Each time I read about another deportation from the United States, my heart breaks a bit more. Each time, I’m reminded that the repercussions of deportation will remain with families for generations to come. For at least three generations in my own family, it’s been this way.

My maternal grandparents, Charles Purinton and Flora Silva (or Leonard), married in 1917. Both were American citizens. Flora’s Portuguese mother was not.

After Flora’s immigrant parents divorced, her brothers remained in California with their father, while their mother took daughters Flora and Alice to Massachusetts. Flora always said that her mother, Mary Silva, knew she was about to die so she left her daughters at a Catholic orphanage in Boston. The nuns then took the girls by train to churches in Maine, where each was taken home by a different Irish Catholic family.

At least, that’s the family story.

In 1986, I traced the girls to the Home for Destitute Catholic Children and Mary to the Westborough State Hospital. Over the ensuing 40 years, I learned my great-grandmother, Mary, had been released for deportation. I’ve never been able to find where she went.

I still mourn the loss of family stories, connections to my West Coast cousins and the loss of my Portuguese culture. So did my mother. She collected traditional hand-painted roosters, Galo de Barcelos, which represent a rooster crowing to prove a man’s innocence — and thus save him. 

If only it were that easy.

Barbara Desmarais
Brunswick