Category: Publications

My latest article came out in the University of California Press’ and National Council on Public History’s journal The Public Historian, 18: 1 (February 2016): 18-47.

It examines the transnational and international politics and motivations behind the Eurocentric campaigns of Portuguese American heritage advocates to memorialize the sixteenth-century navigators Miguel Corte-Real and Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo as the ‘‘discoverers’’ of the United States’ Atlantic and Pacific coasts, and how those campaigns were framed by the advocates’ ‘‘ancestral’’ homeland’s imperialist propaganda. It argues that the study of public memory and heritage politics can offer valuable insights into the processes of diaspora building and helps reveal the asymmetrical power relations often missing in discussions about cultural hybridity.

The article also explores the intersection of local, national, and transnational politics in ethnic heritage campaigns; their racial and gendered dimensions; how they conflated the contradictory yet mutually empowering interests of Portuguese immigrants, North American politicians, and Estado Novo officials; how they advanced Portugal’s imperialist foreign policy agenda; and how they further marginalized the colonized indigenous peoples of North America.

The article can be downloaded here.