The Study of Racialism

G-Man · Moderator Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 2590 }

from http://spiamedia.com/productions/skfpr/

“Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican?”: A Cape Verdean American Story is the largely unknown story about immigrants from the Cape Verde Islands in the Fox Point neighborhood in Providence, Rhode Island, the second oldest and largest Cape Verdean community in America.

Cape Verdeans began arriving in large numbers from the tiny archipelago off the coast of western Africa in the ports of Providence, Rhode Island and New Bedford, Massachusetts in the early 1900s. They crossed the Atlantic aboard packets, small sailing ships to fill the need cheap labor in the waterfronts, textile mills, factories, and cranberry bogs of southeastern New England.

Urban renewal in the 1960s and 1970s destroyed the tight knit Cape Verdean community bound by family, kinship, language, and seafaring traditions and displaced three generations of Cape Verdeans and their rich culture. The story of this little known community of the African Diaspora addresses many universalities of history, immigration, race relations and urban renewal.

The title, “Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican?”, is derived from an actual comment made many, many years ago. My beau’s brother was a student at Brown University in Providence, RI. Upon learning that his brother had met a Cape Verdean girl from Providence, the Brown student replied, “Cape Verdean? Oh, there are a lot of them around here; they’re some kind of funny “Porto Ricans.” (Note: spelling of “Porto” is the way it was pronounced, hence the spelling in the title). This is a classic example of the (mis)perceptions of Cape Verdean Americans. Rich anecdotal stories like this abound, adding texture and shape to the reflections, observations and experiences–joyous and painful–of growing up in this close, self-contained New England community.

The community of Fox Point was situated near the waterfront and the Port of Providence. Clustered in tenements, families, relatives and friends lived within shouting distance of one another. Once a bustling port for loose cargo-lumber, coal, scrap iron-most of the men from the Point “worked the boats” as proud members of the Longshoremen’s Union Local l329.

Three generations of Cape Verdeans were born and raised in this tight knit neighborhood that stretched along the waterfront. Uprooted by urban renewal in the l970s, the disbanded Cape Verdeans scattered to other parts of Rhode Island. Yet Fox Point remains “home” - at least in heart and spirit-for Cape Verdeans who lived “down the Point.” SOME KIND OF FUNNY “PORTO RICAN”?© chronicles this community’s history, music, ties to the old country, and the maritime/seafaring traditions, especially the longshoremen, who “worked the boats” in the Port of Providence. The narrative vehicle for SKFPR is my childhood memories of family, friends, textures and sounds of the l950s, l960s and early l970s in the Cape Verdean Fox Point section of Providence, Rhode Island.

SKFPR does not attempt to be the definitive word on the “Cape Verdean” experience. What the project endeavors to do is to tell a story that is rich in human experience and scholarly detail. The search for visual material for this project has been an ongoing hunt for over twenty years.

I have gone door to door, following leads of family and friends: sometimes crawling through basements and attics, and in one instance prying 8mm black and white footage of Brava, Cape Verde in the l950s from a reluctant cousin’s attic. Through a more cooperative uncle, I was given the use of his 8mm family archive spanning thirty years of family events and holidays. Other finds include priceless photographs, many going back to the late 1890s, journals, newspaper clippings and a pristine collection of beautiful 8mm color film of the Fox Point community in the late l950s and l960s and of the longshoremen “working the boats” in the Port of Providence. Most exciting is the 8mm footage of the famed ERNESTINA, a two-master Gloucester schooner, the last packet ship to regularly sail to New England, and a legend in Cape Verdean folklore entrusted to me to tell the ERNESTINA story by Manuel T. Neves, the publisher of THE CAPE VERDEAN.

"Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican" Trailer

The DVD of the documentary can be purchased here:
http://spiamedia.com/productions/skfpr/