Tunaville: The Portuguese Empire at Point Loma

At the southern end of Point Loma, in the neighborhoods called La Playa, Roseville, and Fleetridge, there was once a community so economically dominant in its industry that sociologists cited it as the wealthiest per-capita Portuguese-American enclave in the United States. The city called it Tunaville.

The fishermen came from the Azores and Madeira in the early nineteen hundreds, drawn by the same currents that drew albacore tuna to the waters off the Southern California coast. They brought their boats, their language, their Catholic festivals, and the particular boat-handling knowledge that the Azorean islands had been producing for centuries. By mid-century, more than one hundred sixty Portuguese-owned fishing vessels operated out of San Diego. Their combined catch accounted for eighty percent of the world's supply of canned tuna. Bumble Bee, Van Camp, and the other canneries that lined the waterfront ran their production lines on what these men pulled from the Pacific.

The community built what prosperous communities build: churches, social clubs, a school, an annual festival. The Holy Spirit Festival, rooted in Azorean Catholic tradition, has been held continuously in Point Loma for more than a century. It involves a procession, the crowning of a queen, and the distribution of free soup and bread to anyone who comes. Azorean Catholics believe the Holy Spirit is moved by charity; the festival is a ritual enactment of that belief, and it has continued regardless of whether the industry that funded its founding families was thriving or dying.

The industry died in stages. El Nino events through the nineteen fifties and sixties pushed the albacore westward across the Pacific. The canneries followed the fish. Bumble Bee left in nineteen eighty-two. Van Camp followed later. The fleet that once numbered one hundred sixty boats has contracted to a handful of families. The Tunaman's Memorial on Scott Street, a bronze figure in oilskins, marks what the rest of the city has mostly forgotten: that this peninsula once fed the world.