In 1936, a small but growing population of Portuguese immigrants established two clubs that formed a kind of cultural oasis for them in Mineola.
The first was a social club and the second Mineola Portuguese Soccer Club, a soccer team that connected them to their experience as Europeans.
The Mineola Portuguese Soccer Club is still thriving today and on Saturday night the Mineola’s Portuguese-American community came together to celebrate its 75th anniversary at the Mineola Portuguese Club on Jericho Turnpike.
“It’s something that’s inbred. It’s something they brought from the other side,” said Lou Pinto.
“The thing to do was to follow in the footsteps of the other players, to continue the tradition,” said Pinto, who played on the club between 1966 and 1976.
Portugal remains among the top European powers in the sport today. That point of national pride is reflected in the success of MPSC as the Mineola Portuguese Soccer Club has come to be known in the first division of the Long Island Soccer-Football League where it competes today.
The Long Island Soccer-Footbal League is registered under the amateur division of the U.S. Soccer Federation.
“It’s always been a strong organization in the community,” said Pinto, who played on the team’s league champion squad in 1973.
Danny Carlos, who plays defense on the team that is on top of its league this season, played college soccer on a scholarship to C.W. Post, where several of his MPSC teammates also played. The team gives them a chance to continue playing competitively against other Portuguese teams based in Jamaica and Farmingville, as well as Forrest Park, an Italian arch-rival in Glen Cove, and Fenner Bacce, an Albanian club.
Carlos, 25, can remember regularly attending games with his family after church on Sundays. And he sees it a way of maintaining the tradition in the community, along with the camaraderie he enjoys with his generation of players on the club’s first team (there’s also a reserve squad) ranging in age from 22 to 30.
“We’re a community club,” Carlos said. “It’s not just the sport we enjoy. It not only brings the Portuguese community alive. We’re keeping friendships alive.”
Rob Silva, 27, a midfielder who said his role is to “create the goals,” said he enjoys the atmosphere that enables him to be around players he grew up knowing and friends like Carlos who he’s played soccer with since they were in grade school.
“We know each other. We’re played with each other,” he said. “Everyone’s together.”
That was feeling of community was a palpable one at the Mineola Portuguese dinner-dance, where a picture of the 1954 team and its New York State championship trophy was prominently displayed on the dance floor.
“It’s amazing how a single sport, a single ball, can bring a people together,” said Gabriel Marques, general manager and executive vice president of the MPSC in remarks during the dinner on Saturday night.
It’s also brought the father-son team of John Da Fonte and Marco Da Fonte closer together as co-presidents of the soccer club, which they oversaw together for the past three years before the younger Da Fonte took the reins himself.
“I feel great that my son followed in my steps,” the elder Da Fonte said.
In the commercial tradition of European club soccer, MPSC has a new corporate sponsor in Empire Surgical, whose name will be featured on the chest of the team’s jerseys along with RiteWay Construction. Power Bar already has a patch on the jersey sleeves, and Mineola’s popular Portuguese restaurant Churrasqueira Barraida has its name emblazoned on the MPSC team jackets.
“I grew up in it. I’ve been actively involved and it’s great,” said Marco Da Fonte, who is also a midfielder on the first team.
But the soccer team is only one part, albeit the most visible one, of the Mineola Portuguese Club itself.
There are also teams of adult folk dancers and youngsters who learn the steps, along with the language, at the Portuguese school there. Along with those Sunday soccer family outings, Carlos vividly recalls attending school there to learn the language for two hours each after his regular school day was done.
“We’re going through a change now,” said 74-year-old Ilidio Mendes, vice president of the club, who has lived in Mineola for the past 51 year after migrating to the U.S. from his native Portugal in 1960.
On the second day he was in Mineola, friends brought him to the club, which presented an opportunity for community networking before networking was a buzz word. Portuguese would help their landsmen find job or assist them with other issues.
“They saw a little piece of Portugal here. When they came over years ago, this was all they had,” he recalled. “Anything they do here, they show up in numbers.”
But the change he sees is the older generation gradually handing over leadership to their children, like the transition between the Da Fonte’s stewardship of the soccer club.
Nelson Santos, 26, is now the treasurer of the club where his father, Antonio Santos, Sr. serves as chairman of the board. A bi-lingual social studies teacher in Uniondale, he is helping to maintain the continuity at the club from an earlier time when his father and his mother, Maria, first arrived in this country from their rural village in Portugal.
“We maintain the aspect of our culture and our history,” Santos said, adding that the community’s aspiration is to raise the next generations of Portugese Americans as. bilingual, bicultural children.
Ilidio Mendes still remembers a very young Jack Martins, the former Mineola mayor who was recently elected state senator, attending the club’s Portuguese school in the days when Mendes cooked pasta for the children. Now his aspiration is to see the club expand and build a separate school for the vibrant ethnic Mineola community.
While they’re learning to speak Portugese and the steps to traditional dances, it’s a safe bet that they’ll be playing soccer too. And if the team doesn’t reach its goal of winning the championship this year, after falling short in the finals and semi-finals the past two years, there is always next year, and the years after that.
