Autonomy: Name and Path by Aníbal C. Pires

The Constitution of 1976 gave a name to what had long existed in quiet insistence: autonomy. Not as concession, but as conquest. A conquest born from the same gesture that returned to the Portuguese their voice—and the right to use it.

Before that, the Azores lived at the edge. An economy of subsistence, anchored to land and sea. Industry, nearly absent. And emigration, not as choice, but as repetition—an almost biological necessity. People left as one breathes: because staying was not always possible. The islands were distant. Education was brief. Healthcare, scarce. Connections, uncertain. And there was a country—one that did not always arrive. Then came the time of construction.

Autonomy opened roads where there had been none. Europe brought means where there had been limits. And slowly, the archipelago began to redraw its own image: more schools, more hospitals, more ports and airports. An economy loosening, cautiously, from its older constraints.

But to grow is not the same as to balance.

The islands remain unequal among themselves, as if the sea meant to unite them instead disperses them. Dependency persists—less visible now, but no less real—embedded in financial flows that shape decisions and postpone autonomy in its fullest sense. Emigration has changed form, but not essence; it still carries the young beyond the horizon, though now along different routes.

We live better. This is undeniable.

But we do not yet live as we could—and perhaps more importantly, as we should.

Autonomy, after all, is not an arrival. It is a practice.

It is a way of inhabiting territory and time. Laws define its contours, but its substance depends on us—on the capacity to imagine a future that is not merely an extension of the present, nor a reflection of external will or internal submission.

April opened the door.

But crossing it remains unfinished work. There is an autonomy that exists in texts. Another that lives in speeches.
And a third—more demanding—that only takes shape in daily practice: in decisions not postponed, in choices not delegated. It is this autonomy that remains to be fulfilled.

Perhaps because autonomy is not decreed—it is built. And like all things that matter, it is built slowly: with memory, with awareness, and, inevitably, with conflict.

The original promise—a harmonious development across all islands—remains only partially realized. And it is precisely in that gap, between what has been achieved and what has not yet been imagined, that autonomy reveals itself—not as inheritance, but as responsibility.

At its core, the question remains both simple and difficult: What do we intend to do with the freedom we have won?

The true meaning of April’s freedom is realized only when autonomy ceases to be merely a political statute and becomes a collective project—a project of conscious citizenship, of solidarity between islands, and of the full affirmation of Azorean identity within the Portuguese and Atlantic space.

The autonomy secured after the Carnation Revolution was decisive: it gave institutional form to an identity that had long been cultural and emotional. Yet one may argue that this political autonomy has not yet fully translated into a consolidated civic and cultural consciousness.

Azorean identity lives—powerfully—in discourse, in symbolism, in feeling.

But it remains less anchored in political practice, less embodied in a development project that is truly its own—still, at times, shaped by external logics and internal accommodations.

And so autonomy continues—not as a completed chapter, but as an ongoing act of becoming.

Aníbal C. Pires is a poet, writer, and political activist. He was a member of the Azorean Parliament.