From the street, you could hear the muffled beat of Brazilian house music up in The Loft on Oak Bluffs Avenue.
It was my first time going to “Brazilian night,” a Sunday tradition for many Islanders in the off season. As you climb the stairs into the club, the upbeat music crashes down on you with a wave of drum machines and synthesizers woven together with strands of samba and a fusion of traditional Brazilian and modern techno.
Climbing those stairs and entering The Loft’s dance floor is a journey across a cultural divide on the Island, where for too long the vibrant community of fellow Islanders from Brazil has seemed to exist on a different plane, separate and apart. We all need to find a way to navigate across this divide and at the MV Times we are committed to making the journey and bringing new voices, new languages, and new beats into how we report on the Island.
As I learned, there is a rhythm to these Sunday evenings as the Brazilian community, after working hard all week, often goes to church in the morning and then gathers at The Loft afterward, arriving around 4 pm. Bands usually start at 6 pm. On this night, the very popular band Ai Delicia out of Framingham, which also has a booming Brazilian community, was due to perform but they were running late due to delays on the ferry. Their signature sound is “axé music” and “pogodão,” two rhythms rooted in African-Brazilian traditions. An Island resident and fixture at the club, DJ Metralha, whose name is Heleno Santos, started the night off, keeping the dance floor going as the crowd waited.
In a brief lull before the band started, Santos and I were talking. He was reading through a special bi-lingual edition of our Community section under the banner headline “Brazucada!,” a word we encourage all of our readers to get to know. In essence, if I understand the word, it is slang for a big, boisterous gathering of the Brazilian community.
“This is amazing,” said Santos, holding up the paper. Over the din of the crowd, he offered a fist pump combined with a hand over his heart. “I love this.”
On this night, we distributed copies of The Martha’s Vineyard Times and patrons of The Loft were checking out the new translation service from English to Portuguese that we are providing for the Brazilian community. And some were switching from the paper to their phones to see the instantaneous translation at MVTimes.com. We do not want to overstate this initiative. It is essentially a Google Translate button, a simple tool powered by AI, that we have plugged into our website which translates our work not only into Portuguese, but also Spanish, Serbian, and six other languages spoken on our increasingly diverse Island. Indeed, there is also a Balkan night at The Loft, as the manager, Redon (Red) Gega, who is from Albania, informed me. The online translation is one very simple example of how easy it can be for us to navigate across the cultural divides and language barriers that keep us apart.
We have too rich and diverse a history on this island to miss out on any corner of it, including: the celebrated heritage of sea captains and farmers that dates back centuries; the rich legacy of the Black community with many decades of legendary writers, musicians, and political leaders all coming together here on the Island, and the enduring culture of the Wampanoag that is as majestic and as ancient as the cliffs in Aquinnah. It is this shared narrative of our Island that we are committed to bringing to our readers. We will, of course, stay on track with our steady coverage of town meetings and Island institutions and the big issues that challenge our community, including housing and schools and the impacts of climate change, and the solutions that will shape its future. We will keep trying our best to provide daily coverage of all the cultural events, fishing, faith communities, and high school sports. But this tapestry of coverage will only be successful if it weaves together all of the narrative fabric of the Island. We have work to do.
I shared with you in my last column, “Sign of the Times,” that my first days in January as publisher were a struggle. Our newsroom flooded after heavy rain and tidal surge, the “MV Times” sign above our doorway was left twisting in the wind, and our server crashed posing the threat of losing all of our archives. But I want to provide an update here that we have been working together to clean the newsroom up, to invest in its future, thanks to our new owner, Steve Bernier, and we even have a new server set to arrive this week and we have salvaged the archive, or at least 90 percent of it. After two months with the amazing team at The Times, I am starting to feel like we are connecting with the community in new ways and finding our way forward. I will use this column to keep you up to date on the journey, and again I want to invite your input and your ideas on how we can better serve the whole island.
Just before Ai Delicia took the stage Sunday night, the lead singer, Mau Mau, was holding up a copy of The Times and smiling at his picture which ran big on the front page under the “Brazucada!” headline. And this Sunday night gathering was indeed a Brazucada. He jumped on stage and as he warmed up the crowd, he gave the MV Times a generous shoutout:
“Hello MV Times folks! … Thank you very much! They have a story about us there! MV Times has “O Tempo” and it’s translated to Portuguese. It’s going to be in Portuguese… Very cool.”
We are proud to be the first news organization on the Island offering this translation service, and we agree it is “very cool.” But truthfully, it should have happened a long time ago. Our sincere hope is that this service opens a door for the Brazilian community to think of The Times as their paper. We are calling the Brazilian edition on our website ’O Tempo,’ which translates as The Times. And, as we have been informed by many Brazilians, this is the same name as the daily newspaper in Minas Gerais, an interior region north of São Paulo from which most of the immigrants to the Island hail. We love hearing that the name ‘O Tempo’ is familiar to so many, and we hope the community here will see the translations as an easy-to-use tool to inform and enlighten them of important news on the Island.
We hope parents who speak Portuguese at home will read more about the schools and be inspired to get involved, and we hope they will run for school committees and other public offices. We hope Brazilian business owners and tradespeople and house cleaners and every single Brazilian resident might engage with coverage of Island issues, from housing to the impacts of climate change. We will be a better and smarter community with their input. We hope the stories we publish can be a binding force for the Island and bring us all closer together. We live in a deeply divided time and we all have to do whatever we can to find ways to come together, and a dance floor on Brazilian night is definitely a fun way to take a first step.
This is inspiring in so many ways!
But about the flooding of the Times office in January — way back when, like in October 1991, the Times’ move from its old home behind Woodland Market to its current home @ Five Corners was delayed by flooding from the No-Name Nor’easter. The newsroom’s brand-new floor had to be re-laid, and boy, were we grateful that the electrical outlets were already about a foot above floor level. If you ever hanker for a “you were there” account of those days, plenty of us are still around.
I am confused by this article and other recent articles in this paper. The MV Times had a Brazilian column called Saudade that was published in English and Portuguese (translated by the columnist) for YEARS. Why is this ‘new’ news and why isn’t the original columnist being given credit?
Gratitude to the Brazilian residents I’ve come to love,trust, and respect. And to the MV Times for making the news more inclusive…and our island more accessible to building real community
Let’s see if that inclusivity (trademark) comes to be, as you already know, it is a two way street! Our island is fully accessible–anyone can run for office, participate as a parent in the school system, serve on town committees, contribute to the cultural events, fairs, etc. We even offer help with language barriers.
Our island is not fully accessible to people who speak no English.
Really swell piece, Charlie! Some of us had no idea what you were dealing with during your “orientation period” as new Times leadership. Congrats on all of this, and what an eloquent way to express connection with Brazilian islanders: true “cool.”
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