AZOREANNESS WITHOUT BORDERS

The term Açorianidade (Azoreanness or Azoreanity), which expresses the historical, geographical, social, and human condition of being Azorean, was coined by Vitorino Nemésio, who used it for the first time in an article sent to the Ínsula magazine, published in the city of Ponta Delgada in 1932.
Nemésio was a poet, novelist, chronicler, academic, and intellectual – Azorean, Portuguese, universal – who stood out as the author of Mau Tempo no Canal (Bad Weather on the Canal) and became a professor at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon.
He was born on the island of Terceira in 1901, died in the Portuguese capital in 1978, and, curiously, maintained a special relationship with Brazil, where he taught in 1958.
It’s enough to remember that he was responsible for founding our first “cultural embassy” in Brazil—the Casa dos Açores do Rio de Janeiro—which is now celebrating its 70th anniversary.
Nemésio based his Azoreanness concept on this: “As men, we are historically welded to the people we come from and rooted by habitat to some lava mountains that release a substance from their bowels that penetrates us. Geography is worth as much to us as history”.
One of Nemésio’s most outstanding scholars and former Rector of the University of the Azores, António Machado Pires (Angra do Heroísmo, 1942 – Ponta Delgada, 2022), explains “Azoreanness” in the 1995 Enciclopédia Açoriana:
“Extended, this concept not only expresses the quality and soul of being Azorean, inside or outside (mainly outside…) the Azores, but the set of conditioning factors of archipelagic living: its geography (“which is worth as much as history”), its volcanism, its economic limitations, its human dispersion and its idiosyncrasy, its typical languages, in short, everything that contributes to conferring identity.”
All of this fits into the Azoreanness, which builds and consolidates an archipelago without borders and perhaps takes on greater meaning the further away we get from the islands in time and space.
After all, the Azores are wherever there is an Azorean. And we have many more Azoreans on the tenth island than on the first nine.
That’s why Azores Day is all Azores Day this year on May 20. The Azores begin in Santa Maria and only end in Hawaii.
We are and always have been immigrants.
We came here almost six centuries ago and have been leaving for over 400 years, never leaving and taking these islands with us.
In the 17th century, we went to Maranhão.
In the 18th century, we traveled to Santa Catarina, Rio Grande do Sul and Uruguay.
In the 19th century, we moved on to Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.
Still, in the 19th century, we reached the United States, Bermuda, and even Hawaii.
In the 20th century, we conquered Canada.
We’re in South and North America, from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
And wherever we are, we are who we are.
A people who are proud of their islands and dignify their communities.
Despite being scattered and distant, we are together and we are accomplices, raising the blue and white flag high and feeling the flag of the Divine deep down.
The Divine Holy Spirit is always present in the hearts of the Azoreans and, therefore, in all the Houses of the Azores.
Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, California, Quebec, the North, São Paulo, Bahia, and New England, but also Ontario, Winnipeg, Santa Catarina, Rio Grande do Sul, Uruguay, Bermuda, and now Maranhão and Madeira.
As with so many stewardships on all the islands and communities, each of our Houses celebrates the Azores by honoring the Divine.
That’s why Azores Day had to be, as it is, on Holy Spirit Monday.
And that’s why it can only be celebrated, as it always will be, with our hearts on the islands and our eyes on the sea.

---

José Andrade is the Regional Director for Communities in the Government of the Autonomous Region of the Azores
Based on a text from his book Transatlântico – As Migrações nos Açores (2023)