Fifty years after the inauguration of the First Regional Government, Mota Amaral’s legacy endures in the political dignity he restored to the islands and in the bridges he built with their scattered people
On September 8, 1976, the Azores awakened to a form of government that, until then, had existed principally as an aspiration. Four days after the inaugural session of the newly elected Regional Assembly, the First Regional Government took office at the Palácio da Conceição, in Ponta Delgada. For the first time in nearly nine centuries of Portuguese statehood, the people of the archipelago possessed democratically elected institutions of self-government.
It was more than an administrative beginning. It altered the Azorean understanding of itself.
Recalling that historic day fifty years later, João Bosco Mota Amaral spoke of the “great expectation” felt throughout the islands. The regional elections of June 27, 1976, had mobilized a population aware that it was participating in something unprecedented. People voted, he remembered, “with enthusiasm and pleasure.” They were not merely choosing representatives; they were entering history as political subjects, claiming the right to have a decisive voice in the destiny of their islands.
Mota Amaral was only thirty-three when he became the first president of the Regional Government. He had already served in Portugal’s National Assembly, beginning in 1969, and had participated in the political opening associated with the Liberal Wing. After the Revolution of April 25, 1974, he became one of the principal architects of the constitutional and political struggle for Azorean autonomy.
The government he formed was composed, in his memorable expression, of the prata da casa—the silver of the house. It brought together a largely young generation of Azoreans, including Reis Leite, Raul Gomes dos Santos, Rui Mesquita and Germano da Silva Domingues. They inherited few models, limited resources and a central government reluctant to surrender powers accumulated over centuries. Yet they possessed something more important: the conviction that the Azores could govern themselves responsibly without ceasing to belong to Portugal.
That distinction became central to Mota Amaral’s political thought. Autonomy was not separation, nor was it a temporary concession from Lisbon. It was the democratic expression of the Azorean people within the Portuguese Republic.
“An autonomous region is not a non-self-governing territory,” he recently insisted. “It is not a territory dominated by Lisbon. It is an autonomous territory. Full stop. We are Portugal here.”
Those words contain the essential grammar of Azorean autonomy. Portugal does not end on the European continent and then begin again, reluctantly, in the Atlantic. Portugal is also fully present in the Azores. The national interest does not need to be explained to Azoreans by those arriving from outside, because Azoreans are not peripheral observers of the nation. They are among its makers.
In his inaugural address fifty years ago, Mota Amaral promised an “unyielding defense” of autonomy and appealed for unity among Azoreans. He also rejected fantasies of a new Atlantic empire that would bind the islands to colonial practices disguised by paternalism. Autonomy, in this conception, was the opposite of tutelage. It was political adulthood.
The transfer of powers, however, did not occur easily. Mota Amaral remembers the resistance of the central government and the need for patient but relentless insistence. Cooperation improved with Mário Soares beginning in 1978 and took what he described as a “great qualitative leap” under Francisco Sá Carneiro in 1980. Lisbon may have expected the Azoreans to tire, divide or abandon the project. They did not.
Mota Amaral would lead the Regional Government for nearly nineteen years, from 1976 to 1995, winning five regional elections. During those formative decades, he became more than the first head of the autonomous executive. He became, in the public imagination, the face and voice of autonomy itself.
Yet his understanding of the Azores was never confined to the nine islands.
A people larger than its geography
For Mota Amaral, the Azorean people also lived in New England, California, Canada, Bermuda, Hawaii, Brazil, Uruguay and in the many other places where generations of islanders had rebuilt their lives. Emigration had dispersed the population, but it had not abolished belonging. The diaspora was not an appendix to the archipelago’s history. It was one of its central chapters.
This vision represented a profound departure from the years of dictatorship. The Estado Novo knew that Azoreans emigrated, regulated their departures and sometimes celebrated their attachment to Portugal. But it never created a genuinely Azorean policy of continuous, direct and reciprocal engagement with the communities abroad. Emigrants were frequently considered through the narrow lenses of labor, remittances, consular administration or patriotic symbolism. They were spoken about, but seldom spoken with. They were expected to preserve Portugal, but Portugal—particularly the distant state centered in Lisbon—did comparatively little to understand the complex societies they were building abroad.
For decades, the Azores themselves had been treated as distant “adjacent islands”: strategically useful, culturally picturesque, politically subordinate and economically neglected. Roads, education, healthcare, communications and basic infrastructure revealed the consequences of a system in which decisions were made elsewhere and island realities were filtered through distant ministries. If the archipelago was peripheral in the imagination of the centralized state, the Azorean diaspora existed even farther beyond its field of vision.
The same families could therefore be forgotten twice: first when they lived in neglected islands and again when poverty, limited opportunity or natural disaster compelled them to leave.
The bond survived because families preserved it. It endured in letters written at kitchen tables; in photographs carefully enclosed between sheets of paper; in parcels filled with clothing, coffee and small gifts; in Masses offered for relatives across the ocean; in the Holy Ghost festas, marching bands, folklore groups and Portuguese-language newspapers established through sacrifice. The relationship between the islands and the diaspora remained profoundly alive, but for generations it was primarily intimate rather than institutional.
A letter from California, Massachusetts, Ontario or Hawaii might require weeks to reach an Azorean village. News traveled through relatives, parish priests, ship passengers and returning emigrants. The emigrant often knew the homeland through memory, while the homeland knew the emigrant through absence.
For those of us who grew up in the diaspora during those years, the Azores existed at once as geography and inheritance. They were present in the language spoken at home, in the food prepared by our mothers, in the voices of grandparents, in radio signals crossing the Atlantic, and in envelopes bearing unfamiliar stamps. Yet the islands could also seem politically distant—as if we belonged to them emotionally without knowing whether their institutions knew that we existed.
Autonomy began to change that relationship.
From family letters to public policy
One of the most transformative achievements of Mota Amaral’s governments was the creation of the first regional mechanisms dedicated to direct and continuing contact with Azorean emigrants and their descendants. Beginning in 1979, the First Regional Government initiated a program to establish services directed toward the emigrant communities. Over time, these structures developed into the institutional framework represented by the Gabinete de Emigração e Apoio às Comunidades Açorianas and, later, by the present Regional Directorate for Communities.
This may appear bureaucratic when reduced to the name of an office. In human terms, however, it constituted a revolution in belonging.
For the first time, an Azorean government assumed political responsibility for maintaining a relationship with the Azorean people beyond the physical territory of the archipelago. The emigrant was no longer simply someone who had departed. He or she remained part of the Region’s moral, cultural and civic community.
The new mechanisms allowed the government to establish regular communication with associations, clubs, churches, cultural groups, educators and community leaders. They created channels through which the Region could understand the difficulties of emigrants, support Portuguese-language education and cultural initiatives, encourage visits and exchanges, and develop a policy of proximity that had been unthinkable under the old centralized order.
Mota Amaral’s journeys to the diaspora gave human form to this institutional transformation. His first direct encounter with Azorean communities in the United States had occurred during a study visit in 1972. Later, as president of the Regional Government, he crossed the Atlantic repeatedly—not only to the large and historically visible communities of New England and Canada, but also to the dispersed Azorean world of the American West.
He visited California from Arcata in the north to San Diego in the south, traveling through communities that, at the time, were scarcely known in the islands beyond family correspondence. These were communities built in dairy country, agricultural valleys, fishing ports, industrial towns and expanding cities. They had created halls, churches, mutual-aid societies, newspapers, radio programs and Holy Ghost celebrations, often without sustained institutional attention from the homeland.
His arrival conveyed a simple but powerful message: the autonomous Azores knew where its people were.
A president entering a modest Portuguese hall, visiting a dairy family or addressing an immigrant association did more than fulfill a ceremonial obligation. He was acknowledging communities that had long preserved their Azorean identity largely through their own labor. His presence transformed private memory into public recognition.
He listened to men and women who had departed from São Miguel, Terceira, Pico, Faial, São Jorge, Flores, Graciosa, Santa Maria and Corvo. Many had left with little formal education and few possessions but had constructed lives of dignity through extraordinary work. Their children were becoming teachers, business owners, farmers, attorneys, journalists, public officials and university students. Mota Amaral understood that these communities were not remnants of a lost Azorean past. They were part of the Azorean future.
Across two oceans
The relationship established with Hawaii became one of the most symbolic expressions of this Atlantic-Pacific vision. In 1982, Mota Amaral and Hawaii Governor George R. Ariyoshi formalized a fraternal relationship between the two archipelagos. Both island societies had been shaped by volcanic landscapes, oceanic distance and the labor of Portuguese immigrants, many of them Azoreans who began arriving in Hawaii in significant numbers during the nineteenth century.
Hawaii was extraordinarily far from the Azores, yet its Portuguese traditions carried recognizable traces of the islands—from family names and religious devotions to music, foodways and community institutions. The agreement affirmed that geographical remoteness need not become historical abandonment.
California likewise became an indispensable partner in the Azores’ relationship with its diaspora. Official ties, legislative relationships, sister-city programs, educational exchanges and civic cooperation gradually transformed connections once sustained mainly through families, churches and festas into durable institutional partnerships.
The same bridge-building extended to Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Ontario, Quebec and other centers of Azorean life in the United States and Canada. No two communities were identical. Each had been shaped by different periods of migration, local economies, linguistic realities and generational experiences. Mota Amaral’s importance lay partly in understanding that the diaspora was not a single ceremonial audience. It was a vast, plural and evolving Azorean world.
His policies established a principle that should remain central today: the diaspora must not be remembered only when a delegation travels, a festival is held or a political speech requires an invocation of saudade. It must be engaged continuously, strategically and respectfully.
Mota Amaral helped turn saudade into public policy and ancestral affection into civic partnership. He recognized that the ocean separating the islands from their emigrant communities could also become the space across which a larger Azorean consciousness was constructed.
The humility of asking forgiveness
There was another significant moment during the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the First Regional Government. After recalling almost two decades of leadership and the immense work undertaken in a Region where, as he acknowledged, nearly everything remained to be done when he assumed office, Mota Amaral asked the Azorean people to forgive him for any failure committed during his mandates.
The request was brief, but its moral weight exceeded the language of ordinary political ceremony.
Power usually prefers the vocabulary of accomplishment. It enumerates roads built, institutions created, laws approved and elections won. It rarely pauses to recognize that every long exercise of authority also contains errors, omissions, choices that caused disappointment and possibilities that were not fulfilled.
Mota Amaral did not erase his work by asking forgiveness. He enlarged it.
Humility does not require a statesman to deny what was achieved. It requires him to understand that public office is never a personal possession and that history does not absolve leaders merely because their accomplishments were substantial. To ask forgiveness after nearly twenty years in power is to acknowledge that governing is a human undertaking: necessary, imperfect and ultimately accountable to the people.
This humility is especially meaningful in an era when political figures so often confuse admitting error with surrendering authority. Mota Amaral’s words suggested the opposite: that moral authority may be strengthened when a leader accepts the limits of his own actions.
His lament regarding the present disunity among Azoreans carries the same tone of concern. He has insisted that the essential purpose of autonomy is to “bring all the Azores together”—not to replace dependence on Lisbon with dependence on Ponta Delgada, Angra do Heroísmo or Horta, but to unite nine distinct islands in a common political project.
The same principle must include the diaspora. To bring together “all the Azores” is to recognize that the Azorean human archipelago extends far beyond its visible geography.
The bridge must now become a common road
Fifty years later, commemoration cannot be reduced to gratitude or nostalgia. The bridges built during the first decades of autonomy now require another level of ambition.
The diaspora has changed. Its younger generations are multilingual, professionally diverse and increasingly distant from the experience of emigration that shaped their grandparents. They cannot be engaged only through symbolic visits, traditional celebrations or occasional appeals to ancestral sentiment. They must be invited to participate as partners in research, education, entrepreneurship, cultural creation, environmental policy, technology, public health, media and the international projection of the Azores.
The next stage must move from preservation to participation, from periodic contact to permanent cooperation.
Universities, municipalities, media organizations, cultural institutions, businesses and civic associations should be connected through lasting networks. Young Azorean Americans and Canadians should encounter the archipelago not merely as the birthplace of their ancestors, but as a contemporary society in which they can study, invest, create, conduct research and contribute. The islands, in turn, must learn from the diaspora’s accumulated experience without viewing it primarily as a source of remittances, tourism or ceremonial support.
The relationship must also become more reciprocal. The Region should not merely send culture outward; it should welcome the culture created by Azoreans abroad. The literature, scholarship, music, journalism, political participation and social experience of the diaspora belong within the larger story of Azorean identity. The descendants of emigrants have not simply preserved a culture received from the islands. They have expanded and transformed it.
Mota Amaral’s generation built the political house of autonomy. It gave the Azores their own democratic institutions, defended their constitutional powers and insisted that islanders possessed the maturity to determine their collective future. It also opened that house to those who had departed, assuring them that distance had not erased their place within the Azorean family.
The enduring lesson of September 8, 1976, is therefore larger than the inauguration of a government. Autonomy is never merely a structure of offices, laws and competencies. It is a continuing act of recognition: the recognition of a people, of its dignity, of its capacity for self-government—and of its presence wherever Azoreans and their descendants have carried the islands within them.
Mota Amaral became the face of autonomy because, for nearly two decades, he embodied that affirmation. He also became one of the faces of the Azores abroad because he crossed oceans to meet communities that had waited generations to be seen. And, fifty years later, by asking forgiveness for whatever he may have done imperfectly, he reminded us that the greatness of public service is not measured only by the monuments it leaves standing, but also by the humility with which it kneels before memory.
The First Regional Government brought political power closer to the islands. Mota Amaral helped bring the islands closer to their diaspora. The most fitting tribute now will be to carry both journeys forward—deepening autonomy at home while transforming the Azores–diaspora relationship into a more creative, reciprocal and consequential partnership.
The bridge has been built. It is now the responsibility of another generation to make it a common road toward the future
Diniz Borges for Filamentos
Photos from Governo dos Açores and RTP, including RTP-Archives.