Whenever October 5 returns, I think of a country that has so often stood before the threshold of its own possibilities. I think, too, of the Portugal I carried away as a child: an island, my parents, the familiar landscape of Terceira, and an ocean whose immensity I could scarcely understand.
But my family’s journey across that ocean began long before mine.
In 1910, the year the Republic was proclaimed, my grandfather Manuel Ferreira Lourenço left for America. While Portugal attempted to give itself a new political beginning, he sought a new beginning abroad. He lived in America until 1928, when he returned to the Azores. His eighteen years overseas spanned the life of the First Republic; by the time he came home, a military dictatorship had already closed its parliamentary doors.
I often think of those overlapping journeys: a country searching for its future, a grandfather searching for opportunity, and, decades later, my parents and I crossing the same ocean.
In 1968, when we left the Azores for California, I was ten years old. Portugal was still living beneath the long shadow of dictatorship. I could not yet comprehend the political structures that governed our lives, but I was beginning to learn something that no constitution can fully describe: what it means to leave the place that first taught you the names of things.
We carried Portugal with us. It traveled in our language, in the habits of our household, in the memories my parents brought into their new lives. It remained present at our table, in our celebrations, and in the silences where homesickness sometimes settled. America became our home, but the islands continued to inhabit us.
Perhaps that is why Portugal’s history has never seemed to me a distant procession of dates. Its promises and disappointments belong to the intimate history of families like mine.
On October 5, 1910, the proclamation of the Republic ended centuries of monarchy. The new regime sought to establish a different foundation for political authority: citizenship rather than inheritance, representation rather than the succession of a royal house. A new flag, a new constitutional order, and a new presidency announced a country attempting to reconsider itself.
The transformation carried aspirations for education, secular government, and a new relationship between the state and the Church. Yet republican citizenship remained incomplete. The electoral law of 1913 excluded women and those unable to read and write. The Republic spoke in the name of the people while leaving many outside the room where their future was decided.
The First Republic deserves remembrance without romantic embroidery or dismissive contempt. Political fragmentation, social conflict, and Portugal’s participation in the First World War placed enormous pressures upon its fragile institutions. The distance between republican aspiration and everyday security widened. In May 1926, a military coup ended the parliamentary experiment and opened the way to dictatorship.
Two years later, my grandfather returned to the islands. The Portugal he encountered was already different from the one whose republican dawn had accompanied his departure.
That history reminds us how dangerous the exhaustion of hope can become. When institutions appear unable to answer suffering, the promise of order acquires an authority it has not earned. A people weary of uncertainty may surrender freedoms whose absence they will understand only afterward.
The military dictatorship prepared the ground for the Estado Novo. Portugal retained the name of a republic, demonstrating how little a political designation guarantees when liberty has been emptied from the institutions beneath it. Censorship reached across newspapers, books, the arts, radio, and cinema. Power sought to govern both public life and the words through which a country might question its condition.
The darkness of those decades lived in the distance between what people thought and what they dared to say. Political repression narrowed the possibilities of citizenship. The colonial wars deepened the wounds of a regime increasingly unable to reconcile its vision of Portugal with the aspirations of those it governed.
This was the Portugal my parents left in 1968.
I would not reduce their departure to a single political explanation. Migration emerges from the complicated meeting of family circumstances, economic needs, and hopes for children. But our journey belonged to that historical landscape. Like so many Portuguese families, we sought possibilities beyond the borders of our birthplace.
In California, I learned that an immigrant’s life is built through work, adaptation, uncertainty, and persistence. I began dairy work at thirteen. I became an American citizen at eighteen. These milestones belong to my American story, but they also belong to Portugal’s dispersed history: the countless lives through which a small country has become present across the world.
Then, in 1974, the country we had left opened another door.
The Carnation Revolution overthrew the dictatorship on April 25 and began the difficult passage toward democracy. Freedom arrived with exhilaration, but its construction required elections, debate, conflict, and compromise. The Constitution of 1976 established fundamental rights and a democratic framework, including autonomy for the Azores and Madeira. For an Azorean, that recognition carries particular meaning: the islands could participate in Portugal’s future through institutions attentive to their own circumstances.
I continue to believe in that future.
Portugal can still fulfill promises too often postponed. It can build a country where young people have meaningful choices about staying or leaving; where education opens doors regardless of family income; where the islands are heard; and where public service merits public trust. Emigration should be a possibility freely embraced, rather than the price a young person must pay for a viable future.
But hope requires an honest response to hardship. Housing, wages, employment, and access to public services cannot be dismissed by those who wish to defend democracy. Unanswered suffering creates an opening for extreme populism, whose easiest offering is often an enemy.
Portugal must resist that trap: the seductive promise that a country can recover its greatness by narrowing its sympathies, vilifying newcomers, and entrusting its frustrations to those who turn resentment into political currency. We have already known the cost of surrendering freedom to promises of order. Democracy asks us to confront hardship with practical answers before disappointment becomes the instrument of those who would diminish it.
The immigrant becomes a convenient bearer of blame. An accent becomes an accusation. An unfamiliar name is treated as evidence of danger. Years of political failure are displaced onto people who frequently possess the least power to defend themselves.
For Portugal, this carries a painful contradiction.
Ours is a people whose family albums so often contain an ocean. Generations departed for Brazil, France, Germany, Canada, the United States, and many other destinations. They carried skills, ambition, uncertainty, and saudade. Many knew the discomfort of speaking imperfectly, the exhaustion of unfamiliar work, and the longing to be judged by their character rather than their birthplace.
When I hear newcomers described as though their presence were an offense, I think of my grandfather arriving in America in 1910. I think of my parents beginning again in California in 1968. I think of the child I was, learning to belong to another country without surrendering the first.
Our experience does not exempt us from prejudice. It gives us a responsibility to recognize it.
A democracy can regulate migration, enforce fair laws, and ask for integration while making integration possible. It can protect its institutions and respect those who arrive seeking safety, work, and a future. Vilification contributes nothing to those tasks. It corrodes the confidence and solidarity a country needs to address them.
Portugal possesses possibilities far greater than the politics of suspicion would allow us to imagine. Among them is a different relationship with its diaspora: sustained, reciprocal, and rooted in shared work.
Those who carry Portuguese ancestry, language, memory, or affection across the world offer an extraordinary range of experience. They are educators, researchers, entrepreneurs, artists, workers, and young people whose connections to Portugal can nourish both their countries of residence and their ancestral homeland. Their participation should extend beyond ceremonial invitations and the expectation of remittances. It can help build enduring partnerships in education, research, culture, investment, and civic life.
After a lifetime in California, I know that belonging can deepen across distance. I have seen it in classrooms, in cultural exchanges, and in the curiosity of younger generations discovering a country their grandparents left. Portugal should make room for them, including those who no longer speak Portuguese but still wish to enter its unfolding story.
Language is a precious bridge, and we must continue to teach and cherish it. But a weakened command of Portuguese should never become a verdict upon someone’s belonging. The descendants of emigrants carry histories that Portugal helped create. Their desire to reconnect deserves an invitation and a path forward.
My grandfather’s eighteen years in America, my parents’ departure in 1968, and my own life between the islands and California belong to that larger possibility. The ocean has separated our homes; it has also enlarged the world in which Portugal can act.
I left the Azores in 1968, but I have never ceased to belong to their unfolding story. Through language, teaching, culture, and the bridges between islands and diaspora, I have tried to return something to the country that first formed me. That work has strengthened my conviction that Portugal’s future can be built through relationships extending well beyond its geographical borders.
On October 5, I remember the Republic as an unfinished promise. I remember April as the freedom to continue its work. Between those dates, I see my grandfather’s departure and return, my parents’ courage, and the life that became possible for me across the ocean.
Portugal can still become more faithful to its finest aspirations: confident enough to welcome those who arrive, imaginative enough to engage those who departed, and democratic enough to give both a meaningful place in its future.
That possibility rests in the daily choices of its citizens: how they govern, how they disagree, whose suffering they acknowledge, and whom they allow to belong.
And when another family arrives carrying the uncertain dreams my parents once carried, I hope Portugal will recognize a familiar human journey—and find the confidence to open the door.
Diniz Borges