The Portuguese community in San Jose had been growing for decades, drawn to the Santa Clara Valley's agricultural economy and mild climate. On November 16, 1913, a group of Portuguese residents pooled their resources and purchased a parcel of land on East Santa Clara Street, just off what is now U.S. Highway 101. But owning land was not the same as having a parish. Working with Manuel Teixeira de Frietas, the community petitioned Archbishop Patrick Riordan of San Francisco for the blessing to establish a church. Riordan approved, and in 1914 the parish opened a house that served as both the pastoral residence and the site of its first bazaar. The formal founding date is recorded as November 8, 1914.

The church might have been built of ordinary California lumber, but the timing of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition changed that. Portugal's pavilion at the 1915 fair had been constructed with materials shipped from the old country, showcasing Portuguese craftsmanship to an international audience. When the exposition ended and the pavilions came down, the Portuguese community in San Jose acquired the timber. Wagon by wagon, the wood traveled south along El Camino Real, the old mission road that connects San Francisco to San Jose. In 1915, the Archdiocese of San Francisco officially recognized the parish as the National Church of Portuguese of Five Wounds, and the salvaged pavilion materials gave the building a direct physical link to Portugal itself. The church's name refers to the Five Holy Wounds, the five piercing wounds suffered by Jesus during the crucifixion, a devotion with deep roots in Portuguese Catholicism.

Five Wounds did not merely serve a neighborhood. It defined one. The blocks surrounding the church on East Santa Clara Street became known as Little Portugal, a district where Portuguese bakeries, markets, and social halls clustered around the parish. The church at 1375 East Santa Clara Street became the anchor for a community that maintained its language, its festivals, and its culinary traditions across generations. Monsignor Henrique A. Ribeiro celebrated the first mass as pastor of the new parish, establishing a tradition of Portuguese-speaking clergy that reinforced the congregation's cultural identity. The church sits under the jurisdiction of the Diocese of San Jose in California, but its roots run back to the Azores, the Algarve, and the villages of mainland Portugal from which its founding families emigrated.

There is something fitting about a church built from a world's fair pavilion. The exposition celebrated engineering ambition and global connection. The church that inherited its timber celebrated community and faith. Both were acts of construction meant to declare presence: Portugal showing itself to the world at the fair, Portuguese immigrants showing themselves to San Jose through a parish of their own. The materials made the same journey twice, first across the Atlantic to represent a nation, then down a California road to shelter a congregation. Five Wounds still stands on East Santa Clara Street, its timbers carrying the memory of two crossings and two purposes, each one an assertion that this community had come to stay.