"The more we do the more they expect," Costa says. "They don't like us to belong to the unions. If we are sick they don't believe us."

The underemployment of Portuguese immigrants has more than economic implications. According to Aurelio Torres, a former director of COPA: "There is resentment [among the Portuguese] of the switching around of social classes in this country.

"For many who were well educated in Portugal, coming to this country is a kind of spiritual death," Cabral says. "My father was a minister in Portugal and when he came here he worked in a factory."

The desire to achieve even slight economic gains, however, has hindered efforts to mobilize Cambridge's Portuguese workers. While the Congress of the Portuguese in America (sponsored by COPA and held at Harvard last spring) could declare that "because the immigrants in their homelands are accustomed to the absence of decision-making power in their places of employment, the helpless situation of the worker is perpetuated in the United States [and that] it is necessary to arouse the consciousness of the workers," grass roots efforts in organizing Cambridge's Portuguese have yielded little response.

Efforts to unionize workers and proposed class action suits against businesses allegedly exploiting workers have not been well received. "We proposed bringing class actions against offending businesses, but as soon as we started talking about court, the workers backed down--they didn't want to lose their jobs," Torres says.

Father Joel Oliveira, pastor of St. Anthony's Church on Portland St.--the only Portuguese parish in the Boston area--confirms the Cambridge Portuguese workers' unwillingness to organize for their labor rights. "Two men were here from a union a while ago, they wanted to unionize some of the factories," Oliveira recalls. "The Portuguese didn't want to get involved. In most cases they are underpaid, but they didn't want to lose their jobs."

Cabral observes that one of the reasons the Portuguese are unwilling to rock the boat to obtain increased benefits is that conditions in America, bad as they are for the Portuguese, are still better than what they left behind.

"The American dream is not a farce for the Portuguese, because even the worst conditions in this country are better than the old country," he says. "In the old country they had nothing--nothing they could grab economically or psychologically. Here at least they can work. They believe that the little liberties they are given are something, because if you have nothing and are given something, it is a little more."