a new book offers a fresh perspective on Joe Fortes, one of Vancouver’s most celebrated figures

Joe Fortes is one of the most celebrated figures in Vancouver history. Best known for teaching generations of children how to swim in English Bay and saving many more from drowning, today he is commemorated with a drinking fountain, a branch of the Vancouver Public Library, and the downtown steak and seafood restaurant that bears his name. But what if our image of him is inaccurate, or, at best, incomplete?

Enter Ruby Smith Díaz, author of Searching for Serafim: The Life and Legacy of Serafim “Joe” Fortes. She maintains much of what has been written about him has been filtered through a White colonial lens.

“He wasn’t just a lifeguard; he was a complicated man who had to fight for his place in the city in a time where people like him were being actively displaced or excluded from most public spaces,” she said.

Díaz refers to him as Serafim.

“That’s how he signs his name,” she said. “There are only a couple pieces of writing, of his own writing, that have survived. They are in the Vancouver Archives. And when he signs his name, it is as Serafim Fortes.”

“I think what happened was that White Vancouverites latched on to the old minstrel song about Cotton Joe or Old Joe, and essentially conflated him with this United States Southern identity that is also connected to enslavement. And I think that’s a nickname that stuck.”

Like Fortes, Díaz has Afro-Latino roots. In telling his story, she also reveals parts of her own.

“Yes, absolutely. The more that I recovered about his story, the more I was reminded about things that I had experienced growing up.”

“I think it takes somebody who shares his heritage to be able to understand the nuances of what it means to survive a White supremacist society and what it also means to call different places home, especially here on the Lower Mainland, and also navigate that through layers of displacement.”

Fortes was born in Trinidad in 1863 or 1865 to a Black father and a Latina mother and left home at age 17. He arrived in Granville, what would later become known as Vancouver, in 1885. He had been serving as a member of the crew aboard a transport ship named the Robert Kerr, where he was also the victim of a violent attack earlier that year.

“He was actually attacked by a fellow crewmate with a cotton hook. The cotton hook was struck through his cheek, and he was off his duties for many weeks due to this injury. And it’s something that is not mentioned when we talk about who he was. We don’t look at the dangers that he faced on an everyday basis, of the violence that was very prominent at that time, and I would argue that’s present today as well.”

Fortes would find work as a bartender at the Alhambra Hotel. In 1901, he was named the city’s first official lifeguard with a salary of $80.00 a month after years of unpaid labour. But it was his role as a special constable of the Vancouver Police Department that Díaz found especially problematic.

“Within that role, he is also responsible for essentially enacting White supremacy around other communities of colour. There are many documented incidents where he interacts with East Asian communities, or members of the Asian and Pacific Islander communities, referring to them through racist terminology, kicking them out of locker rooms, or assuming that they were responsible for theft or about to commit some sort of crime.”

When Fortes died in 1922, thousands lined the streets to view his funeral procession. However, as Díaz points out, even in death he wasn’t treated as a whole person. One daily newspaper remembered him as a “servant, friend, and protector” – in that order.

“This, to me, mirrors how Vancouverites saw him as a servant primarily,” she said.

“Pretty much every dedication that came out around this time that tried to uplift him was constantly kneecapped with phrases like, in spite of his dusky skin, in spite of his darkness, or he was the whitest soul that ever existed within a Black man.”

She adds, what is most troubling, is how little things have changed since then.

“There are too many commonalities with his story, with what I have lived over 100 years later, and what is being seen right now in Vancouver and Canada that is not being addressed or not being spoken about.”

Searching for Serafim is not your conventional biography. Given what she calls the “insufficient depository of knowledge” about Fortes, Díaz says she took it upon herself to reimagine his life as that of an uncle she never knew. It contains elements of memoir and poetry, as well as a capsule history of the Black and racialized experience in British Columbia. It is, at times, a difficult read but a necessary one.

“I hope it serves as a call to action, to yes, uplift the story and the life of Serafim Fortes, but to also take action around the systemic policies and barriers that are in place that undermine the brilliance of Black, Indigenous, and racialized communities in Canada.”

Díaz says the greatest tragedy of his life is that Fortes will never be able to tell us who he was in his own words. In telling his story, and her own, she shows the reader that it is not a privilege to be taken lightly.

Searching for Serafim: The Life and Legacy of Serafim “Joe” Fortes is available from Arsenal Pulp Press.