(gentle guitar music) - [Resident] It is a place, you'll never find another place like Fox Point.

I don't care where you go.

That's why I stay here.

- Oftentimes when we get older, the guy said, "Let's go, let's go to Boston.

"Let's go there, let's go there."

You take Fox Point, put it on a trailer truck, and I'll go.

I'm not leaving Fox Point.

- Now, today, it ain't like before.

The Creoles used to get together.

I don't care who it was.

Everybody was family.

But now everybody's scattered.

Scattered, scattered.

You know?

- [Resident] The Providence Development Agency said that the families had to move.

- They told us, well, we're gonna fix these houses up.

We're gonna knock some of them down.

We're gonna fix 'em up and you're gonna be the first ones to come in.

But little that we know, you know, we couldn't afford these houses here.

- And you know what gets me so mad is now they call Fox Point the Lower East Side.

I said, "This is not the Lower East Side.

This is Fox Point."

- [Speaker] Because of interstate 195 in the redevelopment, many families had to move out of this area.

And if you meet any of them and you ask them where are you from, there's only one response you will get from them.

It is, "I'm from Fox Point."

(crowd applauds) Even if they now live in East Providence, Pawtucket, North Providence, or wherever they reside today, you can hear the pride that they have for the Point.

(violin music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - Hey y'all, I'm Kiara Butler, and welcome to "Generation Rising", where we discuss hard-hitting topics that our diverse communities face every day.

And just last month, Cape Verdeans across Rhode Island and southern Massachusetts celebrated 48 years of independence from Portugal at the annual Cape Verdean Festival in Fox Point.

Fox Point is an area once inhabited by the multicultural immigrants, but it now barely has any trace of their cultural impact.

And so today we welcome two ladies who literally wrote the movie on this subject.

Dr. Claire Andrade-Watkins and Glynis Ramos-Mitchell.

And stay tuned after our show to watch their film, "Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican?

: A Cape Verdean American Story".

Hey, ladies, how are you?

- Hello.

- This is a little different.

We have you here on Zoom today but we're gonna rock it and roll it.

How y'all feeling?

- I'm grateful.

- Good.

- So I mean, share with us how your personal work, your personal stories inform the work that you're doing today.

- Well, thank you.

I'm gonna jump in on that.

I'm Claire Andrade-Watkins.

I'm the producer director of "Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican?

: The Cape Verdean American Story."

And Glynis and are founding members of the Tockwotton Fox Point Cape Verdean Heritage Project.

Glynis is the president and I am the vice president and project director.

And so we're here to talk about why we are not funny Puerto Ricans and why the work that I've done as a filmmaker and a historian and a second generation native descendant of Fox Point, as is Glynis, a descendant of the founding families, to talk about why is that the question.

Why is that the movie that you're gonna be seeing afterwards, the PBS 55-minute version?

Who are these not-funny Puerto Ricans?

- And what about you, Glynis?

- I'm sorry, could you repeat the question?

- I was just saying tell us more about your personal story and what led you to this work creating this movie.

- Okay, well, for me as the filmmaker, and I'm gonna turn it over to my childhood friend.

Our family goes back generations from the Point.

And why we're telling this story is because we both went to Lincoln.

And when I left Lincoln several decades ago out of high school from where we lived, and I was conceived born and raised on Planet Street, and went to school in Boston, majored in history, my master's in history, PhD, I kept looking, "Where's our story?"

I left in 1970, and in 1973 when I came back, I got married.

My parents were still on Planet Street.

They lived there for 40 years almost.

But in '74 when I graduated, you know, we weren't there anymore.

And I'm like, "Where did our story go?"

It was like, where did two generations, where's my story?

So, you know, history, as a history major and as a filmmaker, traveling the world, where's Cape Verdean story?

Okay, there was something about Black Portuguese and Moby Dick.

But where are the stories about my grandmother?

Where are the stories in our language, Creole?

Where were the smells of our food?

Where was our community that existed as a contiguous community for almost 80 years throughout, from Planet Street all the way into Point Park?

So the quest to the journey to tell that story began as a search to find where our story was and why it was absent.

And so it's not just the movie.

It became the movement of our generation of Cape Verdeans to lead the way really to begin to ask the question of, "Why is our story not there?"

And so that's the filmmaker part, but as I said, it's a bigger story.

It's about our work for advocacy, to recreate the story as we lived it, not how it was told about us.

And that really speaks to our agency about the Independence Day Festival, which happens at India Point Park on the sacred land, our Plymouth Rock in America, where in 1892, Antonio Coelho sails, was the owner of the Nellie May, the packet, arrived in Fox Point, and that's where the first community settled.

So the park historically is set on the land where the community settles and grew from there until we were displaced by gentrification.

Coming back again to where is that story?

And as we celebrate 48 years of independence from Portugal, where is the story of the people who established that community as the first voluntary immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa?

So that's why it's a movie, but it's also grabbing control of how and why we tell our story.

Me, I use my craft as a filmmaker to ask the questions that matter to us and as part of a team of community-based research descendants, how we turn that into sustainable legacy.

And so with that long-winded response, I want Glynis to talk about that for you, Kiara, if you don't mind.

- Sure.

- I'm done for a while.

So there, I'm done.

- [Interviewer] What happened to the Cape Verdean community here in Fox Point?

What messed us up and pushed us out?

- Well, first thing that happened, people lived around here, they gave up all the houses around here on account of the church here.

They was figuring on the only one that stayed was Mamie, that's all.

Mamie house.

That's the only one that kept their house.

Everybody else sold out and got out.

Yeah, it's too bad.

- Cape Verdeans, well, you know they all talked.

They didn't know, but they threw a few dollars at 'em.

They thought it was a lot of money.

But today they're all sorry 'cause they're all scattered.

Now, today, it ain't like before.

The Creoles used to get together, all the Cape Verdeans.

I don't care who it was, everybody was family.

But now everybody's scattered, scattered, scattered.

- They scared a lot of the folks down there.

They moved like Pike Street.

Majority of people moved out except the Alves.

They're the only ones that stayed behind.

In fact, they just named the street after the Alves family.

- [Narrator] This story is a quest across oceans of memory and time, searching for the Fox Point of the past and the parts that survived.

My journey began many years ago with my grandmother telling me about her voyage to America.

- What island you born?

- I was born on the Boa Vista.

Saint Vincente, I did live there quite some time.

In fact, I came from Saint Vincente Island.

- [Interviewer] Well, how did you meet grandpa?

- [Interviewee] He wrote to me in the Cape Verde islands.

Ask my mother permission.

- What island was he from?

- Saint Antao.

- You remember the name of the boat that took you over here?

- Savoia.

- [Interviewer] How long did it take for you to get here?

- 48 days.

I throw up first of two days after I left the island.

- I became part of this project.

Actually, I've always been part of this project.

But I'd ask myself the same questions.

"Why don't I know the story?

Why don't people in Rhode Island know these stories, these people?"

It's important.

And our project is community-based in a very real way.

And even though our community physically is no longer tangible, we have intangible history that we are keeping alive because that's part of our (voice scrambles).

When you think about Fox Point, about Tockwotton, you think about Cape Verdeans.

So our project is really very important to the history of Providence, the history of Rhode Island and Fox Point.

- How would you say you've seen Fox Point change over the years?

- Glynis, do you want me to take that from you a minute?

- Yeah, please.

- I think that's really important because, as I said, we settled there in 1892 through 1973.

We were our autonomous self-sufficient economically.

Indian Point Park was where the local 1329, the union created by the first generation in 1932, coming up to their 90th anniversary, (voice scrambles) scrap and lumber.

We spoke Creole, we had our own food.

We had our own traditions.

So we were fine, but we were invisible.

We weren't homeowners, we were renters.

We worked in the factories and the mills.

But we had a very rich culture.

But when gentrification and preservation happened, the big drum roll drama of urban renewal in the '70s, they took the houses.

But built environment does not make a community.

We were never broken.

We are always 500 years of resilience.

You took the houses down.

Okay.

Yeah, we got scattered all over Providence.

We were displaced.

Many of our community ended up in the projects.

It was hard to connect again but we never lost our connection.

I think part of it is dispelling the myth that we went away.

We didn't go away.

Look the two of us.

And we've never forgotten, like Glynis said, our intangible memory.

So what happened is that urban renewal happened.

Historic preservation rose in terms of prominence in Rhode Island.

History changes and changes again.

It's a pattern that happened all across America in vulnerable communities of color at the intersection of power and inequity.

So we are not new.

What's distinctive about us is we know that we weren't destroyed and we're kind of pushing back at being pushed into a box that calls us something that we don't call ourselves, that doesn't speak our language, that doesn't understand the richness of our traditions and how it's still the glue over a hundred years that connects us.

And you saw it at the 48th.

I mean festival at India Point Park where most of us were.

I mean, I'm talking to fifth cousins.

In the American lexicon, fifth cousins, you're not family.

Heck yes, we are.

We go back, Glynis and I, our families go back three generations to Cape Verde, and everybody we know is interrelated from Fox Point.

We are here.

And that's the joy we want to share with Rhode Islanders.

We're not broken.

We have lovely these stories to tell but we are taking the lead on how we wanna tell our stories, how we preserve them and how we document them.

And Glynis, your family, the Alves and Alves ways are one of the tent poles of heroism of what happened 60 years ago.

- Yeah, and to (voice scrambles) up on that, in terms of how the community quote unquote has changed, are changing that narrative so that we can be (voice scrambles).

Because one of the ways that it has changed is that we have been absent from the history of Providence, history of Rhode Island.

So that's a big change.

That's a good change that we are controlling our narrative, telling our story and being included in the history of two sense of the word providence.

- Yeah, and so seeing - Inclusive, not excluding, and it's been an uphill fight here because it makes it sound easy.

Oh, we're telling our story, but we're up against the entitled centers of power from the academy.

From historical societies who have normally been the stewards of all recorded history.

And if you don't have primary source documents, well, you're really not authentic.

You know, it's not real.

You don't exist.

We're challenging that.

We're challenging protocol.

We're challenging sources in a way that, and I think our project is part of this one, is how to make it a win-win.

We create partnerships with the former gatekeepers, if you will.

The curators, the producers of our content.

Because we all need to be at the table together.

The difference is we're not on the menu anymore.

- Yeah, so seeing the direct impacts of gentrification, where would you say Cape Verdeans have dispersed to?

Are you keeping track of that?

Are you documenting it so people can find other people within their families, generations?

Is that something- - Can I ask you... Can I turn that question on you and say why is that question important?

Because the fact that it's a question speaks to how important it is that the perception of us is that we're invisible.

So thank you for that question because we're not.

It's not as much a thing of we're dispersed because we are and have been from the beginning in 1462 in Cape Verde we've been a global community of immigration.

We've been dispersed globally forever.

Anywhere in the world there's a port or where the sea meets the horizon, there's a Cape Verdean.

We're sea people.

We came on our own packets voluntarily.

We've been bopping along under the radar of the big history going, do, do, do, do.

Okay, well, we'll been coming here picking the cranberries down the Cape, the blueberries, working on the waterfront, going back and forth to Cape Verde, speaking our Creole.

Do, do, do, do, do.

And sometimes history kind of notices us when we get in the way or they want what we had, which was the old zip code.

So now Fox Point is beautifully preserved and we are joined in that stream of history by raising the value of our intangible memory.

We're here.

Right.

So it's not as much as we're dispersed, it's how we've stayed together.

- I lived around the port.

We're all Cape Verdeans anyhow.

Majority of them guys used to work the Colonial Line and also the Provi Line where a lot of cotton for all these mills in Pawtucket and the Bedford River would all come in there.

And these old-timers had to take these big iron hand strokes.

I mean, oh, they were terrible.

My generation started with my father.

He worked the coal ships.

That's all he did mostly was work the coal ships.

It was a back-breaking job.

No certain days, no certain hours.

I remember my father when his boss had come and call him three or four o'clock in the morning, "Come on, Tony.

We got a botch."

And they had to go down, had to go and go to work.

There was nothing you could do.

I felt sorry for him, but we didn't realize what he was going through in those days, you know.

Really was tough.

Really was tough.

- The thing that I dreaded seeing the most was Marshall Williams' uncle.

Spanyol?

- Oh, Spanyol.

Yeah.

- They were loading, he was wrapping up the load here.

They threw the wire underneath and he was on his knees reaching under to get the sling.

Stanley Montero, God rest his soul, was on the winch and he was picking up a load from here to go out.

And he's a winchman up here.

Now he didn't see him there and he picked it up, and as he picked it up, it swung and it went there.

It just smashed.

I mean, it hit him.

And Spanyol looked up and them words ring my ears.

He said, "Stanley, why you kill me?"

And that was it.

And the guy died right there.

I never, never forgot that in my life.

- And Glynis, this question is for you.

Why would you say it's important to keep the Cape Verdean history of Fox Point relevant?

- I think it's important to keep the history of the Cape Verdean and Fox Point relevant because we are a vital part of the history of the city of Providence, the (voice scrambles) history of the city of Providence.

And we have been absent from those histories.

So it's really important to keep that alive because it's a historical imperative to do so.

- Is there anything you would add, Dr. Claire?

- I'm piggybacking on what my colleague and (speaks in Creole), as we say in Creole, my (speaks in Creole) said, is and emphasized that we were invisible.

And it's about the and.

It's turning the and into an active verb of inclusion.

Not exclusion.

Not erasure of the other streams of diversity.

Everyone should be able to create their own stream.

And we're staying in our lane through ours and hope it becomes an example of empowerment and hope for others of how to follow this example graciously crafting and owning their own story.

- And how can we as a community, as a society, do better about telling your story, making sure that you're not invisible?

How can we bring your story and narrative to the forefront?

- Thank you for that question.

I'm gonna give you my two to three points and I wanna hear from what my (speaks in Creole) says.

One, it's education.

This is a digital century.

Our project is a Vanguard Initiative pilot project to reconstitute our chronological timeline digitally from our archival memory, using the best protocol and practices of rigorous research, craft, as you have to, this is me as 40 years as a filmmaker, you need to go have good craft.

But the key change factor there is the content.

So please share the work that we're working on, our commemorative project at India Point Park, which Glynis will talk about.

But for me as a filmmaker scholar, the films that me and our team do from our archive are part of the education.

Help us get the work out.

All my stuff's on YouTube.

Help us continue to educate.

Continue to support my work as an artist so I can train other people on how to tell our stories.

And we're just grateful to be able to add to knowledge.

- Thank you, Claire.

- Yeah, I agree with all of that.

And I think it's really important that the word "and" because and, it's additional.

It's additional and it's important.

And as Dr. Andrade-Watkins mentioned, we are a community-based research project, and the term "community" is really, really important because it's us.

It's us telling our story.

It's us being inclusive in terms of our story and authentic.

- And we are the Plymouth Rock in America.

Let's use a comparable reference that Rhode Islanders will understand.

The Tockwotton Fox Point Cape Verdean community is our Plymouth Rock in America.

It's the first community of Cape Verdeans that settled in Rhode Island.

That's huge.

Which makes us like an important global story.

And also, Glynis, talk about our capstone project that we've been working on for 10 years, which is to build and get created a commemorative park in India Point where our community was first settled to kind of make a physical presence monument to us.

So that's you, Glynis, to talk about our project for park.

- Yeah, I think the park is vanguard.

It's really important because it is where we lived.

It's where we first settled.

So when I go to India Point Park, I'm like, "Wow, this is where my ancestors first came and first settled."

And who thinks about that now?

- There's nothing there.

And that's why we've been working, and now with the deceased, an iconic landscape architect, Carol Johnson, now deceased, who worked with our team over several years to create a vision of a community space that channels who we were and are as a community based on how we see ourselves.

And that is the design.

That is the project that we are been working through the pipeline of Providence City Hall and bureaucracy to get to the finish line through many challenges over 10 years.

But I think we're getting there.

And so stay tuned.

Please follow our progress.

The Tockwotton Fox Point Cape Verdean Heritage Project, Spia Media Productions, and our team doing the digital content.

Be part of the journey with us please.

- And can you all tell our viewers where can we find the film?

How can we stay in touch with both of you?

- Can you?

I mean our website, the Fox Point Cape Verdean Heritage Place website.

The spiamedia.com website.

And that's the best way.

Glynis, can you think of any other way?

And also we did a panel which was like with Providence Preservation, one of our stakeholders who's been advocating with us to work on the narrative.

And it's beautiful because Providence Preservation was created by displacing us.

So it's kind of historic justice, not reparations, but justice that we're teaming to tell the story in a way that is respectful and truly, truly, intentional collaboration.

So that's the shout out to them.

And we'll share that link to that panel that we did with them in 2022.

Right, Glynis, anything else?

- Yeah, I think that'd be really informative.

And the website, our website as well.

Really informative in terms of a background history of where we came from and where we are now in terms of the project.

Also, there's a wonderful representation on the website to visualize the actual commemorative park.

- Well, thank you both, ladies.

We have run out of time.

To our viewers, I would like to thank today's guests, Claire and Glynis, for their time and incredible work.

To catch up on past episodes, head on over to watch.ripbs.org, and be sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter for the latest updates.

Thank you so much for joining us.

We wish you were here in person, but we made it work.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues)