At Barcelos Bakery in Fall River, customers line up to select pastries from giant glass cases and breads from huge wicker baskets. They place their orders: a dozen pasteis de nata, two cappuccinos, a couple bread rolls with butter and cheese. And four of those pastries — no, better make it six.
The Portuguese bakery represents the life’s work of owners Sara and Antonio Rodrigues. They both immigrated to New Bedford as children, and met years later working at a bakery. The couple married soon thereafter, and 22 years ago, they bought Barcelos.
“ I live here. I raise my kids here. I own a business here, so I’m invested in this city,” Sara said.
Theirs is an American success story. They’ve grown a business with mostly immigrant workers, in a city that’s home to the largest Portuguese population in the country.
But as President Trump runs mass deportations and a war in Iran, and the middle class struggles with rising costs in Democrat-controlled Massachusetts, the Rodrigues family and others in the Portuguese community of southeastern Massachusetts have conflicting views on the economy, politics and the state of the “American Dream.”
For Sara Rodrigues, the dream has always been about work — and the success it can bring.
“ I always have relied on immigrants,” she said. “This is a Portuguese bakery — 80% of the people that come in, they don’t speak English, so they’re expecting somebody who speaks their language.”
When her parents came to the U.S., they had jobs lined up, she recalled her father saying.
“Let’s say, he got here on a Tuesday — that Thursday he went to work,” she said. “My Mom worked in a mill until the day she retired, for almost 30 years.”
Now, Sara feels too many people aren’t willing to hustle. Her family’s business has finally returned to pre-pandemic levels, she said, but it would be even better if she could fill three empty jobs. It’s been months, and she’s had to close two hours early every day, and at 1 p.m. on Sundays, even as she and her husband put in more hours.
“I have days where I work 24 hours,” Sara said, adding it’s been tough to hire bakery staff. “ If somebody calls out, I’ll go downstairs, take care of customers. If a baker calls out, [Antonio] will come in, he’ll make the bread.”
For Sara, Trump is a pro-capitalist antidote to the kind of “socialist” policies she said make Massachusetts a difficult place to do business.
“ We’re not looking for a handout, and I think a lot of immigrants are not looking for a handout,” she said. “But I think there’s a lot of people living off of the system, and I think that doesn’t have to do with immigration. I think it has to do with socialism.”
Her husband, Antonio, stood in the bakery’s kitchen in a dusty white apron, hunched over an industrial-sized bowl of fudge. For him, the U.S. needs more immigrants, not fewer — they bring diversity and stimulate business growth. But he thinks they should come legally.
“I have to ask permission to enter your house,” he said in Portuguese. “My parents waited 10 years for permission to enter this country. Ten years. Now we’re American citizens. We did whatever you’re supposed to do.”
That sentiment in Fall River’s Portuguese community helped Trump win the city in 2024, making him the first Republican presidential candidate to do so in decades.
Trump did not win in nearby New Bedford, 15 miles to the east. But he came close, losing by just 800 votes in a seaside city that claims the second-largest Portuguese population in the U.S.
Today, census numbers show nearly 50,000 Portuguese immigrants call Massachusetts home. Another quarter million report Portuguese ancestry, making it the sixth-largest national origin group in the state, after people of Irish, Italian, English, German and Polish descent.
The Portuguese of Bristol County
People from the Azores islands have been immigrating to the state’s South Coast since the days of whaling voyages, which once made New Bedford the richest city on Earth. Portuguese workers later filled the massive textile mills that line the waterways of New Bedford and Fall River, a local industry that’s now all but extinct.
In 1984, Helena DaSilva Hughes began working as a secretary at for the Immigrants’ Assistance Center in New Bedford. She said there was a huge influx of Portuguese immigrants at that time, mainly arriving with green cards, as her family had in 1971.
“When I started working here, that’s the immigrant population that we were able to serve and provide services to,” she added. “A lot of elders were illiterate. I was one of those kids in school that did not speak English and was picked on.”
The most recent wave of immigration from the southwestern European nation started around 2000, after Portugal was added to the list of countries whose citizens could visit the U.S. for 90 days without a visa. DaSilva estimated thousands of families decided to settle in the area without legal status.
“ They used to say, ‘Well, there’s 11 million people who don’t have status, so they’re not going to deport all those people,’ ” nationally, she recalled. “So we started to see a system of people coming to visit and never leaving.”
The mass deportation campaign is changing that calculation, she said.
DaSilva said the Portuguese have not faced the level of immigration enforcement that Central Americans have seen in New Bedford under the second Trump administration. Still, the threat of deportation is leading some undocumented families to return to Portugal on their own.
“They can’t live under the stress. They’re selling their things and leaving,” she said. “They’re feeling that they’re being forced out.”
Unlike Haitians and Guatemalans facing deportation, DaSilva said Portuguese people don’t have a dangerous place to go back to. Portugal is a developed country with universal healthcare and a more robust economy than when people left in the early 2000s.
It’s just that people had established lives here in Massachusetts, DaSilva said, and for those who came as children, the U.S. is the only place they know.
Casa Benfica
At Casa Benfica in New Bedford, a private social club for supporters of one of the top soccer teams in Portugal, retirees and working men gather in the afternoon to drink Portuguese wine.
They talk “futebol.” They talk about the old country. And they talk about America.
“This is a melting pot,” said Jon Cabral, 60, a hair stylist who came to the U.S. when he was 4 years old. “That’s why we all came here. For a better country, for a better living — why our parents brought us here is for that reason.”
For Cabral and his buddies at Casa Benfica, the president represents the opposite of those ideals.
“Trump is a man about me, myself and I,” Cabral said. “He don’t care about small business. He don’t care about the working man.”
Eating a bowl of octopus stew and nodding along, Kevin DaPonte said some club regulars support the president. He said he tries not to butt heads with them: “It’s like Thanksgiving dinner. You don’t talk politics or religion.”
“ I still love them to death,” he added, “but they are definitely Trumpers.”
DaPonte runs a paving company. After asphalt and heavy equipment, he relies heavily on two things: federal infrastructure money and immigrant labor. For him, Trump fails hard on both fronts.
Former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden both signed infrastructure bills, and Trump has yet to do so in either term. DaPonte said his business is still “riding the coattails” of infrastructure dollars ushered in by Democrats.
He also said he worries what will happen to his industry if the administration ends work authorizations for hundreds of thousands of immigrants; that could become a real problem for his business.
“ ICE hasn’t knocked on my door yet — yet,” he said.
As for the upcoming midterms, in which Democrats hope to win back Congress, DaPonte said he can’t imagine Republicans performing well amid the chaos of the Trump administration.
“I think people have actually opened their eyes,” he said. “ I have a good friend of mine that said, ‘I voted for him three times, and I finally see that I made a mistake.’ ”
Portuguese immigration to New Bedford has been replaced in recent decades by waves of arrivals from Guatemala, El Salvador and Puerto Rico. The president of Casa Benfica, José Barbosa, said his whole family voted Trump because they felt immigration was out of control. And he does support deporting criminals.
“I think it’s right — but everything has limits,” he said. “There are parents being separated from children, and I can’t support that.”
Barbosa is about to turn 80, and he was among longtime Democrats who first voted for Trump in 2024.
“He spoke in a way that I thought would be good for the community that has been here for many years,” Barbosa said in Portuguese.
Barbosa said he supported the idea of the new administration cutting assistance benefits for people he feels should be working. But beyond watching the White House tighten the screws on food stamps and healthcare benefits, he’s bristled at the invasion of Iran, soaring gas prices, and a trade war with Europe that’s caused Portuguese wine import prices to spike 15%.
For a guy who practically orders wine by the barrel, the tariffs are hard to swallow.
“From one day to the next, prices started to rise,” he said. “That’s costing the Portuguese.”
Now Barbosa says the president reminds him of a Portuguese dictator from his early life, António de Oliveira Salazar.
“I lived during Salazar’s time,” he said. “I know what a dictator is, and I don’t like dictators.”
Despite their sometimes grim accounting of the current American reality, the guys at Casa Benfica agree: the American dream is still alive. But it’s going to take a new president, they say, to restore the principles of the country that drew them here.
This story was originally published by WBUR as part of a continuing series called “State of the ‘Dream,’” which profiles longtime Massachusetts immigrants and their communities.
