The Portuguese Holy Spirit Festival

The canneries are gone. The fleet that once sent more than one hundred sixty boats to sea now operates with a handful of families. The neighborhoods of Point Loma where Azorean fishermen built their houses have been absorbed by the general real estate market. And every year, the Holy Spirit Festival continues.

The festival has been held continuously in Point Loma for more than a century. It came from the Azores, the Portuguese archipelago nine hundred miles west of Lisbon in the middle of the Atlantic, where the tradition of the Holy Spirit celebration is older than the tuna industry by several centuries. The Azorean fishermen who built San Diego's canned tuna empire brought it with them when they arrived in the early nineteen hundreds, and the festival outlasted everything else they built.

The structure of it is specific: a procession through the neighborhood, the crowning of a queen from the Portuguese community, and the distribution of free soup and bread to anyone who comes. The soup is free. The bread is free. You do not have to be Portuguese or Catholic or a descendant of any fishing family to eat. The distribution of food to the community is the theological point: in Azorean Catholic practice, the Holy Spirit moves through acts of charity, and the festival is a ritual demonstration that this community will perform that act again, this year, as it has every year, regardless of whether the industry that first funded it still exists.

It is among the oldest continuously operating ethnic religious festivals on the West Coast. The industry that created it is gone. The people who created it are still here, and the festival they brought from the Azores is still running, free soup and all.