Emanuel Melo torontonian azorean writer

Girls from the Cruzada Eucarística in procession

My father, Antonio Cabral de Melo, took photographs of the First Communion procession that took place on June 11, 1967 throughout the streets of Toronto from St. Mary’s church and ending at Exhibition Stadium for an outdoor Mass (based on what I can gather from the photographs).

There were so many people that it took three quarters of an hour with three priest giving out communion, so wrote my father on the back of the final photograph on this post.

Most of these photographs have not aged well. I think it’s partly due to the Kodak printing paper used at the time, but they still provide a glimpse into the vibrant and engaged Portuguese community in Toronto of those early years of immigration, and posted here during this year’s Portuguese Heritage Month.

The Archbishop of Toronto speaking to the Portuguese People

A First Communion Procession in the streets of Toronto, June 1966

St. Mary’s church in Toronto welcomed the wave of Portuguese immigrants who came, mostly from the Azores, in the 1950s and 1960s.

Catholicism was an integral part of daily life for the families who held on to their traditions and gifted them to their children as a significant part of their personal identity and heritage.

The ceremony of a First Communion is a rite of passage in a young person’s religious life. The celebration which took place in June of 1966, sixty years ago, included a procession through the streets of Toronto in the vicinity of the old and venerable church originally established by Irish immigrants.

It was common at the time for Catholics to participate in religious processions of this kind, but what makes this one so significant to me is that is shows how quickly the Portuguese integrated themselves into the rituals and celebrations of their new country while paying homage to the traditions they brought from the homeland.

My father, Antonio Cabral de Melo, took these photographs that historically show the early professions of religious faith of the Portuguese Community in Toronto as they walked the city streets and claimed them for their own, celebrating their Portugueseness and, in a way, asserting their place in the country of acolhimento.

The Procession most likely making their way back to St. Mary’s from the Sir Isaac Brock Bridge at the bottom of Bathurst Street, near Front Street

Sete Cidades (photo from my 2016 visit)

As I get ready to return to São Miguel for a May visit, I remembered that in November of 2011, after meeting the poet Gabriela Silva from the island of Flores, who had come from the Azores to give a talk at the University of Toronto to a group of students, I was so moved by listening to her that I wrote a reflection based on that encounter, and posted it, first in Portuguese and then in English  in May of 2016, the year that I started my blog.

It’s now May, 2026 and on this tenth anniversary, the time has come for a return visit to São Miguel, Açores. Chegou a hora de voltar.

Lagoa do Fogo

Miradouro de Santa Iria

Viewing Vila Franca do Campo from the Ilheu

Senhor Santo Cristo dos Milagres procession in Toronto, May 15, 1966 *

The annual Festas do Senhor Santo Cristo dos Milagres has been part of Azorean religious and cultural life for over 300 years (1700-present), and it was celebrated for the first time in Toronto on May 15, 1966 by the thousands of Portuguese immigrants who had left their island home but who had not forgotten the importance of this annual feast.

I have already written and shared my father’s photographs of the first procession that took place in Toronto and also the photographs he took the following year, in 1967

I would like to acknowledge the 60^th anniversary date by reposting some of my father’s photographs documenting this historical moment in the Portuguese Canadian diaspora as well as write about an intimate story that links the festa from the Azores to the one held in Canada that first year.

My mother and I were still living in São Miguel in 1966 and while she sent my father photographs (photographer unknown) of the procession that took place in the city of Ponta Delgada, he sent her photographs of the first procession that took place in Toronto.

I find it extraordinary that my parents, in their thirties, apart from each other for three years with only weekly letters between them, decided to share these photographs with each other. It would have been so much simpler now, so immediate; a quick photo taken and sent on WhatsApp, not to mention a live video chat, the way we do things now. They had to mail these photographs, received weeks after the event, but still connecting them meaningfully to one of the most important celebrations of Azorean life and as a reminder of their love for each other.

My family connection to the devotion of Senhor Santo Cristo is deep and bridges the decades. My father became a member of the Irmandade do Senhor Santo Cristo until his death, giving of his time each year as a volunteer to set up the outdoor church lights and displays around St. Mary’s. He also carried the andor in procession many times until he was no longer able to participate.

Over the years, I, too, have seen the procession of Senhor Santo Cristo both in Toronto and in the Azores, forever linking my experiences of religious devotion with family life.

As an altar boy at St. Mary’s church I was in the processions of the early 70s. In this photograph, I am the first boy in the forefront of this picture from 1970.

My father, who had come to Canada in 1965, saw that first procession at St. Mary’s in 1966, along with my paternal grandparents, my aunt and uncle, and my two little cousins, who had all been the first of our family to come to Canada. My grandmother once told the story of how everyone cried with emotion that day, remembering their family members still in the Azores, and how there was no filarmónica band to play the Hino do Senhor Santo Cristo. As a substitute, a gramophone record of the hymn was played from the back of a truck accompanying the procession through the streets of Toronto.

Father Alberto Cunha

outdoor Mass in 1966, during the sermon

outdoor Mass in 1967

Mariano Rego * carrying the processional lantern, my father the second man behind him, in 1972 (photographer unknown)

*I am grateful to Manuel Geraldes, a long-standing member of the Comissão do Senhor Santo Cristo, who identified his father, Antonio Andre Geraldes as the man in my father’s 1966 photograph of Senhor Santo Cristo, carrying the andor on the left side. He was president and one of the founders of the festa, along with Manuel Arruda, Tony Vaz, Manuel Ferias, Anton Esckia, and a few others.  Father Alberto Cunha, in the same photograph, came to St Mary’s in February of 1966 and was an instrumental figure in promoting the festas of those early years.

*The statue of Senhor Santo Cristo was donated in 1964 by Mariano do Rego, a famous Portuguese guitarist, in gratitude and thanksgiving for a cure of his wife’s grave illness after praying to Santo Cristo. Thanks to his act of generosity, the Azorean immigrant community was able to have a bit of home recreated in the diaspora. More about his life can be watched on this Gente da Nossa video.

Leonor Patricio was a friend of Mariano who recorded a record to raise money for the construction of the Chapel of Senhor Santo Cristo at St. Mary’s Church.

From Jorge da Costa I learn that the statue of the “Ecce Homo” gifted by Mariano Rego was made in Braga, Portugal, that the andor (litter for carrying the statue in procession) was constructed by senhor João Guden, born in Ponta Delgada, and that  Senhor Liberal Medeiros of Liberal Jewellery in Toronto since 1970 was responsible for the ornate treasures of jewels that adorn the statue of Senhor Santo Cristo (the Esplendor, the crown of thorns, the scepter, and the medalhão).

Suzette Arruda-Santos was less than two months old when her mother Maria Olguete Ventura Arruda sewed the first Guião (processional banner that leads the procession). It was used for many years until it was replaced.

Many thanks to Manuel Geraldes, Jorge da Costa, who have been intimately connected with the festas since their youth. Also, thanks to Leonor Patricio, and Suzette-Arruda-Santos for sharing information with me on my Amantes dos Açores FaceBook post. They all have oral history which deserves to be written down as part of the story of Senhor Santo Cristo in Toronto.

The chapel of Senhor Santo Cristo at St. Mary’s Church, Toronto

Antonio Cabral de Melo in 1966

My father had this postcard size image in his car as a sign of his devotion to Senhor Santo Cristo.

In memory of my parents, Antonio and Berta de Melo, and of their devotion to Senhor Santo Cristo

Em 1966 a festa do Senhor Santo Cristo dos Milagres  foi celebrada no dia 15 de maio. Foi também a primeira vez celebrada em Toronto, Canadá pelos imigrantes dos Açores que fizeram parte da nossa diáspora. Neste ano eu ainda vivia em Ponta Delgada com a minha mãe enquanto o meu pai já tinha partido da ilha. A minha mãe enviou-lhe fotos que comemora o dia da procissão na cidade açoreana e ao mesmo tempo o meu pai enviou as suas fotos da procissão em Toronto. Desta maneira os meus pais ficaram unidos na sua fé e no seu amor pelo Senhor Santo Cristo, apesar da distância que os separou durante três anos antes de nos reunirmos como família. Fico grato por esta singela lembrança que fez parte da nossa imigração e partilho estes registos em memória dos meus pais.

Reposted in Filamentos

My father visited Niagara Falls in September of 1965, the year he came to Canada. These are the photographs I still have in my collection to document his visit. As with all his photographs, on the back, he wrote a description of what the photograph portrayed. It felt so magical to read them as explanations of places I could not imagine when I was just seven years old living in a world without television or other ways of connecting with what existed outside the insularity of my island home of São Miguel.

Years later, when it was my turn to see Niagara Falls with my own eyes, I saw it as a confirmation of what was already familiar to me from the photographs my mother and I received while my father was away.

Skylon Tower

I don’t know if it was my father or if it was me who took this photograph of my mother with my little brother, born in Canada, on one of our trips to Niagara Falls, sometime in the late 1970s.

What I notice about this photo is that, in composition, it could have been me who took it; it could also have been my father. I’m sure I got my love of photography from him and our styles and ways of seeing through the lens of a camera seem to blend into one.

Unlike the 1965 photographs this one has no writing on the back. It’s not even dated. It’s no longer a photograph of an immigrant’s exploration but rather one of arrival and belonging, and looking towards the future. A future which made Toronto our home.

My father at 37 years of age, in 1965

Antonio Cabral de Melo October 3, 2028 – April 21, 2005

In recent years, I have relied with gratitude on the Toronto Public Library for providing me with books that, regardless of where they are located in the city, are sent to my local branch for convenient pick-up upon my request.  It’s a service that recognizes the importance of making books available easily and equitably to interested readers living in Toronto. The public library is the perfect solution to satisfy my need to read something new.

For decades of my life, purchasing books, increasing the size of my own private library, was the joy experienced by the collector in me. But I no longer need to own every book I read. I also don’t have space at home for more. I still buy books, but rarely. For a new book to become part of my personal library, it has to entice me with writing that captivates me enough to want to give it a place of honour in my home.

This is what happened with Carmelinda Scian’s debut novel, Yellow Watch, Journey of a Portuguese Woman. The title may suggest a memoirist journey but it’s a novel written in the form of stories, beautifully interwoven chapters that feel like quilt squares sewn together to reveal the story of Milita Ferreira’s life from a faraway time in the Portugal of the 1960s, starting in Algarve, then later moving to the small village of Amendoeiro, across the Tagus River from Lisbon, and seamlessly continuing forward to the time of immigration to Canada, specifically to the Toronto of the 1970s, and the subsequent decades until the story ends in the late teens of the new century; four decades, as Milita reflects near the end of the novel, “spent at the smithy of life trying to cobble a new me.”

Carmelinda Scian’s details of place and time are rendered masterfully by references to the political and social events that mark the decades all the way from the days of the PIDE, Salazar’s sinister and secret police and their attempts to destroy citizens who went against the state in the smallest ways, to the FLQ crisis in Canada, as the background to lives of poverty, oppression, social conventions, immigrant challenges, and the pursuit of a new life, always linked to the past in an never-ending circular awareness of what has come before and what may lie ahead.

I found an excellent and detailed description of the novel in a Goodreads review by writer Ian Colford and I don’t feel it’s necessary to duplicate here what has already been written so precisely and well by another appreciative reader.

Suffice it for me to add my endorsement of Yellow Watch as a book which will mesmerize through its sparse prose, beautifully crafted without sentimentality and never flinching from raw truth. Carmelinda Scian does not shy away from difficult subjects such as prostitution, abortion, fixed marriages, family violence, and poverty. She handles each with the skill of a surgeon, or an investigative reporter, honest in her revelations but without judgment of the facts, simply allowing us, the reader, to decide how to interpret a person’s life history, in this case, Milita Ferreira. I hope you will get to know her by reading Yellow Watch, Journey of a Portuguese Woman.

The highest praise I can give Carmelinda Scian is that she is a good writer.

Here’s an excellent interview and introduction to Carmelinda Scian in the Malahat Review:  The Truth of Human Experience: Alexandra Handley in Conversation with Carmelinda Scian

University Avenue, Toronto

When my father arrived in Toronto on June 18, 1965, my mother and I were still in the Azores.  That summer, he sent us photographs he took to show us the city that three years later we would call home.

His camera captured images that are now over sixty years old. I’m glad my mother was wise enough to bring my father’s photographs with her when she and I left the Azores. They are a document and a testament of my father’s interest, curiosity, and exploration of the city where he had planned on making a new life for his family.

I already introduced a few of his Toronto photographs when I started my blog in 2016 and I invite to have a look at what I posted then. Now I am including his other photographs.

The ones of City Hall, at Nathan Phillips Square, which officially opened on September 13, 1965, coincidently the month and year stamped on his photographs, places my father perhaps there on that opening day or shortly thereafter.

There’s also a few photos of University Avenue, the Gardiner Expressway, and the railroad tracks with the Royal York Hotel in the distance.

He also witnessed the annual Labour Day Parade that same September of 1965, a parade which is still held in Toronto today. His photos capture the spirit of the union solidarity of the time.

My father did not have a car then, and I’m not sure how he got around to take his photographs; perhaps he walked the city or was taken by car by family or friends.

What I do sense is that he cared enough to use photography as a means to show a city with the same enthusiasm as a modern day Instagrammer, with captions written on the back of each photograph to tell me and my mother what we were seeing.

I am grateful for the preservation of these priceless images that connect me not only to my father, but to the city I have lived in for most of my life.

City Hall

Nathan Phillips Square

My cousins

Old City Hall

University Avenue

A new glass building, wrote my father on the back of this photo

Bellevue Park on Bellevue Ave between Dennison and Wales Ave

Railroad tracks with the Royal York Hotel in the distance

Rail yard

A new building

My father loved cars and was fascinated by the highway

Sick Children’s Hospital

Labour Day Parade

The Dufferin Gate, west-end entrance to Toronto’s Exhibition Place

These photographs have a ghostly look to them, worn out by the vintage of time, but come alive through my father’s immigrant eye.

Antonio Cabral de Melo October 3, 1928 – April 21, 2005

Parque Terra Nostra, São Miguel, Açores

For those who consider the Azores a paradise on earth, a walk through Parque Terra Nostra, on the island of São Miguel, truly transports you into some mythical visual delight of what we imagine a paradisiacal place to be. I invite to visit their website for more information.

My interest in posting about this enchanting park is simply to share a few photos on a foggy, rainy day in Toronto which will hopefully melt the persistent snow of a long winter when we still wait with eagerness for the coming of spring.

To sit for a while in the company of magnificent nature that offers you rest for body and soul.

Achada, São Miguel, Açores

This agapanthus was still mostly in bud in May, 2017 when I came upon it on my walk down to the ocean from the village of Achada. Since then, so much has changed in the world, and in my life, and I wonder if that road still looks the same now. I am looking forward to walking it again this coming May, 2026 and hope that the agapanthus will be there to greet me.

For over twenty years I helped my mother display her presépio and each year she would tell me that it would be her last until finally it was.

However you celebrate the season, I wish you a Feliz Natal and a Merry Christmas filled with peace and joy to you and those you love.

Por mais de vinte anos ajudava a minha mãe a fazer o seu presépio e em cada ano ela dizia-me que sem dúvida seria o seu último Natal até que finalmente chegou o dia previsto.

Seja como for a maneira que celebra a quadra natalícia, desejo-vos um Feliz Natal repleto de paz e alegria.

Berta Pereira Duarte de Melo July 28, 1933-March 17, 2025