38 School Street: A Memoir

George Monteiro never intended to write a memoir. But as the stories, poems, and sketches about his childhood in a Depression-Era New England mill town began to pile up, he found that he was writing a composite memoir of Valley Falls, Rhode Island and its Portuguese American community. Like his parents, many of these people had emigrated from rural Portugal to find work in the textile mills and build a life more hopeful and prosperous than the one they had left behind. Through its various forms of expression, this memoir seeks to understand Francisco and Augusta Monteiro, who found a life that was more difficult than they had expected. But it also paints a vivid picture of the colorful characters whose varied adaptations to American life made the Portuguese community of Valley Falls both a unique environment in which to grow and one that is familiar to everyone in this nation of immigrants.