Two books from PBBI’s Bruma Publications reach the top-selling list at Livraria Letras Lavadas—and affirm the power of a publishing project built between islands, languages, and generations

What began with an empty page in California has returned to the Azores as a shelf of living memory.

Two books published by Bruma Publications, the publishing initiative of the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute at California State University, Fresno, have entered the top-selling list at Livraria Letras Lavadas in the Azores. Azorean History Themes: Islands of Struggle and Resilience, by historian Carlos Enes, occupies sixth place, while An Unending Bridge: The Azorean Islands of North America, by José Andrade, appears in ninth place.

For a small academic and cultural press created thousands of miles from the archipelago, this is far more than a commercial distinction. It is the completion of a symbolic Atlantic crossing. Books conceived to bring Azorean history, literature, and diasporic experience to English-language readers are now being embraced in the islands from which so much of their memory first departed.

The recognition is particularly meaningful because these books stand among titles from different publishers, genres, and readerships. Their presence demonstrates that works addressing Azorean history and the worldwide Azorean experience are not confined to academic circles or diaspora institutions. They can enter the wider public conversation, find ordinary readers, and claim their rightful place within the contemporary cultural life of the archipelago.

History as Resistance, Memory as Bridge

Azorean History Themes: Islands of Struggle and Resilience introduces English-language readers to decisive, and sometimes insufficiently understood, moments in the political and social history of the Azores. Carlos Enes examines the archipelago not as a passive territory at the edge of Europe, but as a place shaped by resistance, popular courage, political conflict, and the difficult construction of democratic consciousness.

The book moves from Terceira’s resistance to Spanish rule in the sixteenth century to the struggles against dictatorship, the emergence of democratic institutions, and the development of Azorean autonomy. Yet its importance resides equally in its attention to those often left outside official history: workers, artisans, rural communities, emigrants, and ordinary citizens whose lives gave substance to the larger transformations of the islands.

By appearing in English, the work also answers one of the central challenges confronting the Azorean diaspora. Many descendants in the United States and Canada remain deeply connected to the islands emotionally and culturally, while no longer possessing sufficient command of Portuguese to read scholarly works in the original language. Translation, therefore, is not a secondary literary exercise. It is an act of cultural restoration—a way of returning history to those from whom language loss might otherwise have taken it.

If Carlos Enes’s book recovers the historical struggles of the islands, José Andrade’s An Unending Bridge: The Azorean Islands of North America reveals what happened when the islands crossed the sea within the people who left them.

Translated and introduced by Diniz Borges, the book gathers chronicles about the Azorean presence throughout the United States, Canada, and Bermuda. Its geography includes the dairy communities of California, the Portuguese neighborhoods of New England, the cultural associations of Canada, the deeply Azorean society of Bermuda, and the religious and familial networks through which the archipelago continues to exist far beyond its physical shores.

Andrade’s “islands” are not solely islands of basalt and hydrangeas. They are also islands reconstructed in kitchens, parish halls, Portuguese-language newspapers, Holy Ghost societies, festivals, classrooms, radio programs, family stories, and the inherited saudade of generations born abroad.

The bridge of the title is therefore neither static nor ornamental. It is made and remade through human movement. It carries memory in both directions. It allows the diaspora to return imaginatively to the Azores while permitting the Azores to recognize that a substantial part of their human geography now exists elsewhere.

The appearance of these two works on the Letras Lavadas top-selling list creates a revealing dialogue. One book tells the history of the Azores within the islands; the other follows the Azores into North America. One studies resistance and political consciousness; the other records migration, belonging, and cultural continuity. Together, they suggest that Azorean history cannot be fully understood without the diaspora—and that the diaspora cannot understand itself without access to the history of the islands.

Bruma: A Publishing House Born Between Shores

Bruma Publications released its first volume in September 2022. In fewer than four years, it had published 36 books—an extraordinary body of work for a small, mission-driven press operating within PBBI at Fresno State. The achievement is not measured only by quantity. Its deeper significance lies in the coherence and urgency of the project. As documented in Filamentos’ issue devoted to Bruma’s publishing journey, every volume emerged from a belief that the stories of the islands and their dispersed communities deserve to be preserved, translated, studied, and placed into circulation.

The name Bruma—mist—could hardly be more appropriate. Mist is one of the elemental presences of island life. It conceals and reveals, erases the horizon and then returns it. It drifts without recognizing borders. In much the same way, Bruma Publications has sought to retrieve writers, histories, experiences, and cultural memories that risked disappearing into silence, linguistic distance, or the gradual erosion of generational memory.

From the beginning, its purpose has been clear: to disseminate literary and scholarly work concerning the Portuguese-speaking world, with particular attention to the Azores and their diaspora; to translate Portuguese-language writing into English; and to create meaningful encounters between the islands, North America, and the broader Lusophone world. Its guiding principle—“Preserving memory, fostering dialogue, connecting diasporas”—is visible across the entire catalogue. The current Bruma catalogue and mission may be consulted through Filamentos – Arts and Letters.

Bruma was never intended merely to print books. It was created to address a cultural fracture.

For generations, Portuguese and Azorean communities in North America maintained an extraordinarily rich inheritance through family, faith, association, oral tradition, music, foodways, and communal celebration. Yet, as English increasingly became the principal language of younger generations, much of the written culture of the islands became inaccessible to the very descendants most eager to understand their origins.

Bruma entered that space as both publisher and bridge. Through translation, it has allowed authors from the Azores, Madeira, mainland Portugal, Cape Verde, and the diaspora to reach readers who might never encounter their work in Portuguese. Through bilingual editions, it has created a meeting place for the two languages. Through history, literary criticism, poetry, fiction, folklore, memoir, and academic scholarship, it has expanded the intellectual architecture available to Portuguese-descended communities.

A Catalogue Made of Many Atlantics

The Bruma catalogue is not organized around one genre or one generation. It is an archipelago of books—each volume distinct, yet all connected beneath the surface by memory, language, displacement, and the search for belonging.

Its work in Azorean and island history includes Carlos Enes’s Azorean History Themes: Islands of Struggle and Resilience; Luís Mendonça’s History of the Azores: Questions and Answers; Joel Silveira Ávila’s Shades of Black and Gray, the first comprehensive history of Pico published in English; The Azores, the Atlantic, and the Global Challenges; and One Atlantic, Many Perspectives, an interdisciplinary volume emerging from the LPAZ Forum on Santa Maria.

Historical memory also takes the form of travel and biography in Joaquim Flores’s The Cartography of a Traveling Islander: Notes from a Trip to North America and Henrique Levy’s Bento de Goes. Literary and cultural investigation appear in A Terceira de Pessoa, which explores Fernando Pessoa’s little-known relationship with his maternal island of Terceira, and in Assunção Melo’s Between Silence and Vision: António Dacosta and the Sense of Belonging in Painting, a study of one of the most important Azorean and Portuguese modernist artists.

The preservation of oral tradition occupies a central place through Manuel da Costa Fontes’s Portuguese Folktales from California and Contos Populares Açorianos (Terceira e São Jorge). These volumes safeguard stories carried by emigrants and island storytellers—tales populated by clever peasants, enchanted princesses, animals, saints, devils, giants, and the inexhaustible humor of communities that understood storytelling as both entertainment and survival. The bilingual children’s book O Coelhinho Branco / The White Rabbit extends that inheritance to younger readers, making language learning an act of imagination and affection.

Poetry has been one of Bruma’s most expansive territories. The catalogue includes Through the Walls of Solitude, by Álamo Oliveira, shortlisted for the 43rd Northern California Book Award in Poetry in Translation; Rising of the Shadows, by José Pedro Leite; Misty Paths, by Pedro da Silveira; Dripping Words, by Madalena Férin; Going to the Horizon, by Marcolino Candeias; The Grammar of the Wind, by J. H. Borges Martins; Island and Return, by Aquiles García Brito; and Suspended Worlds, which brings the poetry of Natália Correia into English.

It also encompasses Ângela de Almeida’s Calligraphy of the Birds, published in bilingual and English-language editions; Regina Correia’s Conjugation of Maps; Alberto Pereira’s Inner Snow; João Carlos Abreu’s Whispering Tides; and the monumental bilingual anthology Into the Azorean Sea, which places poets from the islands in conversation with Portuguese American voices writing in English.

Bruma’s poetic geography stretches beyond the Azores to the wider Lusophone world through Cape Verdean writer Vera Duarte’s Between Words and Prayers and Supplications / Songs of Hopelessness. In these volumes, the Atlantic is not romanticized. It carries the histories of colonialism, enslavement, displacement, racism, famine, resistance, and the moral labor of remembrance.

Portuguese American writing holds an equally essential place. Sam Pereira’s Code Blue: New and Selected Poems and Lara Gularte’s Soul of Black Stone: Echoes of Islands, Shadows of Time reveal how Azorean inheritance has been transformed within the American landscape. Their work moves through California towns, ancestral memory, labor, family, ecological belonging, spiritual doubt, and the unfinished conversation between what was inherited and what has been created anew.

Fiction broadens the catalogue further. It includes Álamo Oliveira’s I No Longer Like Chocolates; Joel Neto’s Jénifer, a finalist for the 44th Northern California Book Award in Prose Translation; Paula de Sousa Lima’s The Elderly; Diogo Ourique’s Let Me Out of This Book; and Virgínia do Carmo’s Zulmira Died, translated by Richard Simas and published in partnership with Poética.

The catalogue also includes Count Me Out: The Education of Paul Francisco, by Anthony Barcellos, a Portuguese American memoir of education, identity, and social mobility. José Andrade’s An Unending Bridge now joins this wider record as one of the clearest affirmations that the Azorean diaspora is not a peripheral chapter of island history but one of its central continuations.

Bruma’s publishing work has been strengthened through partnerships with Letras Lavadas, Poética, Moonwater Editions, the Institute for Azorean-American Studies, authors, translators, municipalities, scholars, and cultural organizations on both sides of the Atlantic. These collaborations demonstrate that cultural preservation is most durable when it is shared.

A Bestseller List—and Something Greater

To see two Bruma books among the top-selling titles in an Azorean bookstore is to witness a project completing one passage and beginning another.

The books left California carrying Azorean memory in English. They crossed the Atlantic and arrived in the islands not as foreign objects but as returning relatives. Their language may be English, but their intellectual and emotional genealogy is unmistakably Azorean.

Their success also challenges a persistent assumption: that books about history, diaspora, identity, and cultural memory belong only to specialized readers. The Letras Lavadas list tells us otherwise. Readers are seeking books that help them understand where they come from, how their society was formed, why their people departed, and what became of the islands after those departures.

In an age of shortened attention, cultural spectacle, and rapidly vanishing memory, the book remains a patient form of resistance. It asks us to stop, enter another consciousness, and remain long enough to understand. For diasporic communities, it performs an additional task: it preserves what distance and assimilation might otherwise erase.

This moment belongs to Carlos Enes and José Andrade, whose work has earned the attention of readers. It belongs to the translators, editors, designers, publishers, partners, and institutions that helped the books cross linguistic and geographic borders. It belongs to Letras Lavadas for creating an indispensable literary passage between the Azores and the world. It also belongs to every reader who has chosen to carry one of these books home.

But, most of all, it affirms the enduring purpose of Bruma Publications.

What began in September 2022 as a modest publishing initiative at the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute has grown into an Atlantic library: poetry and history, fiction and folklore, scholarship and memory, islands and diasporas gathered into books.

Bruma may mean mist, but its purpose has always been illumination.

And now, on a top-selling list in the Azores, two of its books stand as visible evidence that the bridge is being crossed—that the words are reaching the other shore, that readers are waiting there, and that the stories we preserve can still return home.

We thank all of you for your support.