[Diniz Borges asked me to provide a few words about my 2026 calendar, “O último calendário eletrónico ~ Uma síntese” (“The final online calendar ~ Summing up”), because each month this year the Filamentos blog is posting that month’s page, along with my brief explanation of its contents.]
“The Tenth Island” denotes communities of expatriate Azoreans and their descendants living in North America, i.e., outside the archipelago’s nine populated islands. Dr. Onésimo Teotónio Almeida is credited with coining the term, subtitling his 1987 book L(USA)lândia – A décima ilha. Decades later, Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles Times journalist Diana Marcum titled her 2019 memoir The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores, recounting her journey from reporting on communities of Azorean ancestry in the lower San Joaquin Valley to immigrating to Terceira herself.
The Tenth Island includes regions in my native California, where my paternal great-grandparents arrived early in the 1870-1924 immigration wave. As I learned more about my father’s family history, in mid-life I went back to school part-time to study the Portuguese language, and began traveling to the Azores to research our genealogy. To my surprise, I also eventually I became a translator of Portuguese literature into English.
To view a larger version of the calendar page, click on:
http://www.