Heritage on the outside, party on the inside

One of the many images that has stayed with me in Anthony De Sa’s excellent 2008 novel Barnacle Love is of the houses in Toronto’s Little Portugal. The street-facing façades present themselves as model citizens: free of clutter, trimmed lawns, even scrubbed sidewalks, with only the azulejo saint embedded into the wall by the front door to hint at who might be inside.

But, in the backyards and laneways, an agrarian society: here, homeowners kept pigeons, tended to tiny rows of crops, and even slaughtered pigs in the garage. The mess of real life.