But in the three decades hence, Lopes has helped build up MAPS into a thriving ethnic community center. She has volunteered here twice a week for three decades, and the once-fledgling Portuguese center now serves as Lopes' second home. She volunteers, helping to serve meals and run the ritual after-lunch bingo games.

It is where she feels welcome, she says. But it is also a place where she has remained almost entirely Portuguese, enabling her not to be forced to venture outside of her tight-knit community and even allow her to get by without ever learning English.

When Lopes first arrived, however, she says there was little of today's sense of Portuguese solidarity. She only chose Cambridge so that she could be close to her brother-in-law, who had immigrated from Portugal some years before.

Lopes, a pleasant-looking woman in her 60s, tells a classic immigrant's tale of sacrifice for the next generation. She speaks through an interpreter, MAPS Director of Social Services Claudia Lobo.

Lopes came from Portugal with her four children, husband and mother-in-law to escape her country's failing economy.

"I wanted to give my children a better future," she says. Lopes smiles easily and tends to use expressive hand gestures, so it is almost possible to understand her despite the language barrier.

Four years after her arrival in Cambridge, Lopes divorced her husband and found herself a single parent in charge of four school-age children. She had to find work, navigating her way through the system without any grasp of the language.

It was the newly-founded MAPS, she says, that helped her with applying for American citizenship and directed her to her first job here, sewing bridal dresses in a Somerville factory.