[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” designates communities of expatriate Azoreans and their descendants living in North America, 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 borrowed it for the title of 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.
Besides California, the Tenth Island includes Azorean communities elsewhere in the U.S. and Canada. In fact, it exists wherever Azoreans gather in the diaspora.
To view a larger version of the calendar page, click on:
http://www.