Alfred Lewis, Portugal’s Day, and California’s Azorean Landscape

The sea is the first exile. It holds the memory of departures and the echo of voices lost in the horizon’s salt light. For the Azorean, the ocean is both cradle and frontier, a body that carries away sons and daughters while whispering their return in tides that never cease. Every emigrant is a sentence broken mid-verse, a page torn from the book of the islands and scattered across the world. Yet in that scattering, new words are born that bind memory to future, longing for creation. Among those words is the life and work of Alfred Lewis, a poet of Flores Island who carried his islands into California’s vast landscape, translating saudade into two languages, two homelands, one destiny.

Every year, June 10 arrives carrying many names: Portugal Day, Camões Day, and, since 1977, Portuguese Communities Day. It is a day celebrated with pride yet layered with contradictions. For those who cherish democracy, there is unease in remembering how, for decades, the holiday was bent to glorify a dictatorship. That is why I choose to mark June 10 through poetry—honoring not only Luís Vaz de Camões, our epic voice, but also the poets who followed him, in Portugal and across the seas. Among them, one stands out: Alfred Lewis, born in the Azores, exiled in California, who passed away in 1977, the very year the holiday gained its present name.

Born Alfredo Luís on April 30, 1922, on Flores Island, Lewis became one of the pioneering voices of Portuguese-American literature. A poet, journalist, short story writer, and novelist, he achieved what few immigrant authors of his generation dared to dream: in 1951, Random House published his novel, Home Is an Island.

At nineteen, he left the Azores with the promise of return. Like countless emigrants before him, he imagined a temporary exile: a handful of years in California, a pocketful of savings, then back to his Fajãzinha. The year was 1922 when he crossed the Atlantic and the American continent to join his brother in Merced County. There he labored in the fields, pulling sweet potatoes from dawn to dusk. It was not the sunset of Flores that he remembered from childhood, but another, harsher light. With little English, he took work where he could: a kitchen assistant in a Portuguese restaurant, a hand in the fields, bread baked for others. Yet always, he carried a hunger for words. Encouraged early by a teacher who recognized his gift, he began to write.

His longing found outlet in journalism. His first published piece appeared in Jornal de Notícias, edited by Pedro L. C. Silveira, also from Flores. This opened the door to Revista Portuguesa, where he collaborated under the guidance of João de Simas Melo of Pico, and soon after, to Jornal Português. Poems and articles flowed, each line a bridge between the Azores and California.

Lewis read voraciously. Through magazines such as The American Mercury, he absorbed American literature. In time, like Joseph Conrad before him, he dared to write in his adopted language. Short stories appeared in Prairie Schooner, poems in The Carmel Pine Cone, articles in the local press of Los Banos and Dos Palos. His vision was clear: literature was not only art but a way of belonging, of making community visible. Reflecting on Home is an Island, he wrote: “I believe this book, albeit modestly, has helped introduce the Azorean people to many who knew them only through Melville’s brief mention of a whaler in Moby Dick.”

The year 1922, when he first emigrated, was itself a landmark in world letters. In Paris, Sylvia Beach published Joyce’s Ulysses, only for it to be banned in Britain and burned by U.S. customs. In America, Fitzgerald offered Tales of the Jazz Age; Sinclair Lewis gave Babbitt. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land appeared, as did Hesse’s Siddhartha and Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows heralded the Harlem Renaissance. In Portugal, Camilo Pessanha published Clepsidra, Aquilino Ribeiro Estrada de Santiago, and in Azinhaga, a boy named José Saramago was born—the future Nobel laureate.

The milestones of Lewis’s life always seemed to echo broader literary currents. In 1951, the year Home is an Island appeared, American shelves were filled with J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Truman Capote’s The Grass Harp, William Faulkner’s Collected Stories, Adrienne Rich’s debut A Change of World, and poetry by Frost, Stevens, and Sandburg. In Portugal, Natália Correia released Descobri que Era Europeia, Miguel Torga published O Fogo e as Cinzas, Eugénio de Andrade Palavras Interditas, and Sebastião da Gama Campo Aberto. Across borders, literature pulsed with vitality—and Alfred Lewis was part of that symphony.

He read “the best that American and English authors had to offer,” learning, as he put it, “to recognize the music of a sentence.” His lifelong devotion to literature kept him attuned to currents far beyond his own islands, even as those islands remained the heart of his imagination.

Fittingly, Lewis died on June 10, 1977, the day Portuguese Communities Day was officially grafted onto Portugal and Camões Day—397 years after the death of Camões himself. Ill and near the end, he likely did not know that parliament had only recently abandoned the dark legacy of “Race Day.” Yet even had he known, he would not have been surprised. Poets understand the opportunism of politics, and Lewis knew that naming alone does not give life to a holiday.

For him, community was not a political slogan but a lived reality. Though he never returned to Flores, he lived in California “lost in abundance,” as his friend Pedro da Silveira wrote, yet always with the islands burning quietly in his heart. His literature was born of saudade, of fidelity to his homeland and his fellow Azorean-Californians. He wrote not for glory but for memory, not for distinction but for love.

The sea took him, yet it also carried him home. In every line he left behind, Flores rises again, surrounded by waters that are both exile and embrace. Alfred Lewis belongs to June 10 not because the state declared it, but because his words endure like waves: shaping, eroding, and renewing the shores of our memory. His is the unfinished journey of all emigrants—the search for return through language, through poetry, through the eternal ocean of belonging.

And so, he remains: an island within the tide, a voice forever carried by the sea.

Diniz Borges