Alda Ramos was eighteen when her mother announced that they would be moving from the Azores to the United States to live with Alda's aunt. The family lived in the small town of Horta on the island of Faial. Alda’s mother was a schoolteacher, her father a carpenter. They were wealthy. They had maids.

So why should a family who had made a name and a living in the Azores ever feel the need to move to a strange new country, to learn a new language and settle in a new city and make new acquaintances? Was the aunt, Elnora Ramos, really that exciting that Alda’s family felt the need to live with her across the ocean?

But the United States was a myth, a phantom, a world hinted at but never seen, spoken of but never heard, and soon these questions gave way to overwhelming curiosity: was there a possibility to make life better?

If so, would the sacrifices be worth it?

“Are you worried, Alda?” her mother asked shortly before leaving.

“No. Why would I be?”

“We’re leaving our home and everyone we know to go across the ocean. It’s okay to be nervous. I am a little myself.”

“But this is America, Mother. America. This is the place where dreams happen. This is the place where everyone wishes they could end up.”

Her mother smiled and knelt down to her, kissed her cheeks. “You’re very brave.”

“Well, you said that if things don’t work out in America, we can always come back here.”

“That’s true.”

“So there’s nothing to be brave about,” Alda said. “Either way we’ll be happy.”

“Do you think we will be happy in America, Alda?”

“I do.”

The move, as it turned out, was a good one. The nine-hour plane ride in a rickety, ancient, wobbly plane was the most difficult part. The Ramos family arrived at Logan International airport on a cold February morning in 1968. Boston looked brown from above. As Alda stared down at this new country that was supposed to gleam with promise—and maybe even streets lined with gold—the harsh, bleak winter landscape was incongruous and shocking. Winters in the Azores are mild at worst. Alda had never before seen ground turned barren and brown. As the family stepped off the plane, the weather outside was not much more welcoming. Freezing wind whipped their faces, and leafless, skeletal trees stirred like tortured souls mourning the loss of beauty. This was Heaven?

But soon Alda’s aunt Elnora picked them up in a huge black Buick, so big it felt like a limousine. They drove from Boston to Lowell, the Buick rolling fast and smooth across the back roads, under endless tunnels of trees and past wide undulating fields and through small, idyllic towns. As they rode, Elnora provided peaches in a can—unheard of back home. Surely America couldn’t be so bad after all.

Work was rather a foreign concept, so when Alda was forced to get a job at Hathaway Shirts—a dingy mill in Lowell—the world seemed, for a time, turned on its head.

“Did I mention we had maids back home?” Alda said to her mother one day. It was not in her nature to complain, but the strangeness of this new situation indeed warranted some discussion.

“Alda, dear, you knew when we came that you would have to work. In America the possibilities are limitless, but you need to work to reach them.”

She sighed. “I know. But…I thought the jobs would be a little more….”

“Glamorous?”

“Sure, glamorous. Or at least fun. Or….”

“America isn’t Heaven, dear.”

Another sigh. “I think I just realized that.”

But it was closer to Heaven than she might have at first suspected. Alda was married the year she moved to this country to Manny Rocha, a Portuguese immigrant turned real estate developer who went on to build forty-nine apartment complexes in and around Lowell. She bore a daughter, Elizabeth, two years later. And she found a thriving, flourishing Portuguese community in Lowell.

She earned a bachelors degree in social work from the Lowell Technical Institute, which came in handy for her volunteer positions. The odd jobs Alda Rocha held over the next few years—the menial labor at Hathaway Shirts and later Honeywell—were moot and unimportant compared to her work with the Portuguese people of Lowell. She learned English quickly, and was soon teaching the language to immigrants in classes for citizenship papers. She became the president of the Holy Ghost Society, the biggest Portuguese organization in Lowell. She volunteered at the Portuguese-American Club and the Portuguese Civil League. She continues this work today.

The phone rings in Alda’s office, a small square bisected by a large desk covered with stacks of papers, notebooks, business cards, and calendars.

“Mass Alliance of Portuguese Speakers, this is Alda,” she answers. “Oh, hello! Yes, that’s right. We’re expecting almost three hundred people. The festival should be a huge success…oh no, no, I couldn’t do that. I’m already cooking for two hundred people and selling tickets. No, these…excuse me, these people are counting on me to be there, it can’t be too difficult to get someone else to…I’m teaching tonight as well, there’s no way I can possibly fit this….” She sighs. “Yes, I could drop by this afternoon if you need me to. What’s one more task?”

She flips open her appointment book, a cluttered mess of names, dates, places, and appointments. The pages are so sheathed in blue ink that Alda barely has room to scribble a phone number in the margins. Any doubts Alda or her family ever had that she would not “make it” in America are disproved by that book alone—her connection to the Portuguese community is so intense that one wonders if that community could possibly have thrived had she never moved to Lowell.

“Yes,” she says into the phone. “That’s fine. No, it won’t be too much work.” She chuckles. “Well, yes, it will be too much work, but I don’t mind. I do it for my people.”

The word “immigrant” conjures up images of out-of-place people desperately trying to make ends meet in a new world, trying to navigate and assimilate in a difficult, strange, foreign place. But Alda Rocha’s transition was so easy—and her work with other immigrants so abundant— that hers doesn’t feel like much of an “immigrant” story at all. One gets the feeling that if Alda were to have stayed in Portugal, her work would have been just as voluminous. Opportunities did not find her in this country—she made them for herself. This is not the tale of an immigrant’s life work so much as the story of a woman working at life, no matter where she is, or where she came from.