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The Capelinhos Volcano and the Azorean Immigration to the USA (1958-1965)
| From September, 1957 to October, 1958 an offshore volcano, near Fayal Island, has erupted. The big quantity of ashes and dust expelled provoked an immediate impact on the island economy, fundamentally based on farming. However, this wasn’t the only problem the Fayal populations had to deal with. In May 1958 a huge earthquake has stroke the same island destroying almost a thousand of inhabitant’s houses.
Under an enormous demographic pressure and with almost one third of the lands becoming infertile after the eruption, the Portuguese government tried to promote the emigration of twenty Azorean families to the Portuguese colonies in Africa. However, since the nineteenth century, the Azores Archipelago had a natural trend of mass migration to the “New World” lands, namely, Brazil, the United States and the Hawaii. As a result of this, the Portuguese colony in the United States started a solidarity movement to help their Azorean fellow countrymen that led to the approval of two Bills, by the American Congress, that enable the entrance, in the USA, of almost 2.000 Azorean families. The first and most important Bill became known as the Kennedy-Pastore Act, because those were the two main sponsors of that legislative process: Senators John Kennedy, from Massachusetts and John Pastore, from Rhode Island.
The major objective of this paper is to analyze and describe national and international context that enable the entrance of 2.000 Azorean families in the USA in a period where restrictive quotas of immigration laws were instituted. We shall understand what kind of pressures and lobbies were behind the approval of the Azorean refugees’ acts and what was Senators John Pastore (RI) and John Kennedy (MA) role on the legislation process. On the other hand, we aim to understand the impact of the mass immigration enabled after 1958 for the Portuguese-American relations.
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