Peixe, patria e possibilidades Portuguesas: "fish, homeland, and Portuguese possibilities"

This essay explores the relationship between food and identity performances within a segment of a Portuguese transnational community with social, economic, and political ties to both the Ironbound neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey, and many of the rural villages of Portugal. I examine how some Portuguese-Americans in Newark's Ironbound use bacalhau (salt cod) to perform their identities. Combining ethnographic, historical, and historiographic research methods, I consider how bacalhau operates within a complex system of performance practices and epistemologies through which many Portuguese-Americans situate themselves in relation to past, present, and future time and space.