Established in 2020, with a grant from the William M. Wood Foundation, UMass Lowell’s Portuguese American Digital Archive (PADA) collects and preserves a rich array of documents, photographs, motion pictures, sound recordings, oral histories, and many other resources associated with Portuguese immigrants and their descendants primarily in the Greater Boston Area.
UML PADA’s community oriented approach for collecting these resources draws from the fields of history and anthropology. It seeks to represent a diversity of experiences in the lives of the region’s Portuguese, spanning multiple generations, beginning in the 19th century, and encompassing family, work, business, leisure, social activism, politics, arts, sciences, and literature.
Through careful electronic digitizing, organizing, and interpreting of these varied resources, PADA makes its archival holdings readily available to students, educators, and the general public in order to enrich our understanding of the region’s Portuguese history and culture.
