The Fourth Gathering of Media from the Azores and North America brought Azorean journalists to California not only to formalize a new transatlantic media alliance, but also to encounter a Portuguese-American community whose farms, businesses, university presence, and media reveal both the extraordinary achievements of immigration and the increasingly urgent challenge of preserving connections across generations.
“Califórnias perdidas de abundância”—“lost Californias of abundance.” Pedro da Silveira placed those words at the end of his poem “Ilha,” after the closed sky, the hovering gull, the sea and the distant boat whose hungry eyes imagined another world beyond the horizon. Few lines could have accompanied more appropriately the Fourth Gathering of Media from the Azores and North America, held in California from September 23 to 26. What began as a meeting among journalists became something larger: an encounter between islands historically shaped by departure and one of the places where so many of those departures eventually became lives.
At California State University, Fresno, the gathering culminated in the formalization of the Azores Diaspora Media Alliance (ADMA), coordinated through the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute at Fresno State. The objective is straightforward but ambitious: to create lasting relationships among news organizations in the Azores and the diaspora so that stories, information, contacts and journalistic projects can travel more easily in both directions. After decades in which connections have too often depended upon individual initiative, ADMA seeks to make that relationship more permanent—part of the everyday work of journalism rather than something rediscovered only during occasional visits.
Yet understanding California’s Azorean diaspora also meant leaving the conference room. Traveling through part of the San Joaquin Valley offered a glimpse of an agricultural landscape whose scale can seem almost unimaginable from the islands: seemingly endless rows of almonds, walnuts, pistachios, peaches and other crops stretching toward distant mountains. It is abundance engineered through land, water, machinery, capital and generations of labor, but it is also abundance accompanied by questions about water, sustainability and the competing demands of agriculture, cities and new industries. Pedro da Silveira’s imagined California thus acquires another meaning: abundance is real, but never without limits.
That scale became unmistakable during a visit to Pires Dairy Farm in Gustine, owned by Commander João Pires, originally from Terceira. According to the account of the visit, the operation milks a herd of 12,000 cows and produces approximately 170,000 liters of milk each day for cheese production. Particularly striking was the robotic unit developed with his son Helder Pires: eight robotic systems milk approximately 1,200 cows, guided by sensors that identify when each animal is ready. The contrast with Azorean dairy farming could hardly be more dramatic. In the islands, the image of cattle grazing in green pastures remains part of the landscape itself; here, dairy production becomes an immense choreography of technology, nutrition, logistics and uninterrupted production.
The same sense of scale accompanied the visit to AV Thomas Produce in Livingston, owned by Commander Manuel Eduardo Vieira, a native of Silveira do Pico and widely known as the “Sweet Potato King.” The company produces eight varieties of sweet potatoes, with an annual production reported at approximately 100,000 tons, serving markets across the United States, Canada and Mexico. Its workforce reaches around 1,200 employees and rises to approximately 1,500 during planting and harvesting seasons. Behind those numbers lies one of the central stories of Azorean California: immigrants and their descendants did not simply find employment in the Valley’s economy; in many cases, they helped build and transform it.
Fresno State offered another expression of that presence. Its agricultural fields, laboratories, libraries, humanities programs and modern academic spaces demonstrate the importance of higher education within the economy of the Central Valley. Portuguese language and culture have also acquired an institutional presence through the work of the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute, creating a space where the Azores and the Portuguese-American experience can enter the university not merely through nostalgia, but through language instruction, scholarship, publications, archives, exchanges and cultural programming.
And yet the visit also exposed a paradox. Economic success does not automatically guarantee cultural continuity. Portuguese-language media in California operate with limited professional resources, while younger generations increasingly consume information in English and through digital platforms. The problem is familiar on both sides of the Atlantic: newspapers, radio and television confront fragmented audiences, changing technologies and difficult economic models. California may offer a potential audience measured in hundreds of thousands of people of Portuguese ancestry, but heritage alone does not guarantee that those people will read, listen or watch in Portuguese.
That is precisely where ADMA may find its most important purpose. The task cannot simply be to send more news from the Azores to California. Journalism must also carry California back to the islands—the achievements and difficulties, businesses and artists, students and workers, elderly immigrants and younger generations, those who still speak Portuguese and those who no longer can. A diaspora becomes invisible when the homeland knows it only through festivals and ceremonial visits; a homeland becomes distant when descendants encounter it only as the remembered birthplace of their grandparents.
Pedro da Silveira wrote of eyes looking from an island toward distant “Californias of abundance.” Generations eventually crossed that distance and discovered those Californias for themselves. They planted orchards, milked cows, built companies, educated children and created communities.
The challenge now is different. It is to ensure that after crossing an ocean and building another world, the two shores can still recognize one another.
For that, journalism may become what the Atlantic has always required: not a wall of water between communities, but a river of stories flowing in both directions.
Based on a story in Diário Insular-José Lourenço, director. The photo is also from DI.