Where the Atlantic remembers and the Pacific begins.
To the Other Ocean*
(The Azores—if they wish—have a partner on the West Coast of the United States)
“For this land that was not yours
you generously gave your blood,
and you gave it, oh seed of worlds,
your children.”
—Pedro da Silveira, Êxodo
Somewhere between basalt and desert, between the hum of windmills and the whisper of vines, two oceans face each other — the Atlantic and the Pacific — separated by continents yet joined by memory. What one began, the other might continue. The Atlantic taught us to depart; the Pacific now invites us to return. And between them, the Azores remain, islands of both departure and belonging, poised to rediscover their reflection in another ocean.
“Don’t waste this opportunity,” I said, perhaps too bluntly, to a Portuguese diplomat at an event at California State University, Fresno, where I teach. It was not impatience that guided my words, but conviction. Here, in the fertile plain of California’s Central Valley, a wave of collaboration is rising — a convergence of interests, energies, and human stories that could unite the Azores with the American West in ways that serve both the islands and their far-flung descendants. It is a moment full of promise, if we choose to act with vision and with will.
California State University, Fresno — or simply Fresno State — began humbly as Fresno State Normal School on September 11, 1911. Its mission then was to educate teachers for the San Joaquin Valley. The first classes were held in the basement of Fresno High School. From that unassuming beginning emerged an institution that would help shape the identity of this region and the lives of generations. During World War II, Fresno State became a training ground for military personnel, demonstrating its adaptability and its deep sense of service. The postwar years brought an expansion unlike any other. Veterans returning from the frontlines, supported by the G.I. Bill, filled classrooms and transformed the college into a place of renewal and ambition. In 1949, it was renamed Fresno State College, and in 1972, it joined the California State University system, solidifying its role as one of the great public universities of the American West.
Today, Fresno State is part of a constellation of 23 campuses that comprise the California State University system. This system extends across a state four times the size of mainland Portugal. California’s 2022 GDP reached $3.6 trillion, about 14.3% of the total U.S. economy. If California were a sovereign country, it would rank as the fifth-largest economy in the world, ahead of India and the United Kingdom. The CSU system, serving nearly 460,000 students, represents the most ethnically, economically, and academically diverse student body in the nation. With almost 60,000 faculty and staff, it offers more than 4,000 academic programs. It has awarded over four million degrees — living proof that public education, when rooted in community, can transform lives on a vast scale.
Fresno State’s main campus covers 388 acres, with an additional 1,011-acre agricultural estate that stretches toward the Sierra Nevada. The university lies in the heart of California’s San Joaquin Valley, one of the world’s most fertile farming regions. Fresno, the sixth-largest city in California, has over 580,000 residents, and nearly 1.5 million live in Fresno County. From the university, Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks are less than an hour away; Los Angeles and San Francisco are four hours distant. During the 2023–2024 academic year, Fresno State enrolled roughly 25,000 students and employed 2,505 faculty and staff.
The university continues to climb in national rankings, particularly in social mobility — a measure of how well an institution enables students to rise beyond economic hardship. In September 2023, U.S. News & World Report ranked Fresno State eighth in the nation for social mobility, up from thirtieth the previous year. “This high and significant ranking,” said President Saúl Jiménez-Sandoval, “is especially meaningful to our students, their families, and our region. It means that Fresno State allows our students to become the best versions of themselves and, in doing so, become the leaders we all need.” Jiménez-Sandoval, who holds a doctorate in Portuguese and Spanish studies and speaks Portuguese fluently, understands both the language and the soul of the Lusophone world.
About 65% of Fresno State’s students are the first in their families to attend college; nearly 80% of its graduates remain in the San Joaquin Valley, reshaping the social and economic landscape of a region where an Azorean community has flourished for over 150 years. Fresno State currently ranks 101st among the best public universities in the United States and 185th overall among more than four thousand institutions nationwide. It ranks 12th in electronic engineering and communications and 6th in the 2024 Wall Street Journal/College Pulse Best Colleges rankings for social mobility. It also ranked 26th nationally on Washington Monthly’s 2023 list of top universities and 13th in the “Best Bang for the Buck: West” category. Money Magazine recently gave Fresno State a 4.5-star rating for affordability and quality, and the university received seventy million dollars in research grants in the last fiscal year alone.
These numbers matter not as a boast but as context: this is an institution situated in one of the most productive regions on Earth, where descendants of Azorean immigrants live, study, and teach. It has every condition to be a strong and lasting partner for the Autonomous Region of the Azores — especially now, when the Azores are seeking relationships built not merely on heritage, but on shared innovation and purpose.
The Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute (PBBI), inaugurated less than seven years ago by the then-President of the Regional Government of the Azores, Vasco Cordeiro, has been essential in cultivating this bridge. It has quickly become a living network of cultural, literary, and academic exchange between the archipelago and its diaspora. Among its many projects: seventy-five oral histories recorded, ninety-five percent of them with Azorean immigrants or their descendants; conferences and lectures that explore Azorean and Madeiran themes; Bruma Publications, which in three years published 24 books, nearly all of them devoted to Azorean culture and printed in partnership with Letras Lavadas; the Cagarro Colloquium, a community of writers with roots in the islands; student and faculty exchanges between Fresno State’s agricultural sciences and the University of the Azores; Filamentos, a digital magazine and paltform subtitled “Arts and Letters in the Azorean Diaspora”; and Novidades, a platform offering Azorean news in English for younger generations.
PBBI’s documentaries on oral history, its proposed Azores-Diaspora Media Alliance, and the planned Azorean Diaspora Forum continue this work of translation and dissemination — not only between languages but between realities. They are the architecture of a dialogue long overdue.
Fresno State is not MIT, as one arrogant visitor from Portugal once told me — nor does it pretend to be. But it is a partner the Azores can count on, precisely because it is grounded in the lived experiences of communities like ours. To call Fresno a “rural” place, as someone once did condescendingly, is to misunderstand the vitality of this city of over half a million inhabitants and the tenth most multicultural city in the United States. This is not rurality; this is humanity in all its breadth.
There is genuine enthusiasm here for the Azores. “There’s excitement on campus about the islands,” a student told me recently. The university’s leadership and faculty share this curiosity and affection. President Jiménez-Sandoval himself, a Mexican emigrant and a scholar of Lusophone culture, has expressed a profound sympathy for the Azores and the Portuguese world.
If there is any sin, it would be the sin of indifference — to ignore this rare moment, to allow this current of goodwill to pass without building the bridge it offers. The Azorean diaspora in California, though smaller than popular exaggerations suggest, remains the largest community of Azorean descent in any state or province of North America. From this western edge of the continent, projects of genuine reciprocity can emerge — for those who stayed and for those who left, for those who remember and for those who are just beginning to rediscover who they are.
Let there be vision. Let there be will. The Atlantic once taught us to leave; the Pacific now invites us to return — not as exiles, but as partners, as travelers who recognize that the sea, in its infinite patience, always waits for dialogue.
The Azores, if they wish, have a partner on the western shore of the United States — a university, a community, and an ocean that listens.
And perhaps, in the hush between two waves, the two oceans might one day recognize each other — not as distance, but as reflection, each completing the other’s horizon.
*From the poem Êxodo by Pedro da Silveira
The Azorean West (a new segment)
Stories and Reflections from the Azorean Diaspora in California and Beyond
Across the long arc of the Atlantic and into the open light of the Pacific, the Azorean presence endures — not as a distant echo, but as a living geography of memory, work, and imagination. The Azorean West is a space for reflection, research, and storytelling about the Azorean diaspora in California and throughout the western United States — its past migrations, its present voices, and its emerging futures.
Here, the ocean is not a boundary but a bridge. Each essay, profile, or chronicle reveals the quiet ways the Azores have shaped the cultural, agricultural, and emotional landscape of the American West — from dairy farms and vineyards to classrooms, poetry readings, and archives of remembrance.
Rooted in the language of both continents, The Azorean West speaks to those who left, those who stayed, and those who return through art, education, and memory. It is a chronicle of the tenth island made visible — a testament that identity, like the tide, always finds another shore.
Filamentos (artes e letras) 