At a moment when the Azores mark fifty years of political autonomy and SATA Azores Airlines celebrates eighty-five years of connecting islands to continents, the “I Love Azores” competition emerged as something far more meaningful than a literary contest.

It became a quiet testimony to the endurance of memory across oceans.

Promoted jointly by the Regional Secretariat for Parliamentary Affairs and Communities, through the Directorate for Communities, and by SATA Azores Airlines, the initiative invited young Azorean descendants across North America to write, in English, about their relationship with the islands of their ancestors.

What emerged from the contest was not merely nostalgia, but something deeper:
the persistence of identity in a generation often separated from the Azores by language, geography, and time itself.

Among entries received from communities across the United States and Canada, two young women were selected for works distinguished by literary quality, emotional honesty, and what the jury described as a genuine connection to Azorean identity.

Amanda da Rosa, from California, received the Boston–Azores–Boston award for a text that transformed memory into sensory geography. In her writing, the Azores appeared not as abstraction, but as lived texture: the smell of fresh pão-de-leite, the Atlantic “like glass,” the taste of fish caught by family members still tied to the sea.

Her narrative carried the emotional complexity familiar to many descendants of emigrants:
feeling “too Portuguese to be American, too American to be Portuguese.”

It is a phrase that echoes across generations of diaspora experience. Not exile. Not complete belonging. But life suspended beautifully between worlds.

Meanwhile, Kelsey D’Andrade Almerico, from Tacoma in the state of Washington, received the New York–Azores–New York distinction for an intimate reflection on discovering Terceira Island, homeland of her ancestors, after growing up within what she described as a “microscopic Portuguese-descendant diaspora” of only three people.

Without large ethnic neighborhoods, Holy Spirit societies, or community festivals surrounding her daily life, her connection to the Azores survived through fragments: a surname, family stories, and memory carried quietly across generations.

Her essay retraced a 2018 journey to Terceira Island, where inherited imagination finally encountered physical landscape. Along the way emerged another remarkable story: that of an ancestor who crossed the Atlantic and helped establish the first Portuguese-language department at an American educational institution — a reminder that Azorean migration has always contributed not only labor but also intellectual and cultural legacies to North American society itself.

The jury was chaired by acclaimed Katherine Vaz, joined by José Andrade, Regional Director for Communities, and Graça Silva, SATA’s director of sales and marketing.

Yet perhaps the most meaningful aspect of the competition was not the prizes themselves — roundtrip journeys to the Azores — but what the initiative symbolized.

Because in many diaspora communities today, identity no longer survives automatically. It must be rediscovered, reimagined, and consciously chosen.

The Azorean world of the twenty-first century stretches far beyond the nine islands scattered across the Atlantic. It also exists in California kitchens where malassadas are still prepared from family recipes; in New England churches carrying the red banners of the Divine Holy Spirit; in Montréal social halls where Portuguese mingles with French and English; and in the imagination of young descendants searching for meaning in inherited memory.

The “I Love Azores” competition recognized that reality.

It acknowledged that Azorean identity is no longer sustained only through proximity to the islands themselves, but through stories capable of crossing generations and oceans.

In honoring these two young women, the Government of the Azores and SATA also affirmed something larger:
that the future of Azorean culture depends not merely on preserving traditions, but on allowing new generations to reinterpret them through their own voices, languages, experiences, and journeys.

Because the Azores have always been more than geography.

They are also an emotional cartography of belonging.

A place carried in surnames, in recipes, in music, in prayer, in silence, and sometimes simply in the longing to understand where one comes from. And perhaps that is why contests like “I Love Azores” matter. Not because they distribute airline tickets. But because they remind an entire diaspora that even after generations abroad, the Atlantic continues speaking softly across distance — calling people home, even when home exists partly in memory.

Translated and adapted from a Press Release.