

In 1849, he decided to return to Japan. The trip included stops in California and Hawaii. Authorities in the latter detained him for 18 months for violating isolation laws (Hawaii at the time was an independent kingdom). By 1851, he was back home.

In 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry visited Japan with a fleet of ships that would force Japan to open up to the world with the 1854 Treaty of Kanagawa. Rooney said the moment led Japan’s shogun, Tokugawa Iesada, to appoint Manjiro as an adviser due to his experiences in the U.S.

The advisory role came with one important benefit for Manjiro: he became a samurai.

“That being the case, he was finally allowed to take a family name: Nakahama,” Rooney said, after his home village on Shikoku. “He ended up teaching navigation to other high-level people” at Tokyo University.

Rooney said Manjiro continued to help Japan as it opened up to the world, at one point leading a diplomatic visit to Europe that included a brief stop in Fairhaven. He died in Tokyo in 1898 at 71. 

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Louis Zéphirin Normandin: French Canadian 

New Bedford’s economy began to diversify from whaling in 1846 with the establishment of the Wamsutta Mill. After the Civil War, the textile industry exploded, growing to 70 mills employing 33,708 people running over 3.4 million spindles by 1920, and replacing a moribund whaling industry as the city’s main economic driver.

In an effort to find those thousands of workers, mill owners recruited from abroad, at the outset largely from the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Canada.

“[French-Canadians] came when the cotton industry came to New Bedford,” said Alfred Saulniers, a local historian who literally wrote the book on Francophone New Bedford, “The French of New Bedford,” published in 2023.

In his book, Saulniers said the rise of French Canadians in New Bedford happened fast. As of the 1860 census, there were only 97 Canadians, 23 of whom came from Quebec, living in the city. By 1910, that number had increased to 12,241.

Saulniers said the community concentrated in the North End, as represented by a line of French Canadian churches — most prominently St. Anthony of Padua on Acushnet Avenue. 

In addition, thousands of children were born to French Canadian immigrants by 1910, according to Saulniers. And chances were high that the doctor who brought them into the world was Louis Zéphirin Normandin.

“He became known as the Father of New Bedford’s French Canadians,” Saulniers said. By the time of his death in 1924, Normandin was present for the births of almost 7,600 infants.  

Born in 1851 in Saint-Jacques-le-Mineur, Quebec, Normandin immigrated to the U.S. with his family when he was 15, first settling in North Adams. He became a U.S. citizen while living in New Bedford.

“He’s a fascinating character,” Saulniers said. “He started as a barber, and that means he had his finger on the pulse of the community.”

Normandin went to Montreal for medical school and returned to New Bedford in 1879. He swiftly earned a reputation as a kindhearted man, reportedly never turning a patient away for inability to pay. Normandin often provided medicine for free and even opened a pharmacy on Purchase Street in 1898.

In 1897, voters elected Normandin as the first French Canadian city alderman — a member of the upper chamber of municipal legislature (the city moved to a unicameral legislature in 1938). He also was active in civic life outside politics, establishing a number of French-Canadian civic organizations.

“He was a serial organizer,” Saulniers said. “He felt proud of his French heritage and anything that promoted the French heritage he was behind.”

Normandin died at 73 in 1924. Three years later, the city honored his legacy by naming Normandin Middle School in his memory.

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Andrew O’Leary: Irish 

New Bedfordians have pride in their city. It’s clear in the merch residents sport around town — an unofficial crest of harpoons with N, B, M, and A as cardinal points. And it’s manifest in conversations, especially if you’re a transplant or visitor. 

The same can be said of Corkonians, the people of Ireland’s South Coast, according to Andrew O’Leary, who was born and raised there.

“We drive people all around Ireland crazy by talking about Cork,” said O’Leary, the superintendent of New Bedford Public Schools. 

O’Leary visited Massachusetts as a teen during the summer, working on the Nantucket ferry. He later emigrated to the United States in his 20s for graduate school. There, he met his wife, a Massachusetts native, and settled with her on the South Coast. 

His office represents both identities, decorated with Massachusetts and Ireland trinkets in equal measure. There’s framed photos of John F. Kennedy, the country’s first Irish-Catholic president; a bust of Michael Collins, who led the Irish War of Independence; a statuette of Cú Chulainn, the Irish Achilles; and two Irish family crests, to name just a few.

His journey to New Bedford follows in the footsteps of Irish immigrants who arrived in significant numbers in the mid-19th century, most fleeing the Great Famine that killed one million people. 

Like other immigrants, the Irish found work in the city’s textile mills. By the eve of the Civil War, those from the Emerald Isle represented the largest minority group in the city, which held about 20,000 residents. By 1900, Irish numbered about 3,000 in the city, amounting to 12%, a decrease from 24% in 1890.

They also worked on the waterfront as fishermen. One Irishman in the 1920s built the city’s first freezer storage plant for fish. 

Though numbering fewer today, the Irish immigrants of yore and their descendants have left their mark on the city. The Friendly Sons of Saint Patrick in 2005 erected a Celtic stone cross along the waterfront. (O’Leary has a small replica standing on an office cabinet.)

And in the city center, City Hall bears the work of an Irish sculptor who emigrated to Worcester, in 1872. Decades later, he would carve New Bedford’s foundational industries — whaling and textiles — into the building’s pediment. 

O’Leary says he doesn’t see much difference among the immigrants coming to build a life in America. They may be fleeing different troubles — famine, earthquakes or violence — but they’re seeking opportunity and ready to work for it. 

His belief in that is conveyed by another item in his office, a framed print with “Immigrants we get the job done!” stamped on it. It’s a line from the musical “Hamilton” that also appears as a sticker on his laptop.

The “hidden genius” of this country is tied to immigrants, O’Leary says. And as the former history teacher reflects on the role immigrants have played in this country’s 250-year history, he expresses hope that the xenophobia expressed by some won’t deter future immigrants from seeing America, still, as a land of opportunity. 

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Ana Dias: Cabo Verdean

Ana Dias was born to Cabo Verdean parents in Sintra, Portugal, in 1976. But it wasn’t until she moved to New Bedford in the early 1980s with her mother that she grew into her Cabo Verdean identity.  

“For the years that I was [in Portugal], there were only two Cape Verdean families in my town,” Dias said. “My father always made sure we spoke Portuguese … Cape Verdean Creole was not my main language at the time.

“I learned that language here with my family members,” she said.

Cabo Verde’s connections to Portugal and New Bedford are long and storied, going back to 1462, when the Portuguese first colonized the archipelago, and the early 1800s, when Cabo Verdeans began arriving on Massachusetts’ South Coast. 

“Cabo Verde was understood to be important because of the strategic location” off the coast of West Africa, said Angelo Barbosa, director of the Pedro Pires Institute for Cape Verdean Studies at Bridgewater State University. “What really started to be the main economic engine was the slave trade.” 

That location also led to the island becoming a prime location to recruit for whaling vessels out of New Bedford. Cabo Verdeans had long experience with whaling, in part because the island lies along North Atlantic whale migration routes. That gave birth to the city’s Cabo Verdean community. That history of voluntary migration to the city gave Cabo Verdeans a special place in African-American history as well.

“The first free Africans to come to the U.S. came from Cabo Verde,” said José Maria Neves, president of Cabo Verde, in an interview with The Light during a visit to New Bedford in June.

In the early 20th century, the rise of the petroleum industry displaced whaling and enabled commercial fishing to become the major pillar of the city’s economy. The Cabo Verdean community was present in both sectors at the time, many coming to captain whaling ships in that industry’s final days.

Cabo Verde’s relationship with Portugal enabled a community to grow in the Iberian Peninsula. In 1914, the Portuguese government gave citizenship to Cabo Verdeans — a status not given freely to Indigenous populations in its other colonies. The subsequent Estado Novo dictatorship maintained that status through the Carnation Revolution of 1974 that ended its time in power and led to Cabo Verde’s independence in 1975. 

Dias’ parents moved to Portugal in 1972. While in Sintra, she recalled only one other Cabo Verdean family nearby.  But the move to New Bedford led to ample challenges, as she learned her heritage tongue through her grandparents and peers.

“I had to adapt to not only CV culture but also American culture,” Dias said. “But it was a beautiful adaptation. … I feel like that grounded me and made me the person that I am today.”

Dias said she studied at Sgt. William H. Carney Academy while her mother worked at a fish house, an industry which employed many Cabo Verdean and Portuguese women in the 1980s and 1990s. She graduated from high school in 1998 and enrolled at UMass Dartmouth in 2002.

From there, Dias worked at the Department of Transitional Assistance for almost a decade. She said that her childhood and adolescence, when she would often have to interpret for her mother at appointments and when she applied for her EBT benefits, informed her philosophy toward the work.   

“I often felt that my mother was not treated properly,” Dias said. “I always said that if I ever get in this service, I’ll never treat people like that.”

In 2022, Dias earned a master’s in psychology from Cambridge College, an education she put to work at Bristol County Superior Court, where she supervises probation officers who keep those enmeshed in the court system on a positive path. 

“It goes back to the same thing from before,” Dias said of her current work. “When people walk into any agency, I want them to be treated with respect and to see somebody that looks like them.

“Life can be hard,” she added. “But we’re here, and people make mistakes and we want to help.”

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Leslie Ribeiro Vicente: Azores, Portugal

Leslie Ribeiro Vicente is technically not an immigrant. She was born in San Diego in 1966 when her mother was visiting Vicente’s grandparents. But three months later, they returned to Pico, an island in the Azores, where she lived until she was 12.

“I’m an immigrant in my own country,” Vicente told The Light in Portuguese at her office at Discovery Language Academy, where she serves as director. 

Vicente’s family history in the U.S. goes back to the second great wave of Portuguese immigration, from the 1960s through the 1990s.

Portuguese roots in New Bedford extend back to the 18th century, when maritime trade routes passed through the Azores and Cabo Verde islands, creating links that brought some people over. Whaling ships then adopted these routes, often stopping in the Azores to resupply and recruit new crewmen. The family ties helped facilitate recruitment for factory work from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 

“[Immigration] wasn’t anywhere near as strict as it is today,” said Paula Gomes Noversa, assistant professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. “They were really just hoping that you were healthy. … You just showed up.” 

Waves of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe prompted a nativist backlash that culminated in immigration restrictions: the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and Immigration Act of 1924.

Over 30 years later, the Portuguese were among the first to break through the wall erected by Congress, Noversa said. In 1957, a volcanic eruption on the island of Faial prompted a young Massachusetts senator named John F. Kennedy and a Rhode Island senator named John O. Pastore to push through the Azorean Refugee Act the following year, granting 1,500 non-quota visas to refugees fleeing the eruption and its impacts. 

The impact of the bill was swift, and thousands of Portuguese, including Vicente’s grandparents, emigrated to the U.S. in its wake. 

In 1960, according to the Migration Policy Institute, there were only 91,000 Portuguese-born people in the U.S. By 1980, that number was 177,400. That same year, 37,462 people in New Bedford claimed Portuguese ancestry, according to the 1980 Census, or more than 38% of city residents. 

Noversa said the visas obtained through the law enabled entire families to come. Many took advantage to escape the Estado Novo dictatorship, poor economic prospects, and conscription and deployment to Portugal’s colonies to suppress independence movements. 

Even as a natural-born citizen, Vicente said her transition to the U.S. was not smooth. She first visited the U.S. as a tourist when she was 11 and had a difficult time at customs despite her American passport due to lack of English.

“A man from customs called out to me and said ‘Stop!’” she recalled. “But I didn’t notice, so I didn’t stop.”

The customs agent asked for Vicente’s passport, but due to her clothing and lack of English, she hypothesized, he didn’t believe her. He told her to sit down and wait.

“I sat for a long time in that chair and my feet didn’t even reach the ground,” Vicente said. “Then he came back with my passport and said: ‘OK, go.’ … I just followed everyone else. And then I passed through the doors and my uncle was there waiting for me.”

Vicente moved to the New Bedford area with her mother in 1979 when she was 12. Two years later, the Azorean bank which employed her father transferred him to their newest branch in Fall River, allowing him to join his family. Vicente enrolled in public schools and swiftly learned English, but said she and other Portuguese immigrants always chose to congregate with each other. They formed their own dance troupes and soccer teams.

Vicente eventually got married and had four children. Shortly after enrolling her youngest at St. James and St. John School — now St. Teresa of Calcutta School — the principal invited her to provide 20-minute lessons to students in Spanish.

“I told him I can’t because I don’t speak Spanish!” she said, laughing at the absurdity of the moment. “I speak Portuguese!”

Thus began a career teaching Portuguese in the parochial school system of the Diocese of Fall River. She did it all without a degree — her previous college experience being interrupted by an auto accident that led to her marriage to the police officer who responded to the scene. (The pair later divorced.)

“It was such a simple thing that a bachelor’s degree wasn’t even necessary,” she said. “I even perfected [my Portuguese] on my own back home so I wouldn’t teach anything wrong.”

In 2011, after attending the graduation of one of her sons, she decided to enroll at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Eight years later, she defended her doctoral thesis on April 25, the 45th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution.

In 2016, Vicente took on her current role at Discovery. She set about diversifying the school’s presentation to its students. 

The most visible example, she said, looking up at the school’s ceiling, to hang not just Portugal’s flag, but those of other Lusophone countries, including Angola, Brazil, Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and Timor-Leste.

“What we’re seeing now is that children with Portuguese parents … their enrollment is declining,” she said. “But Cabo Verdean parents, they want their kids to learn Portuguese. 

“Clearly,” she added, “there is a future for Portuguese here.”

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David Rolando Oliva: El Salvador 

David Rolando Oliva has been a fighter, going back to his teenage years in El Salvador. The Central American nation was then ruled by a military junta backed by the U.S. that arrested and tortured Oliva for his labor union activities.

“I’ve always been involved in organizing to one extent or another,” Oliva, 68, told The Light in Spanish. “And being a member of certain organizations automatically marked you as a communist terrorist.”

From 1980 to 1992, 75,000 civilians — alongside tens of thousands of Salvadoran soldiers and rebels from the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional — died in a brutal civil war. That war, and others like it in neighboring Guatemala and Nicaragua, were the genesis of New Bedford’s Central American community.

“The first Central Americans who came here were actually Salvadorans,” said Lisa Maya Knauer, an anthropologist at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth who has worked with New Bedford’s Central Americans for decades. After a 1981 New Bedford seafood workers strike, she said, “the fish houses were kind of reorganizing and they were looking for people.”

According to the Migration Policy Institute, there were 94,400 Salvadoran immigrants in the U.S. in 1960. That jumped to 465,400 by 1990, with a steep upward trend to well over 1.5 million today. As of the 2021 American Community Survey 5-year estimate, there were 1,900 Salvadorans living in New Bedford, a more than 1,384% increase from the 128 recorded in the 2000 Census. 

Oliva said he came to the U.S. on a tourist visa in 2007 to visit his daughter after leaving a gang prevention project in El Salvador where he did not receive the pay promised. 

“Like so many, I ran into economic problems,” he said. 

The plan was to rest and recover before returning. But in the midst of the Great Recession, there were few economic opportunities in the U.S. or El Salvador. Oliva said he was able to pick up hours in fish houses from time to time, but found no stable employment for two years.

“There wasn’t even money for a plane ticket to return,” he said. “The circumstances forced me to stay.”

Oliva became one of the thousands of Central Americans working, through temporary placement agencies, at the 45-plus fish houses in the Port of New Bedford. Oliva thought he had left activism behind him, but in 2009 — two years after the Michael Bianco, Inc. raid — he and other immigrants felt the need to mobilize immigrant workers to defend their rights.

In 2009, he and other activists, including Knauer and Adrian Ventura, established the Centro Comunitário de Trabajadores. 

The group, which remains active today, calls on fish houses to improve conditions for workers and advocate on issues related to pay. Oliva said that he left the organization in 2014 due to health issues. 

In 2019, Oliva became a leader of the New Bedford Circle of Movimiento Cosecha, an immigrant advocacy organization.

The group advocated for driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants in Massachusetts, achieving victory in 2022, when the state Legislature approved them. The first licenses were issued to undocumented people in the state in 2023. 

Oliva, who is a legal permanent resident, said that as long as he’s able, he will continue to contribute civically and socially to his community. He added that despite the challenges of the current political moment, he foresees a bright future for the city’s Salvadoran community, as long as there are those within it willing to speak up.

“Here, no one gets involved in the struggle for the chance at a Nobel Prize,” he said. “You get involved because you have to.”

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Irma Pérez: Guatemala

Guatemalans began to arrive in New Bedford in the 1990s. In 2011, Knauer published a paper in the journal of the Massachusetts Historical Society, citing an oral history about a K’iche’ man from Providence who found a job at a fish house in the 1980s and kickstarted the inflow.

“Luciano, who is from a small community, Las Flores, in El Quiché, went to Providence and didn’t find a job there,” she said. “He heard that there were jobs in New Bedford, came to New Bedford, and then other relatives of his, friends, neighbors and so forth came.”

At the time, Guatemala was involved in a brutal, decades-long civil war. In the 1980s, a violent military regime backed by the U.S. initiated a genocide against Indigenous populations, leaving more than 200,000 Maya dead and dislocating hundreds of thousands more. The Guatemalan population in the U.S. grew from 63,100 in 1980 to 480,700 by 2000, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

“Many people came without inspection, meaning that they didn’t encounter border agents and they just made their way here,” Knauer continued. Many follow family members here. “Even today, most of the people in New Bedford are from three specific municipalities in Guatemala,” referring to Chinique de las Flores, San Andrés Sajcabajá, and Zacualpa.

In that sense, Irma Pérez’s father was an exception when he left Santa Cruz del Quiché for the U.S. in 2002, eventually landing in New Bedford. He was granted asylum and then legal permanent residency and called for his three children, including Pérez to join him.

“We went to the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City something like 12 times in four months,” Perez said in Spanish. “It’s eight hours one way and we had to rent a hotel room when we went.”

In 2004, Pérez, then 18, obtained legal permanent residency and moved to New Bedford. Pérez found work in a fish house and enrolled in a high school equivalency program. She learned English, making her trilingual alongside her native K’iche’ and Spanish. Eventually, she married and had three children with her husband, also a Guatemalan immigrant with legal permanent residency, now in the citizenship process.

She acknowledged that her situation is different from that of many of her compatriots. As of 2024, Migration Policy Institute counted over 1.3 million Guatemalans in the U.S. The 2021 5-year estimate of the American Community Survey showed there were 2,591 living in New Bedford, though local advocates say the number is much higher. Their immigration status often prompts them to live in the shadows.

“I know family and friends, especially women, who don’t know the language or the community, and it’s very hard to find work, especially without a status,” she said.

“It’s made even worse because many of them are indebted to coyotes,” Pérez said, referring to smugglers who bring migrants across the southern border.

Despite all her trials, Pérez said she feels her life in New Bedford is much better than what she could hope for in Guatemala.

“There are opportunities here for me to advance my education, my finances, and my future,” she said. “And I wish the same for my children.”

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Anastasia E. Lennon contributed to this story.

Kevin G. Andrade can be contacted at kandrade@newbedfordlight.org.
Anastasia E. Lennon can be contacted at alennon@newbedfordlight.org.