• 1 For the sake of privacy, people and institutions have been renamed.

1“It’s not necessary, but it’s nice” was the title and chorus of a song from “Churchill, the Musical” – a play written and performed in 2010, in the Algarve, by the British residents that this article focuses on. Volunteering to help backstage was a strategy to study radio produced by and for minorities in Portugal: the play was widely present in the broadcasts of Bright FM Algarve, the station elected as a case study.1 Pre-recorded promotional clips, interviews with actors, directors and writers, as well as the live coverage of the premiere, engaged radio advertisers, guests and listeners. Participating in the play thereby facilitated the exploration of different relationships comprising the social life of the radio. Whilst watching the protagonist’s performance from backstage, it struck me that the expression “it’s not necessary, but it’s nice” described more than Churchill’s extravagant tastes. It seemed to qualify some of the practices through which the self-designated “expatriates” related to their adopted home – not least through the station.

• 2 Todd Gitlin, “Public Sphere or Public Sphericules?,” in Media, Ritual and Identity, ed. Tamar Liebe (...)

2Indeed, Bright FM Algarve does not seem to be a necessary element in the daily lives of these foreign residents. Founded in 1992, it is but one of the various locally produced English-speaking media. It adds not only to the four local newspapers, the array of leisure-themed magazines and the ubiquitous small media (i.e. pamphlets, free maps, business cards), but also to the various online forums, directories and blogs focused on life in the Algarve. Practical information for settling in and navigating the context of residence can easily be found in the latter – more so than on the radio, since the translation of local news into English had to be discontinued around 2009 due to financial restraints. Moreover, the satellite television and radio channels that are ever-present in British houses, bars and restaurants across the Algarve, along with Internet-based communication tools (e.g. Facebook or Skype), largely fulfill various communicative needs (connectivity, entertainment, etc.). Provided such a public sphericule2, what is the need, place and function for a local radio station?

• 3 Russel King, Anthony Barnes and Allan Williams, Sunset Lives: British Retirement to the Mediterrane (...)

3The research presented in this paper was designed to investigate the role of radio made by and for migrants in the management of their cultural identity during processes of reterritorialization. It aims at understanding how radio assists in thinking, experiencing and making sense of transnational mobility and international relocation. The choice of a local station largely catering to a self-designated “expatriate” population resulted from an initial mapping of the existing radio initiatives in Portugal. As discussed below, the case provided productive avenues to discuss key themes informing the research design (namely, dynamics of visibility in the public space, inclusion/exclusion, cultural reproduction and transnational connectivity). To be sure, although Bright FM addresses all Portuguese and English-speaking locals, tourists and migrants, the research focused on the group most strongly involved in the production and consumption of the radio. The British have also been the longest-standing and most prominent foreign presence in the region.3 Despite not qualifying themselves as migrants, the “expatriates” do re-locate in the Algarve with the intention of creating a new (often permanent) home.

• 4 Michaela Benson, and Karen O’Reilly, “Lifestyle Migration: Escaping to the Good Life?” in Lifestyle (...)

4This paper argues that the case of a local radio station catering to lifestyle migrants – “relatively affluent individuals moving … to places which, for various reasons, signify for the migrants something loosely defined as quality of life”4 – inscribes a counterpoint in the minority media literature besides signaling an under-researched area. It further proposes that the specificities of the case pertain to radio’s unique contributions to the process of establishing a connection to place for relatively privileged populations settling in touristic settings. It starts by discussing the broader mapping of the minority radioscape in Portugal that informed the choice of the case study. It then explores the pertinence of considering relatively privileged minority populations. Whilst situating Bright FM in relation to the main themes and issues of minority media studies, it describes the “expatriates” animating it and its way of creating a connection to place. It finally closes with suggestions on exploring the mediations of such populations further.

• 5 ACIDI, List of migrants’ and minorities’ media. Lisbon: unpublished (provided upon the researcher’s (...)
• 6 The directory is available online, at http://www.anacom.pt/render.jsp?categoryId=42701, accessed Ja (...)

5In order to choose a case study for research, I conducted a mapping of the existing minority radio initiatives. These are concentrated in the local radio sector and benefit from no formal structure connecting, let alone organizing, them. As such, building on previous assessments of the minority mediascape,5 the mapping exercise consisted of a telephone survey amongst the 347 local radio stations listed on the telecommunications regulating authority’s (ANACOM) website.6 Although it did not include online (and unlisted) stations, it considered also stations with national coverage for the sake of contextualizing minority radio initiatives.

• 7 Failure to contact the remaining operators derived from incorrect contact information in the latest (...)
• 8 This task was impossible in the case of shows addressing Eastern Europeans solely in their language (...)

6From June 2009 through June 2010, I asked 140 radio directors, program producers, and fellow radio practitioners about the existence of shows made by and/or for foreigners in their station.7 The 26 positive responses were explored through a short interview schedule concerning the initiative’s establishment history (motivations of those involved; human, technical and financial resources gathered; goals and target audience of the initiative; similar past initiatives and reason for their termination) and production dynamics (e.g. relationship with the station, synergies with listeners). Following the methodology for the shows on nationwide stations, I also listened to the programs and noted their schedules, playlist structures, hosts’ mode of address, location covered in the news when these were provided, spaces for and modes of participation of listeners, discourses addressing communities, genre of music, services and products advertised, and references to other media).8 In the cases of nine potential case studies, I visited the studios as well as other relevant locations (community centers, restaurants, clubs) and further explored the aforementioned topics with presenters, station directors and, sometimes, listeners who were suggested by the shows’ hosts.

• 9 Numbers in parentheses designate the number of stations included in the indicated group.

8The most salient contours of the minority radioscape opposed shows focused on cultural diversity from other spaces that were more oriented to community-making processes. The first group of stations (5)9 included a) programs usually aired on stations with national coverage that were focused on sensitizing for interculturality, and b) spaces promoted by local organizations and activists who explored the complex nature of diversity and intercultural dialogue. These shows described situations of successful adaptation and establishment in a new country, and discussed issues concerning migrants in Portugal whilst, more or less explicitly, advocating for their rights. Together, these programs project a positive image of Portugal as a currently culturally diverse country; they explore people’s life stories as they settle into their new home, give visibility to the work of associations facilitating that process, and register first-hand accounts of an increasingly open and welcoming society. Additionally, they emphasize the added value of diversity when not only promoting and praising the presentation of multiple perspectives on various subjects, but also when problematizing the realities of diversity (through the unpacking of stereotypes).

• 11 RDP África is a public service channel broadcasting from Lisbon to lusophone African countries.
• 12 Maria Ioannis Baganha, “Imigrantes em Portugal: uma Síntese Histórica,” Ler História 56 (2009).
• 13 A total of 16 such programs started and ended between 2003 and 2009. The programs were discontinued (...)

10In turn, the second and biggest group (29), was more focused on catering to the particular populations they were produced by and for, although sometimes with the assistance of Portuguese radio practitioners. These include, in addition to the three stations (founded by Brazilian and British migrants) and three shows on the public service channel RDP África,11 spaces ranging from 15 minutes to 8 hours made by and/or specifically targeting the following groups: people from Portuguese-speaking African countries, such as Cape Verde, Guinea, Angola and Mozambique (8); Eastern Europeans, mostly from Ukraine, Romania, Moldavia and Russia (5); Western and Northern Europeans, mostly from the United Kingdom, Germany, France and the Netherlands (3); Asians from India and China (3); and Latin Americans, namely from Brazil and Venezuela (4). Though the first program started in 1987, most have emerged since the 1990s, coinciding with the transformation of Portugal from an emigration country to an immigration destination. Massive arrivals of Brazilians (in the 1980s and early 2000s) and Eastern Europeans, namely Ukrainians and Romanians (in the early 2000s), added to ongoing flows from the former African colonies that had started in the mid 1970s.12 Most evidently, shows by and for Eastern European populations accompanied the arrival and departure of large numbers of people from those countries.13

• 14 Daniel Dayan, “Particularistic Media and diasporic communications,” in Media, Ritual and Identity e (...)
• 15 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Londo (...)

11These shows are particularistic, to use Dayan’s (1998) expression,14 to the extent that they promote a sense of belonging based on a series of references that construct and sustain imagined communities.15 To be sure, not all groups are based on nationality, as programs are also catered to populations according to regional markers, such as “Eastern Europeans” or “Africans”. These programs draw on specific languages and a number of cultural features comprising common denominators amongst people who may otherwise remain strangers to each other – namely if they are not involved in migrant associations, clubs or religious structures. Regardless, references speak to listeners whilst possibly not being even intelligible to a wider audience, as is the case with the devotional musical references at the beginning of a show that strives to bring together the different religious communities amongst the Indian population in Lisbon. In any case, programs vary in their mode of projecting their “we”-ness (which can be more essentialized or plural, or more or less close-knit) and of sustaining it (e.g. welcoming interaction on air, whether live or asynchronously, promoting off-air sociabilities, focusing primarily on the celebration of musical repertoires, and providing news).

• 16 Blion, “Europe’s Ethnic Media and Diversity Media”, 68.
• 17 Homi Bhabha, “The Postcolonial and the Postmodern: The Question of Agency,” in The Cultural Studies (...)
• 18 Bhabha’s theory on the articulation of cultural difference was developed in discussions on post-col (...)

13However, this self-presentation was not a reflexive account of their position in the mediascape or Portuguese society. In other words, despite displaying “a genuine willingness to open up to the social … environment in which they operate”,16 the shows merely inform about diversity and inscribe it in the mediascape. For instance, they give visibility to the festivities celebrating national days, initiatives of local organizations, concerts by artists from the countries of origin or inter-religious meetings. In that sense, on the one hand, they create a “third space of enunciation17 from which they negotiate cultural backgrounds and new experiences in Portugal.18 To be sure, the programs foster the creation and maintenance of subjectivities mixing cultural heritages and affiliations to other places with identifications with the current country of residence. Frames of reference become intertwined on air in a quotidian mix of, for example, updates on the Portuguese football team’s performance in international championships followed by top-10 features with the latest music hits from Bollywood, or greetings from friends and family abroad celebrating “Mother’s Days” on both the Portuguese and Venezuelan (or other) dates. Shows are thus sites for the expression of situated modalities of belonging to transnational social fields. On the other hand, these programs showcase diversity without advocating for it or problematizing its realities like the aforementioned shows. In that sense, they do not reach out for interculturality.

• 19 Myria Georgiou, Mapping Diasporic Media across the EU: Addressing Cultural Exclusion. Political Sci (...)
• 20 Susana Trovão, and Sónia Ramalho, Repertórios Femininos em Construção num Contexto Migratório Pós-C (...)

14Moreover, this form of self-inscription in the mediascape did not evidence a strategy to gain visibility in the public space so as to countervail exclusion – which is often discussed in the literature as a central function of minority media.19 Although effectively adding presences to the mediascape, what this exploratory research suggests is that radio shows are not driven by or focused on symbolic or social exclusion, even when marginalization is known to constrain people’s opportunities and everyday encounters (e.g. the case of Cape Verdeans and Sao Tomeans).20 The only instance suggestively alluding to problems of exclusion was the “legal office” feature of African-oriented shows, where a lawyer responds to enquiries posed by listeners about legal matters (e.g. exploitation at work, family reunification, legalization processes). These pre-recorded questions and answers occupy a short time slot and are not further evoked or discussed in the program.

• 21 Dynamics happening off air can be as (or more) significant than broadcasted narratives provided tha (...)
• 22 Kira Kosnick, “Ethnic Media, Transnational Politics: Turkish Migrant Media in Germany,” in Transnat (...)
• 23 Ibid.

15This scenario informed the selection of the case study, given the ways it could be related to the literature. Whilst concerns and efforts to overcome the difficulties alluded to above may be articulated elsewhere,21 what this panorama suggests is that, generally, broadcasts are not used to discuss experiences of inclusion and exclusion in association with debates about coping with a fraught social position derived from the migrant condition. In that sense, they do not necessarily operate as a political instrument to voice the problems of migrant constituencies and to facilitate empowerment and social change through calls for public recognition. Representation in the media does not necessarily entail representation through the media, although it fulfills various other functions (e.g. expressing identity and fostering participation in communities within and across borders). Yet, the implicit conflation of dimensions of representation (depicting the minority at stake and speaking in its name, as discussed by Spivak (1988)) is common in conceptualizations of minority media through the “ethnicization thesis”, to use Kosnick’s expression.22 This “thesis” holds that minorities’ access to the media enables authentic representations of “themselves” and, therefore, legitimates the voicing of their interests and concerns in a double sense of portraying and standing for the migrants.23 As the author notes, it overlooks the fact that any population is riddled with tensions that polarize diverse social and material statuses and perspectives. Furthermore, it reduces the complex issue of migrant-mediated self-representation to a matter of access to resources and to the opposition of cultural minorities and national majority.

• 24 To be sure, Kosnick examines Turkish programs in German commercial, public and open (community-like (...)

16To complement Kosnick’s argument, which discusses the cases of subordinated minorities,24 it should be noted that the ethnicization thesis also unhelpfully presumes that the migrant condition is disadvantaged and marginalized. Framing minority media through the lens of discussions based on exclusion, whilst pertinent, can incur the danger of besetting , from the start, their social location as “minority-bound”. Indeed, holding alterity and a pre-set power relation as a point of departure pertains not only to their strength in the mediascape (in terms of numbers and visibility) but also, and mostly, to the connotations associated with the migrant designation and condition.

• 27 Mohammed ElHajji, “Rio de Janeiro – Montreal: Conexões Internacionais/Ruídos Interculturais,” in Di (...)
• 28 Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah, and Catherine Drew, Brits Abroad: Mapping the Scale and Nature of Briti (...)
• 29 Kate Torkington, “Defining Lifestyle Migration,” Dos Algarves 19 (2010).

18In other words, the systematic assumption that minorities are somehow marginalized leads to disregarding relatively privileged minorities (and segments of minorities) that remain under-conceptualized, as ElHajji (2012) notes.27 The British, whom this article focuses on, are indeed still largely under-studied,28 namely in Portugal.29

• 30 Michaela Benson, and Karen O’Reilly, “Lifestyle Migration: Escaping to the Good Life?” In Lifestyle (...)

19The choice of the atypical case of a station founded by and largely catering to British self-designated “expatriates” not only fit the criteria established at the outset, but also posed the possibility to discuss a perspective of power dynamics that has so far been overlooked in studies analyzing the relations between media and migration. Specifically, it promised to raise questions concerning the role of mediated self-representation in a migratory context from the point of view of relative privilege. Indeed, despite differing amongst themselves in terms of financial comfort and stability, the British residents in the Algarve chose where, how and for how long to move in order to experience a “better quality of life” – a subjective reason that rests on choice more than on (economic-based) need to move. They are better conceptualized as lifestyle migrants30 provided that their move is enabled by sufficient resources to pursue amenities such as “warm climate”, “beautiful scenery”, “relaxed pace of life” and “a comparatively lower cost of living”.

• 31 Nabil Echchaibi, “(Be)longing Media: Minority Radio between Cultural Retention and Renewal,” The Pu (...)

20Exploring this perspective inscribes other types of populations in minority media studies by analyzing them according to the same lenses and theoretical tools. It can help to avoid differentiating people engaged in international relocation on the basis of preconceptions about social standing. Moreover, it enables contextualizing and nuancing the representations associated with such “expatriate” populations by grounding them in concrete lived experiences that unravel otherwise invisible processes of cultural identity reconstruction – as other researchers investigating how minority media facilitate these processes have argued for the case of subaltern populations.31

• 32 George Marcus, “Ethnography in/of the World System,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 95–11 (...)
• 33 Debra Spitulnik, “Anthropology and Mass Media,” Annual Review of Anthropology 22(1) (1993): 293-315
• 34 One such field revolved around efforts of social mobilization for various social causes (see David (...)

21An ethnographic approach was taken to research Bright FM Algarve. Fieldwork comprised short and long visits to the Algarve between July 2010 and May 2012. To “follow the radio”, to use Marcus’s (1995) expression,32 I traced radio-informed relations from the broadcasts and the studios to various contexts: meetings with clients wanting to advertise their businesses; live coverage of events (e.g. inauguration and anniversary of lifestyle migrants’ commercial establishments); functions organized by and/or promoted through the station (such as theater plays and quiz nights); and shops, homes and, occasionally, car-rides from which regular listeners tune in. To identify the station’s role for people producing and consuming it, I considered the radio both as a product (in terms of content that is circulated and appropriated) and a social practice (of both production and consumption).33 In addition to observation at the station, I interviewed Bright FM Algarve’s team members, listeners and announcers, in addition to other media practitioners, British local authorities and numerous other people who did not follow the radio but were involved in relevant social fields.34

• 35 European Broadcasting Union (EBU) – Strategic Information Service, Migration: An Overview (vol. 45) (...)
• 36 The British Consul further estimated another 30,000 people who variably stay in the region as secon (...)
• 37 Instituto Nacional de Estatística (INE), I. P. Censos 2011 Resultados Definitivos – Algarve (Lisbon (...)
• 38 Kate Torkington, “Defining Lifestyle Migration,” Dos Algarves 19 (2010): 99–100.

22The representation of the British in the mainstream media differs from that of other minorities. As noted in a recent report on the depictions of migrants in European national media, the British are exempted from such a label and its connotations.35 In the Algarve, where they constitute approximately 10% of the region’s population with an estimated 40,000 full-time residents,36 they blend in with tourists more than with other migrants living in the region (the majority of whom are Brazilians, who outnumber the British, and Ukrainians and Romanians).37 As Torkington notes,38 like other resident Northern Europeans (German, Dutch or Swedish), they socialize, dress, speak and spend time in the same places as tourists – namely, eating, drinking and enjoying sports at places like restaurants, golf courts, pubs and marinas. Accordingly, they are not portrayed in the mainstream media of host contexts based on cold, generalizing, sensational and dehumanizing images that strip them of agency and reduce them to a “problem” requiring active solutions on the part of authorities:

• 40 Maria Ioannis Baganha, “Imigrantes em Portugal: uma Síntese Histórica,” Ler História 56 (2009).
• 41 Isabel Ferin, Clara Almeida Santos, and Willy Filho, Media, Imigração e Minorias Étnicas 2005–2006 (...)
• 42 Ibid.
• 43 EBU, Migration: An Overview, 19; Raquel Huete Nieves, Alejandro Mantecón Terán, and Tomás Mazón Mar (...)

23Brazilians, Africans from Portuguese-speaking countries, and Eastern Europeans – who, combined, are the most numerous and visible foreigners in Portugal40 – have been indeed associated in mainstream media with crime, illegality and sensationalist narratives based on security concerns.41 This despite the fact that Portuguese media have been increasingly preoccupied with the framing, sources, themes and points of view of stories.42 Notably, relatively affluent populations can too, objectively, constitute a “social problem”: their presence has been known to hinder the livelihoods of residents (e.g. through the inflation of property prices to a point where they become unaffordable to locals) as well as in terms of natural landscapes and local economies in the new context of residence, thereby creating tensions with local populations.43

• 44 Madeleine McCann was seven years old when she disappeared during her family holiday in Portugal, in (...)
• 45 Alexandra Noronha, “Governo lança programa ‘reforma ao sol’”, Jornal de Negócios, August 2, 2011, a (...)
• 46 The program Reforma ao Sol (Retirement in the Sun) was designed in 2009 (as established in Decree-L (...)
• 47 LUSA, “Vantagens fiscais tornam Portugal numa ‘Florida da Europa’,” SOL, September 15, 2013, access (...)
• 48 Elsa Marujo, “Uma Família Inglesa,” Linha da Frente (RTP, March 7, 2012), http://www.rtp.pt/program (...)
• 49 Vítor Rodrigues Oliveira, “Em Busca da Flórida Perdida,” Antena Aberta (Antena 1, November 26, 2012 (...)
• 50 Ana Serafim, “Reformados Europeus Podem Render 2 Milhões de Euros a Portugal,” SOL, August 3, 2011, (...)

24Yet, apart from the intense media coverage of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann and of the attempts to find her,44 the British have not been commonly reported on in Portuguese media. Along with other Northern Europeans, they only recently figured more visibly in news about tourism dynamics and, specifically, a campaign to attract affluent retirees. The governmental plan to transform the Algarve into “Europe’s Florida”45 through the “Retirement in the Sun Program” has motivated news pieces, features and debate programs on television, radio and in newspapers. Amidst reports on the potentialities, feasibility and implications of the program, which is meant to create favorable conditions for the settlement of European retirees in the region,46 the British have been portrayed positively. Usually, as affluent individuals who may not be well versed in Portuguese but are a stable, fairly integrated community, besides constituting a strong market for tourism and second-home ownership (see, for example, LUSA (2013),47 Marujo (2012),48 Oliveira (2012)49 or Serafim (2011).50

• 51 As the author notes, these images accompanied the growth of mass tourism and second-home ownership (...)
• 52 King et al., Sunset Lives, 127–156; Torkington, “Defining Lifestyle Migration”, 99–100.

25In an interesting further contrast with other minorities, negative portrayals come mostly from the mainstream media from the country of origin. British mainstream media have notoriously portrayed these foreign residents as people solely interested in “recreating England in the sun”, spending their time in “ghettos” and disregarding, at times even disdaining, the people and culture of their new home.51 The lifestyle migrants have also been noted to insulate themselves from local society, put little effort into learning the local language and to focus only on enjoying local amenities.52 Though I do not dispute these characterizations, in my fieldwork I did not often observe these representations being lived out in practice. Rather, the references to the stereotype revealed the diverse and textured ways in which people position themselves and others in relation to it.

• 53 King et al., Sunset Lives, 137.
• 54 Myria Georgiou, “Diasporic Media Across Europe”, 491–492; Kosnick, “Ethnic Media, Transnational Pol (...)

26More importantly, I observed that English-language media had the potential to contribute to seclusion. Most people’s media diets barely change when moving, given satellite and online technologies. With the availability of local English-language newspapers, reading the national tabloids found on café tables represents, for many, an opportunity to practice (their usually barely functional) Portuguese more than to follow national current affairs. Often not attentively following reporting on national issues in either, various people fail, for example, to name the country’s leaders. This makes one wonder “whether integration is a relevant concept at all for British residents and seasonal migrants along the Mediterranean coasts of southern Europe”.53 Remarkably, such self-segregation lies at the core of arguments (however unfounded they may be) criticizing minority media for inhibiting integration when fostering cultural reproduction.54

• 55 Steven Vertovec, “Fostering Cosmopolitanisms: A Conceptual Survey and a Media Experiment in Berlin, (...)

27 Considering Bright FM Algarve as a minority radio station offsets much of the literature informing the research design. One of the main points raising the question of whether this station can be classed as minority radio concerns the invisibility that also qualifies the population it serves. Indeed, Bright FM does not create a distinctive cultural sonority and presence like other minority initiatives. First, it blends in with the approximately 20 stations in the region, to the point of being hardly distinguishable given its playlist. According to the station’s director and programming coordinator, it aims to create an upbeat and positive tone so as to associate the touristic region of the Algarve with good feelings and memories. In part, accomplishing this includes playing the most recent anglophone rock-pop music hits, which, however, now color most of the radioscape in Portugal anyway. Even the “golden oldies” that two popular live shows of Bright FM play, so as to cater to a particular segment of the population (the retirees), can be heard on national networks that specialize on sonorities of the last three decades. Notably, such hegemonic references are sometimes actively avoided by minority stations such as Radio MultiKulti in Germany, which played world music in between shows by different migrant groups.55

• 56 Torkington, “Defining Lifestyle Migration”, 100; Williams and Hall, “Tourism, Migration, Circulatio (...)

28Second, like the station, the residents are so inter-related with tourism that they fade into that industry’s backdrop, which sets the rhythm of life in the region. To be sure, a significant specificity of lifestyle migration is that people move fluidly between categories connecting tourism and migration along a continuum.56 Many residents started as tourists before deciding to settle in Portugal. Later, they then became only visitors or second-home owners after returning to the UK or moving to other destinations, such as Thailand. As mentioned earlier, they also share tastes, hobbies and outlook. The radio station, like the other media listed earlier, caters simultaneously to all – which complicates the notion of a minority audience with situated needs and interests. This mixture becomes clear when the authorities’ summer messages cautioning holiday-makers against landslides along the beach follow a weekly interview with a financial adviser, aimed at full-time residents, focused on management of UK-based pensions and investments.

• 57 Boaventura Sousa Santos, “Estado e sociedade na semiperiferia do sistema mundial: o caso português, (...)
• 58 While it is important to highlight what is a structuring relation, the point is not to sustain tric (...)

29Only the advertisements and presenters using English denounce the station’s identity when moving along the dial. However, what this signals is that the British and Bright’s invisibility results from the singular juxtaposition of a symbolically powerful minority and a touristic context, where English is the lingua franca. In other words, one of Bright’s particularities consists of broadcasting from a semi-periphery57 to a population whose references are dominant because they moved from a nearby global center.58 Can media made by and for lifestyle migrants be considered minority media?

• 59 Williams and Hall, “Tourism, Migration, Circulation and Mobility”.

30The answer lies, partly, in that very tourism-migration nexus.59 As mentioned, despite the fact they do not consider themselves migrants, the British do re-locate in the Algarve with the intention of creating a new home. Additionally, alongside their constant efforts to distinguish themselves from masses of tourists (for example, in comments that criticize the latter’s lack of ability and/or interest to experience the “real” local culture), their position as non-holidaymakers results frequently from their very involvement in the tourism and migration industries. Although early retirement pensions and/or accumulated capital may foreground the plans of moving, many British become involved in businesses catering to the interests and needs of visitors, second-home owners and fellow residents. For some, what renders remaining in the Algarve and living a “better life” viable is, for instance, being an English-speaking and certified doctor or assisting with the process of finding, buying, renovating, securing and/or moving into a house in English, through a (typically) small company. As such, resembling other cases in the mapping, the radio assists in securing the income of the population by advertising services on air.

• 60 Myria Georgiou, Mapping Diasporic Media across the EU, 63; Salim, Os meios de comunicação étnicos e (...)

31Bright FM Algarve further relates to the themes in the literature, although in particular ways. In what concerns processes of settling and navigating the host country,60 for instance, live show hosts take it upon themselves to underline new laws affecting the residents. These, however, pertain to markers of material comfort rather than to economic difficulties: licenses for boreholes in properties (sometimes used as pools), changes in the tax regimes in Portugal and the UK (affecting investment plans in the stock market), or heightened tolls on the highway (adding to the already expensive matriculation of cars). Moreover, highlighting local events may also signal an inclusion into like-minded “expatriate” networks more than to local realities, as municipal markets and festivities are announced alongside quiz nights, golf tournaments, pantomimes or dog shows.

• 61 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University (...)

32Furthermore, transnational connectivity is a key feature. Benefitting from the innovations in transport and communication, Bright FM became an active agent in placing the UK in the Algarve’s neighborhood (in the sense that Appadurai (1996) uses the term to visualize the configuration and maintenance of localities).61 The proximity is materialized, in practice, by the frequent advertisements of companies based in the UK but with representations in Portugal (e.g. consulting and banking firms) or transporting goods back and forth (e.g. to provide products for supermarkets and wholesalers). Broadcasting programs produced in the UK, or the constant participation of listeners who tune in online from abroad, are also singular forms of materializing this connectivity. Consequently, audience members share and accompany the stories of those who have returned to the UK after the loss of their partner but come back frequently to visit friends, of second-home owners who are spending a few months in another country, or of regular visitors who connect with the sun and fun of their holiday place from cold and rainy homes. From abroad, some use the radio to stay present amongst their social networks through song requests and dedications, birthday and anniversary wishes, and notes about when they will be arriving. Such phatic messages would not find a place in letters to the editor in the local newspapers, which would be the next closest forum.

• 62 Katz Matsaganis and Ball-Rokeach, Understanding Ethnic Media, 139; Silverstone and Georgiou, “Edito (...)
• 63 Law nr. 54/2010, published in Diário da República, 1st series – Nr. 248, December 24, 2010.
• 64 Karim H. Karim, “From Ethnic Media to Global Media: Transnational Communication Networks Among Dias (...)

33Additionally, Bright’s profitmaking goals do not hinder its contribution to processes of cultural reproduction. Granted, a commercial orientation is not uncommon amongst minority media62 and is also unavoidable in a country where there is no legislation regulating community media. The commercial format walks hand-in-hand with all local radio stations’ responsibility for sustaining communities’ interests and needs amongst their audiences (Radio Law’s Article 12, clause e), focusing on the purposes of the radio broadcasting activity63). Yet, Karim notes that the problem with media that so explicitly adopt a mainstream market model is not so much that it belies the conception of minority media as forms of resistance against dominant discourses and structures, but that profit is privileged to the detriment of cultural integrity.64 This suggests that the initiatives discussed in the mapping, which also resort to advertising income, play important roles notwithstanding their disengagement from resistance efforts. Additionally, it highlights how Bright may contribute to cultural reproduction despite not having been built on an essentially cultural and community-making project.

• 65 See, for instance, Filomena Silvano, Marta Rosales, and Sónia Ferreira, “Gente da Nossa: Uma constr (...)
• 66 Michal Bilig, Banal Nationalism (London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1995).

35Being a young Portuguese woman – thus constituting a member of the target audience elected to establish the station amongst the Portuguese – facilitated starting conversation with shop-owners who shared that perception and admitted to tuning in to the station mainly to attract tourists. Whilst cultural distance may have hampered access to some social dynamics within and around Bright FM, it also helped me notice the often disregarded cultural markers and practices emphasizing the connection to the UK. In a context of geographical proximity and highly mediated everyday lives, there are few objectifications of home and cultural identity like those apparent in other minority media65 In other words, more than traditional dates commemorating the UK’s history (e.g. Guy Fawkes Night), which are signaled, the British cultural markers comprised more ordinary, but recurrent, references. These included humored comments comparing weather forecasts for the Algarve and the UK, bulletins updating the exchange rates daily, and a general discursive demarcation between an “us”, the “Brits”, that, significantly, often alternates with a wider sense of we-ness that is complicated by encompassing all “expatriates”. These references all resonate with Bilig’s (1995) description of “banal nationalism”: symbolic references and practices that are often discarded in conversation as trivial, but can bear significant weight in practice.66 This is particularly illustrated by the following turmoil around the broadcast on Poppy Day:

• 68 Paddy Scannell, “For-Anyone-as-Someone Structures,” Media, Culture and Society 22 (2000): 19.
• 69 Bilig, Banal Nationalism.

36It became clear overtime that this incident to a large extent reflected tensions between personal styles and positions within the team. Insinuations of lack of patriotism did not meet the profile of the presenter who, ultimately, brings perhaps the most British references to the broadcasts (e.g. regularly updating listeners on football results and on popular soap operas, such as Eastenders or Coronation Street). The struggle about “what is culturally right” denounced the otherwise “seen but unnoticed”68 unexamined cultural markers that are particularly powerful because of their naturalized character.69

• 70 Scannell, “For-Anyone-as-Someone Structures”.
• 71 Benson and O’Reilly, “Lifestyle Migration: Escaping to the Good Life?”, 9–11.

37According to Scannel,70 radio’s daily, long-standing and pervasive presence makes it taken for granted. Moreover, the author notes the importance of modes of address developing historically to adjust to the characteristics of the audience. Considering the particularities of the lifestyle migrant audience (e.g. the ambivalent stance of connection to place, claiming belonging but cultivating some social distance, as Benson and O’Reilly note71), radio is then particularly able to naturalize such a subject-position through a mode of address based on repetition, ephemerality and, given the local character of broadcasts, the sense of familiarity imprinted by geographical proximity. In other words, radio seems to contribute to naturalizing the “expatriates” stance of connection to the Algarve and its people, provided the singular affordances of aural and local communication.