The Point Loma boundaries of Lowell to Talbot streets, and as high up the peninsula as Willow Street, by the 1930s, had earned the moniker “Tunaville.” Here has been home to an immigrant Portuguese populace settled as far back as 1885, and by the 1940s had become a bustling tuna fishermen’s haven.

“But our people have become diluted,” notes Point Loma Portuguese resident and former tuna skipper Ron Machado. “I’m a preservationist at heart, and don’t want us to forget the way things were and where we came from.”

Early Portuguese fishing settlements grew along the base of Kellogg and McCall streets in La Playa and Roseville. Interestingly, the natural tidelands at the time meandered as far inland as today’s Scott Street.

“Fishermen pooled their resources, and, by turns, fished the Point Loma kelp beds in the community dory,” writes Point Loma historian and bookseller Charles L. Best.

“In remarkably short order, each fisherman owned his own dory. Along the shoreline, they built wonderful little redwood cottages, enlivened with pink, blue, and green doors reminiscent of their homelands of the North Atlantic. Here they established fish markets, grocers, boatyards, and small mission church.”

In 1933, the larger St. Agnes Catholic Church was completed, funded by fishermen. From its campanile shone a lighted statue of Our Lady of Good Voyage, an ever-present beacon for fishing boats returning from sea.

As decades passed, more sophisticated yet modest, multifamily homes were built on 50- by 100-foot lots. Only a few of these survive in the Roseville area today.

“We were one big family,” remembers Machado, “a single neighborhood with mostly dirt roads. We shared a camaraderie that is slipping away today. Back then, we all knew each other. We made Portuguese wine in our cellars. Sang Christmas carols with mandolins going house to house, where families put out Portuguese favorites to eat.”

He adds: “We had Barney Prenda the milkman, and Wes the pastry guy who drove his panel truck ringing a bell announcing fresh pastries. Jerry Vieira delivered linguiça. There were Rose’s Variety Store (corner of Rosecrans and Cañon), and the Andrade father and three daughters running Chris’s Market at Byron Street. We hung out at the Jack-in-the-Box at Emerson Street, or on the street corners.”

“When I grew up,” he says, “we all had an identity: the surfer crowd from Ocean Beach and the tuna guys from Roseville. And nicknames like Goo, Squeaks, or Canary.”

But as time would have it, economics and environmental laws reshaped the fishing industry, and people started leaking out of Tunaville seeking livelihoods elsewhere.

BOATS OF WOOD, MEN OF IRON

Fishing was hard work and lives were lost. From the early dory to bamboo poles introduced by Japanese fisherman in 1910, the bait boats of the late 1930s to mechanized purse seiners of the 1970s, the tuna industry, including canneries and chandleries, earned hefty incomes for local Portuguese. Some 40,000 were employed by the industry. As boats increased in size, so did their capacities to haul fish.

“Alas, the tuna industry in San Diego ended in about 1984 and our boats moved to the Western Pacific,” says Kenny Alameda, a former tuna buyer for local canneries. “We lived on Byron Street and mother worked for High Seas (one of four canneries along San Diego’s waterfront) located where Le Rondelet condos sit today, and near the offloading docks.”

Portuguese historian Zeca Rodrigues says: “My family immigrated to Point Loma from Madeira in 1969. The name ‘Tunaville’ was not known outside our community but we identified with it because of the beautiful industry we helped create.”

Rodrigues continues: “Of my parents’ generation, most spoke no English, did not drive, and were confined to Point Loma. The kids took care of things at home, like banking, paying the bills, and reading the mail.”

“My grandmother said that cannery workers would walk down the street, day or night when the bell rang. This meant the boats were in and it was time to prepare the tuna for canning,” says Evelyn Barandiaran, president of the Portuguese Historical Center. “My mom, Dolores Balelo Madruga, and maternal grandmother, Mary Balelo, worked for High Seas in the 1940s. Mom told me she dressed in the garage, and many cannery workers swam in the bay where salt water helped remove the fish smell they carried home.”

Rodrigues also reminds us of the Portuguese contribution to World War II “when 52 of our tuna boats were painted gray and taken by the U.S. government to become yard patrol boats, known as YPs. (Of these, 22 did not come back, nor did their crews.) A first mission was to patrol the U.S. coastline. These good navigators, together with trained military personnel, became known as ‘the errand boys of the Pacific’ and delivered provisions or picked up pilots who had fallen from their planes.”

“What boats did come back were in very poor shape. Repairs were made and in time Portuguese immigrant and master carpenter Joe Silva gave birth to the slick style of the super seiner.”

A remnant of the old fishing guard exists in Tunaville yet today. Generations of notable Portuguese surnames thrive apart from the historic industry that carried them here from their homeland. Missing, yet forever proclaimed, is their tie to the sea — boats filled with yellowfin or skipjack tuna in line to the canneries that processed their catch.

Peninsula Beacon thanks members of the Portuguese Historical Center for their contributions to this article. For more information, look for PHC’s Images of America series book, “Portuguese Community of San Diego” by Donna Alves-Calhoun.