By Sue Garson / The San Diego Reader / March 31, 1988
Thousands of dollars’ worth of floral arrangements filled the sanctuary of St. Agnes Church in Point Loma. Below the statue of Our Lady of Fatima were anchors and nautical wheels made of blue and white carnations. Floral replicas of tuna vessels were laid beneath Our Lady of Good Voyages, whose plaster arms held the infant Jesus and a tuna clipper. A blanket of white orchids covered the casket containing the remains of a ninety-three-year-old fisherman, and when members of the Brotherhood of the Holy Spirit filed past the cherrywood coffin, each placed a single red rose on top.
After hymns were sung in English, a Portuguese choir sang songs of the sea. The president of the American Tunaboat Association extolled the deceased as a pioneer in San Diego’s tuna industry – Manual Oliver Medina was responsible for starting the high-seas tuna fleet in the United States, and he was first to build and skipper ocean-ranging tuna clippers, the speaker noted. “M.O. was first to use radar and first to install refrigerated holds and radios,” he added in tribute. On this March Wednesday in 1986, Medina’s body made its final voyage to Holy Cross Cemetery, where it received the last blessing. Afterwards, hundreds of mourners paid their respects at Medina Castle, the hilltop mansion on Point Loma’s San Elijo Street, where they had often sought the padrinho’s counsel.
Portuguese fisherman at the foot of Kellogg Street in Point Loma; 1905. Ninety percent of the early immigrants were earning a living from the tuna industry.
Two years earlier, in July of 1984, Van Camp, the world’s largest and most modern tuna cannery, closed its Harbor Drive plant. With it went millions of dollars from San Diego’s economy and an estimated 12,000 jobs. Both the demise of San Diego’s last cannery and the death of M.O. Medina symbolized the end of a 110-year-long Portuguese colonization of Point Loma.
In The Portuguese-Americans, published in 1976, author Leo Pap cites Point Loma’s Portuguese enclave as the wealthiest (per capita) in the nation. During the boom when the book was written, fishing was lucrative beyond all expectation. Fishermen provided expensive family and vacation homes, sleek new automobiles, precious gems, lavish furs, and top-quality imported leather goods. It was not unusual then to celebrate a Portuguese wedding at the Hotel del Coronado with a thousand dinner guests. While male relatives fished off the coasts of Mexico and South America for two or three months at a time, women raised their children on the same Point Loma streets on which their parents and grandparents lived. When the providers returned from the sea, enormous celebrations were held. Extravagantly decorated Portuguese fishing boats lit the embarcadero at Christmas.
San Diego’s tuna fleet then numbered 200 and accounted for eighty percent of the world’s catch. Nearly half the vessels were owned by Portuguese dynasties that had been living in Point Loma for several generations. Crew members, nearly three-quarters of whom were Portuguese, addressed each other in the idioms of their native villages while they laid the huge black purse seine nets on the docks. Nautical designers and employees in ship-building trades and in marine supplies and repairs also had Portuguese surnames, although some had converted Oliveira to Oliver, Rodrigues to Rogers, and Machado to Marshall, for instance, to avoid being confused with Hispanics. During the boom, there were two weekly Portuguese-language radio broadcasts from San Diego-based stations.
In 1876, when the earliest Portuguese immigrants arrived on whaling ships from the Azores, they settled in the area on Point Loma now known as La Playa, from Talbot Street to the southernmost end of Rosecrans. The men caught barracuda and yellowtail, which the women salted on drying racks to keep fresh until it reached the market. As the fish dried, the women chased away the marauding seagulls who were hoping for an early lunch. Perhaps it was because their economic life was so connected to that particular area that the immigrants considered themselves residents of the peninsula, rather than of San Diego.
There were a dozen or so Portuguese families in La Playa when Manual Oliver Medina first arrived in 1912. According to legend, he came with only the knapsack on his back and the address of Joao Monise, who ran a fish market near the bay. While he boarded with the Monise family, Medina fished for mackerel from February through May. By the end of that first season, he had supplemented his savings with enough borrowed cash to by an eight-horsepower gas engine boat with a four-ton capacity. (Its fishing jigs were made in Portugal from whale bone.) What he caught in Baja, Medina supplied to the local fish markets that lined up Broadway from the railroad station to the bay. By then, the Pacific Tuna Canning Company had opened next to the Union Fish Company at the foot of F Street, and ten vessels were homeported in San Diego.
Within two years, Medina owned and operated a fifty-one-foot vessel with a thirty-five-horsepower engine; the holds were often full of lobsters that he carried from Ensenada to San Diego. Five years later, there were ten fish canneries in San Diego. By the time the rest of the Medina family emigrated from the Azores in 1920, Medina’s reputation as an entrepreneur was solid; that August. The diminutive fisherman was skipper of a sixty-foot vessel that he brought back to San Diego with a phenomenal thirty-two tons of tuna.
Three years earlier, word had reached a small, primitive village on the Portuguese island of Madeira (360 miles from the African coast) that San Diego was the lobster capital of the Pacific Coast. Paul do Mar villagers also knew there was a Portuguese settlement on the southwest peninsula. A few fishermen came. After they established themselves, they sent for their families, pooled resources, and bought shares in boats. By making their own wine, by growing their own fruits and vegetables, and by depending on the sea for protein, they were able quickly to pay off the trust deeds on their new homes.
Ninety percent of the early immigrants from the Portuguese islands were earning a living from the tuna industry. Because they clustered in the south end of Point Loma, in what we now call La Playa, Roseville, and Fleetridge, the whole community became known as Tunaville. Herbs, lemons, loquats, tangerines, guava, and cherimoyas flourished in Tunaville’s gardens. Distinguished by both live and plaster parrots in cages and by statues of the Virgin Mother, their open greenhouses nurtured tropical flowers. Inside their homes, native flags and handmade musical instruments were a source of pride. Enormous efforts were made to recreate pockets of old-country living on the peninsula; there was very little desire to assimilate.
Frank Medina. His brother’s (M. O. Medina) death symbolized the end of a 110-year-long Portuguese colonization of Point Loma.
Although his nautical life consumed most of his time and passion, M.O. Medina had a vision of a united community that would be created by native-born and foreign-born, islanders and mainlanders, laborers and entrepreneurs, without resentment of rivalry. Between fishing trips, he raised funds, chose a site across from what is now Shelter Island, and was responsible for the construction of the Portuguese Hall on Upshur Street. When the wooden building as completed in 1922, it was dedicated to the Holy Spirit, and for half a century, Medina was its president. His drive (and the community’s cash) built St. Agnes Roman Catholic Church in 1933, on Evergreen Street, three blocks from the hall. Fifty cents went to Saint Agnes from every ton of fish caught by a Portuguese boat, and fifty cents went to the hall.
By 1935, the pride of Tunaville was the world’s largest tuna clipper, the 135-foot Cabrillo, which had a capacity for holding 350 tons of tuna. During World War II, the United States Navy recruited forty-nine tuna clippers to carry supplies and troops. Crewed by Portuguese fishermen from Tunaville, the boats were sent to the western Pacific, where fifteen were lost.
The Fifties brought big changes to the tuna industry. Japanese competition forced prices down, and in order to sell cheaper, crews had to catch more fish. By the end of 1958, it no longer took three men with three poles to catch a hundred-pound tuna. Huge nets hauled by hydraulic machinery were used to scoop up many tons at a time. Helicopters spotted large schools of fish and guided the ships to them. These were golden days for the industry. Key men – skippers, navigators, and engineers – were getting a percentage of the tonnage. Those in the top-producing fleets were earning $200,000 per year. If the men owned all or even part of the vessel, like the seven Medina brothers, who skippered their own vessels, the profits were much greater. Although financial success could have provided mobility, a fierce attachment to their roots kept the fishermen in Tunaville. The steady influx of relatives coming in from Madeira and the Azores preserved Tunaville’s language and mores and accounted for most of Tunaville’s population; only a small percentage came from the Portuguese mainland, which Tunaville people still call “the continent.”
The last wave of Portuguese immigration in 1974 brought political refugees from Angola after the African colony was granted independence from Portugal. That same year, the turmoil in Portugal from a military coup, the subsequent nationalization of banks and insurance companies, and a sudden counter-coup brought more immigrants to Tunaville. They quickly blended into a well-established economy and a vast network of nepotism among an estimated 5000 fishermen and a few large families, some of which had become 300 and 400 strong.
The early Seventies brought a boat-building boom to San Diego. But builders did not anticipate rising fuel prices, soaring insurance rates, and price cuts — tuna that had brought $1100 per ton soon were bringing only $700 or $800 per ton. As tuna fishing became less profitable, the fleet size dwindled.
For the balance of this 1988 article, please go here.
