1. Who are you, and how do you see the community today?

My name is Joey Medeiros. I am a Portuguese-American musician, educator, and researcher. Much of my professional and personal life has centered on the same questions: how people understand culture and identity, how those identities change across generations, and how communities decide what is worth carrying forward.

I have spent time in Portuguese communities in several parts of the world, and one thing has stayed with me. There is no single way of being Portuguese outside of Portugal.

Portuguese communities in California have developed an expression of Portuguese identity that is distinctly their own. Portuguese communities in Quebec have their own expression of that identity. So do the communities in New England and elsewhere in the diaspora.

Histories, traditions, symbols, memories, and ways of relating connect us, but each community has also been shaped by where it took root, the people who built it, and the generations that followed.

Traveling between those communities can produce (and I am being dramatic here) cultural shock. I arrive somewhere expecting certain things because I grew up thinking this is what Portuguese people do, only to learn that what I expected is what Portuguese Californians do.

Something I assumed was universal may barely exist somewhere else. For example, Sopas do Espírito Santo every Sunday in the summer and queens and their court.

And yet, when I walk into those same communities, I feel completely at home.

That contradiction is the important part. We can be different without being disconnected.

Our community today sits at a similar point of transition. Our strengths are real: strong families, organizations, festas, churches, businesses, artists, educators, and institutions that earlier generations worked hard to build. The emotional connection to Portugal, the Azores, and Madeira remains remarkable, even among people born and raised here.

What is changing is how that connection gets expressed.

For my grandparents and my parents, Portuguese identity was tied directly to birthplace, language, immigration, and maintaining traditions from home.

For younger generations, it can look different. Someone may not speak Portuguese fluently and still know the music, the food, the festas, the stories of their family, and that almost indescribable feeling of recognizing something as ours.

That does not necessarily make their identity weaker. It means that identity is being expressed differently.

Culture is not only inherited; it is interpreted. Every generation decides, consciously or not, which parts remain central, which parts change, and what those traditions mean in a new context.

Our challenge is to preserve what is meaningful without reducing preservation to repetition.

2. Are we making room for the next generation?

While I think we’re making room, I am not convinced we are giving ownership.

There is a difference between inviting young people to participate and inviting them to lead. Representation is different from agency.

Inviting young people into the room is not the same as allowing them to influence what happens in it.

If we want younger generations to stay, established organizations have to hand over real responsibility: a voice in programming, in leadership, in communication, in music, in cultural events, and in decisions about what these institutions will become.

That requires accepting that younger people may do things differently.

The diaspora already shows us this is survivable. Portuguese culture in California did not develop identically to Portuguese culture in Quebec, in New England, or in Portugal itself. Each community inherited a foundation and built something suited to its circumstances.

The next generation deserves that same opportunity. The issues Portuguese people faced before are not necessarily the same issues we have today.

One of the greatest mistakes we could make is asking young people to preserve Portuguese culture while telling them exactly what that preservation should look like.

Living cultures have never remained meaningful through replication alone. Every generation inherits something, interprets it, and adds its own.

So, the question for established leaders is not how we get young people to come to what we are already doing.

The question is what we could build together that they would actually want to inherit and build upon.

3. What future do you envision?

I want a Portuguese identity that is confident in its own evolution.

Ten years from now, many of the people carrying this culture forward will be third-, fourth-, or fifth-generation. Some will speak Portuguese fluently. Some will understand it and struggle to speak it. Some will know very little.

And that is okay.

Language cannot and should not be the only doorway into belonging.

That does not mean language is unimportant. Language carries history, worldview, humor, memory, and cultural knowledge that is hard to translate.

We should invest seriously in Portuguese-language education while recognizing that language proficiency cannot become a test someone must pass before being allowed to belong.

If we want identity to persist across generations, we need multiple points of entry such as music, food, history, genealogy, education, travel, scholarship, entrepreneurship, technology, art, and community life.

Our diaspora communities can also learn from one another. I can travel from California to another Portuguese community, meet traditions completely unfamiliar to me, and still recognize that community as mine.

That is a powerful thing.

Maybe the future is not about making these communities more alike or closing it off for “us.” Maybe it is about strengthening whatever allows us to stay connected and sharing that with a larger community of non-Portuguese people as well.

Our relationship with Portugal should not exist only in the past tense. It should not only be about remembering where earlier generations came from.

It can be about what we create together now: student exchanges, artistic collaborations, research, entrepreneurship, cultural programs, and opportunities moving in both directions across the Atlantic.

The goal is not a perfect reproduction of the Portuguese community of fifty years ago.

The goal is a community strong enough that someone fifty years from now still finds something worth calling their own.

4. What headline would you like to see ten years from now?

My headline would read this way:

“A New Generation Reimagines Portuguese Identity Without Losing Its Roots”

I would want that article to describe a community that did not thin out as it moved further from immigration, but instead became more creative, more inclusive, more open, more connected, and more influential.

I want it to describe a diaspora that recognizes many expressions of non-Portuguese communities enjoying a Portuguese festa, and a more deeply rooted Portuguese identity: Californian, Canadian, New Englander, Azorean, Madeiran, continental, and identities we don’t yet have language for.

For that to happen, we have to accept that preservation and evolution are not opposites. It is about being confident in the evolution.

Our own history proves it. The Portuguese who came before us did not preserve their culture by freezing it. They carried it somewhere new, adapted it, and built communities around it.

In doing so, they created a Portuguese culture in their community that we now call our traditions.

The goal of cultural preservation should not be to produce replicas of ourselves or of a past through “saudade,” but to give the next generation enough knowledge, belonging, and agency to make the culture their own.

We will measure whether we preserved our culture not by whether our children practice it exactly as we did.

It will be whether we gave them something meaningful enough that they wanted to carry it forward at all.

This was Joey Medeiros’ written response as part of a panel at the 50th Conference on Education and Culture of the Luso-American Education Foundation, October 2-3, hosted by the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute at Fresno State.