Tune in to 97.3 FM on a Sunday afternoon and you’ll hear a variety of Brazilian music, from pop hits to catchy accordion-based forro. Weeknights feature Cape Verdean sounds. And around the clock, there’s traditional and modern Portuguese music, news and sports.
The station is called WJFD, and for three decades, it has catered to southern New England’s large Portuguese-speaking communities – immigrants from the Azores, mainland Portugal, Brazil, Cape Verde and other former Portuguese colonies.
It’s a big audience: The 2000 U.S. Census found about 160,000 people in Massachusetts and 37,500 in Rhode Island spoke Portuguese or Portuguese Creole at home. And by the latest Census estimates, there are almost 400,000 people of Portuguese heritage in the two states, more than twice the entire population of Providence.
WJFD isn’t alone in serving this market: There’s also a more talk-oriented radio station, WHTB – 1400 AM – and there are two weekly newspapers, O Jornal and the Portuguese Times, and an English-language monthly, The Cape Verdean News. Created to serve the immigrants who came in the ’60s and ’70s, all have long histories; the oldest, the Times, dates back to 1971.
Now, shifting demographics are forcing them to redefine themselves. Immigration from Portugal and Cape Verde has slowed to a trickle, though there’s a new wave of (mostly illegal) Brazilian immigrants settling in the Boston area. And the older immigrants’ children are fully integrated in American society, and may not even be able to read Portuguese.
“In the long run, the first generation of Portuguese immigrants, they’re going to grow old,” said Manuel A. Ferreira, publisher and editor of the Portuguese Times. “If there’s not a renewal, the future of our paper and some other organizations is not too bright.”
Folks at WJFD and O Jornal are keenly aware of that, but as they’ve made changes to reach out to the younger generation, they say, they’ve been encouraged by the results.
A decade ago, WJFD’s format was “a lot more talk and older, more traditional Portuguese music,” said Cris Raposo, an on-air personality and marketer for the station.
“Today, we try to have a younger image … (and) be a Portuguese station but with a contemporary flair.”
WJFD still plays some traditional music, but the DJs favor more modern sounds, including a heavy dose of Brazilian music, which is popular with Portuguese listeners, too, and Portuguese-language rock and even country by U.S.-based bands.
The station also runs plenty of contests, Raposo said, because “people love to be on the air.” And it does lots of remote broadcasts, taking its “very loud” van wherever the action is. This summer, WJFD even hosted a beach party.
“There’s been a drastic change in the programming,” Raposo said. “We’re not reinventing the wheel, but we’re reformatting to a more Americanized way of doing business. We are the ones who have to make the adjustments to be able to compete in a different demographic.”
The changes have paid off, especially with advertisers. “This station used to do, say, 90 to 95 percent local advertisers, mom and pop stores,” he said. “Now we’re more into the national accounts, with a large number of big names: McDonald’s, Papa Gino’s, big banks.”
WJFD’s biggest audience is still 30- to 60-year-olds, Raposo said, who are fluent in Portuguese and still like to listen to news and sports from Portugal – though mostly they tune in for the music, and because they “feel like they belong here.”
But the immigrants’ U.S.-born children are also tuning in, Raposo said. “Coming from that ’60s and ’70s generation, we didn’t want anything to do with being Portuguese,” he said. Yet in the second generation, “surprisingly enough, some speak Portuguese well, and they’re more like the Hispanics, who are very proud of their music, and have no problem speaking their language in public. It’s kind of refreshing, actually.”
O Jornal, which had also struggled with the demographic changes, is also reaching out to the younger generation. Editor and publisher Ric Oliveira, the U.S.-born son of Azorean immigrants, said when he joined the paper in October 1999, advertising was weak, and about 30 percent of the 14,300-issue run would get returned each week.
Since then, O Jornal has been redesigned, and more important, it’s gone bilingual. In any given issue, about half the stories are printed in English as well as Portuguese. “That has allowed for the paper’s readership to increase tremendously, and it’s allowed people to discover themselves and their heritage,” Oliveira said.
O Jornal covers local and regional news of interest to Portuguese-speaking communities, but it also does cover national and international news, speaking directly with sources across the Atlantic. For immigrants, it’s a connection to the homeland, but for the younger generation, it’s also “like a free textbook,” Oliveira said, a window into their cultural heritage.
A survey two years ago showed 58 percent of O Jornal’s readership was bilingual, Oliveira said, and it’s clear that the English articles are easier for a lot of readers whose Portuguese is rusty. But the paper has also become a way for people to polish up their Portuguese, he said – “which is fascinating, and was not anticipated.” It’s even used in high school Portuguese classes, and in English as a second language classes for immigrants.
In February, O Jornal was bought by the Journal-Register Company, becoming the first ethnic paper on the chain’s roster. That brought “resources we’d never had before,” Oliveira said. It also allowed O Jornal to do something about the other major challenge the Portuguese-language media face: the way they’re eclipsed, in the public view, by the Hispanic media.
Because Portuguese speakers are such an ethnically diverse group – Europeans, Africans, Latin Americans – and so many are fully integrated, they tend to be taken for granted, Oliveira said. O Jornal has long taken calls from people seeking to reach Hispanics; at WJFD, Raposo said the ad agencies routinely send commercials in Spanish.
So in August, O Jornal bit the bullet and launched a sister publication, El Latino Expreso. The paper has its own editorial staff, and the two sell advertising together, offering “one-stop shopping” for the region’s two largest ethnic minorities.
“It’s a natural in many ways,” Oliveira said. “The Latino community is suffering from the same symptoms of culture shock and social difficulties that the Portuguese suffered 25 years ago. And they did not have a strong voice as far as we could see that was able to advocate when needed, explain the American culture, and provide news from their homeland.”
WJFD isn’t going quite so far, though Raposo said the station has considered bilingual programming to help reach the younger generation. The Portuguese Times is also considering that approach, Ferreira said.
“You have to know the past,” he said.
