Loretta Brennan Glucksman’s great-grandparents all emigrated from Ireland. They were coal miners, brewers and bakers, and all four ended up in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Anthony Tamburri, on the other hand, grew up in a very Italian neighborhood in Stamford, Connecticut. And Eleni Kounalakis is the daughter of a Greek real estate developer from the village of Rizes.
Today, Glucksman directs the American Ireland Fund and co-chairs the Glucksman House Ireland at New York University. Tamburri is the dean of Calandra Italian-American Institute at Queens College in New York. And Kounalakis is the lieutenant governor of California.
On January 29, the three officials joined Frank Spula, president of the Polish-American Congressand Angela Costa Simões, president of the Portuguese-American Leadership Council of the United States (Palcus), for a virtual discussion on how to strengthen European diaspora communities on this side of the Atlantic.
The conversation was hosted by Domingos Fezas Vital, Portuguese Ambassador to the United States. This is the first of six monthly webinars in the OutSpoken series marking Portugal’s biannual presidency of the 27-member European Union, which began on 1 January.
“This is the fourth time that Portugal holds the presidency of the EU,” said the ambassador. “Our priorities are to respond to the challenges facing the EU – the pandemic and economic recovery – but also, in the medium and long term, to foster our already unique transatlantic relationship. For us, this is a top priority. We are convinced that we could hardly find a better ally to pursue this objective than the European diaspora in this country.”
The discussion also included a brief welcome message from Kristin M. Kane, business manager at the United States Embassy in Lisbon and concluded with a virtual concert by Portuguese cellist Mafalda Santos.
Greeks and Portuguese benefit from thriving diasporas here
“The Greek-Americans that most people know are a very productive and active group. Over the centuries of Greek immigration to this country, they have retained a true sense of identity and culture,” said Kounalakis, who served as U.S. Ambassador to Hungary from 2010 to 2013 and was elected the first female lieutenant governor of California in 2018.
“We now have six Greek-Americans in Congress and we are very politically active,” she said, estimating that 1.5 million Americans are of Greek descent. Additionally, the country has approximately 500 Greek Orthodox churches in almost every state and the District of Columbia.
At 1.4 million people, the Portuguese ethnic community is about the same size, noted Costa Simões, a third-generation American.
“All my life, my origin has been a source of pride. It really helped solidify who I was, and it gave me purpose growing up – and it still does today,” said the entrepreneur and independent public relations consultant, who spent 20 years working for high-tech companies in Silicon Valley.
Costa Simões said his organization’s annual surveys reveal large numbers of Portuguese Americans in California, Florida, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and New York, but also immigrant communities growing in Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii and even Idaho.
“Generations ago, people immigrated because of volcanic eruptions in the Azores. Now we are starting to see people coming to study at universities or for specific jobs in the tech world,” she said, adding that some 800 clubs and associations cater to Portuguese Americans.
“We have assimilated pretty well into American culture, but we proudly maintain our traditions and celebrations,” she said. “Our three biggest challenges are to preserve the Portuguese language, to involve people so that our culture does not disappear and to elect more Portuguese to political positions.”
Strengthening US-EU Relations
The community already has four Portuguese-American congressmen, including Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey, a Republican whose maternal grandparents were all born in the Azores. Additionally, there is a Friends of Portugal group in the Senate co-chaired by Toomey and Sen. Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat.
According to a recent Palcus survey, she said: “87% of our community has visited Portugal and plans to do so again in the future. Nearly 50% say they would buy property in Portugal in the next five years, and 82% say they would invest in a business in Portugal in the next five years.
Spula said the Polish diaspora in the United States numbers about 10 million people, with the largest urban concentrations in Chicago, followed by New York and Detroit.
“But today, Poles are everywhere in the country,” he said, pointing to successive waves of emigration from Poland throughout history – after World War II, then in the 1970s, and finally with the emergence of Lech Walesa and his anti-communist union Solidarity. . “We were instrumental in helping the Solidarity movement and later ensuring that Poland was part of NATO. »
These days, Spula said, “our mission is to strengthen bilateral relations between the United States and Poland and to promote people-to-people contacts between our countries.”
The Portuguese Embassy is planning further webinars in its OutSpoken series between now and June 30, when Portugal hands over the rotating EU presidency to Slovenia. For more information, please call (202) 350-5400 or email info.washington@mne.pt.