Every seat at the three long tables in the culinary arts dining room was taken during lunch on Tuesday, as students and teachers prepared for the fifth annual Brazilian American Friendship Lunch.
The cups were yellow and green, and the placemats featured intertwined Brazilian and American flags. Savory smells wafted from the adjacent kitchen.
Every person received a small blue wristband commemorating the event. The inside of the wristband had a message too: Building a Better School.
“The students who began this were proud to be here in American and proud to be Brazilian, and they wanted to share in this . . . story,” history teacher and department chairman Elaine Cawley Weintraub told the lunchers. Mrs. Weintraub’s Brazilian history class hosted the event in tandem with one of Jane McGroarty Sampaio’s Portuguese classes. Each student invited a friend to the lunch — 55 students and seven teachers made the final list.
Before the first lunch took place in 2010, Mrs. Weintraub said, the students worried that people might not come. Since then, the meal has become so popular as to require security. If you’re not on the list, Cord Bailey, who has been the bouncer for the past three years, won’t grant entry.
High school principal Gilbert Traverso was one of the guests, and spoke briefly before the lunch began.
“I certainly don’t want to stop [you] from eating,” he said. Mr. Traverso said events like the lunch were crucial for both celebrating external differences and fostering connections that went below the “tip of the iceberg.”
“Different cultures bring an array of beauty,” he said.
After he had collected his plate of food, Mr. Traverso told Mrs. Weintraub that next year’s lunch should be on an even larger scale.
“We need to take half of the cafeteria and make this bigger,” he said.
Senior Julia Leite organized the lunch along with juniors Taynara Goncalves, Celena Guimaraes, Jason Lages, and Gabe Nunes. Although she’d been coming to the event since her sophomore year, when she moved to the Island from New York, Julia said organizing is “ten times more stressful.” But the hard work had paid off. Earlier in the day, the classes put up decorations and set tables. Inside the kitchen, culinary arts students worked on the menu.
The planners made a “very Brazilian” menu featuring food that their friends might not have eaten before. Students filled plates with everything from beans and rice to chicken hearts, which drew rave reviews from guests. The sweet chocolate brigadeiro dessert was also a huge hit.
This year was the first time the culinary arts students prepared the meal. In the past, Mrs. Weintraub said, students and their parents made the food. The collaboration with the vocational class was just one more way to foster connections among the students.
“It was a really good example of fusion, that they’re making the meal,” Mrs. Weintraub said.
Senior Samia Arado, who was born in Brazil but has lived on the Vineyard “forever,” attended the lunch last year and said it gave her American friends the chance to step outside of their comfort zones.
“I think they kind of feel a little like we did when we first got here — there’s a lot of Portuguese going on,” Samia said.
The lunch’s impact runs both ways. Mrs. McGroarty Sampaio’s Portuguese class is made up of heritage speakers — their parents speak Portuguese at home — but most of her students were born in America and not all get the chance to visit Brazil. The lunch gives them the chance to preserve their cultural roots.
“Things like this are so important,” Mrs. McGroarty Sampaio said.
“If you look around, you see people communicating and having conversations,” Julia Leite said. “This is what we want in our community.”
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