Our Town/Nha Vida is funded in part by Mass Humanities, which receives support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and is an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Additional financial support was provided by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and the Friends of The Dartmouth Libraries. The project was supported by the Dartmouth Historical and Arts Society, the Dartmouth Historical Commission, and the New Bedford Public Library.
The Archives and Special Collections department received a Mass Humanities "Expand Massachusetts Stories" grant to conduct oral histories with individuals who self-identify as being Cape Verdean or of Cape Verdean heritage, who were born and raised, who have lived or studied in Dartmouth for an extended period of time. The project includes oral histories, a written history of Cape Verdean immigration to the south coast of Massachusetts, and an exhibit.
“Too much knowledge has been lost, too many stories distorted, too many people forgotten. We mourn for all we do not know. Yet the vision and resilience of Black America are shaping this nation. Our future demands that we unbury the past.”
“Inheritance”, The Atlantic, February 9, 2021
The Cape Verdean community has been migrating to Massachusetts since the mid-late 1800s, as part of the whaling industry. They settled, predominantly, in the south coast of the state, and went on to work in the cranberry industry after the decline in whaling. They married, raised families and became an integral part of Massachusetts society. Estimates from the 2014 American Community Survey (ACS) show that 37,145 foreign-born individuals from Cape Verde reside in the United States, and of those, 25,013 live in Massachusetts (Cape Verdeans in Boston, 2016). This minority community remains woefully under documented, specifically their migration to, settlement in and daily life experiences in Massachusetts.
The project, “Our Town/Nha Vida” (Our Town/My Life) interviewed Cape Verdean-Americans who are multigenerational or first-generation immigrants, of various ages and socioeconomic backgrounds. Their personal experiences and stories provide a more inclusive understanding of their place in Massachusetts. The project is important because it provides Massachusetts residents with concrete examples of how Cape Verdeans have added to the economic, cultural, and social fabric of the state. One of the goals of the project is to encourage audiences to learn and grow in their knowledge of multicultural Massachusetts.
The project serves as an opportunity for the voices of Cape Verdeans, an undocumented, underrepresented but historical, community in Massachusetts to be heard. This project was intended to be for Cape Verdeans and by Cape Verdeans. The humanities are fundamental to the purpose and eventual outcomes of this project, as the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act, 1965 (as amended) states the humanities encompasses “...the study and application of the humanities to the human environment with particular attention to reflecting our diverse heritage, traditions, and history and to the relevance of the humanities to the current conditions of national life.” Various aspects of humanities subjects and methodologies are dispersed throughout the project components.
This project was envisioned as having three components: the oral histories, a traveling exhibit, and a webpage. All three are interlinked and will continue beyond the deadlines and financial support from Mass Humanities since the community is ever-growing and changing. These components will be permanently housed at the Archives and Special Collections division of the Claire T. Carney Library at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where documenting local communities is an integral component of its mission. The oral histories will be conducted by local Cape Verdean community members themselves, who will interview other Cape Verdeans. These interviews will be conducted with contemporaries and elders and will document their lived experiences as residents of Dartmouth. We believe that one of the results of the oral histories will be to provide a greater understanding of how Cape Verdeans have shaped their respective geography and how this place has shaped them.
The project has as its anchor this webpage. The webpage has evolved as the project moved forward, and is now the permanent home for the various components of the proposal. It includes the project narrative, project funders, and contact information for project staff. As calls for project participation are made, they will be hosted on the webpage, and they will include interviewers, interviewees, and exhibit collaborators. It will subsequently evolve to host the researched history of Cape Verdeans in New Bedford and Dartmouth, and when they are cataloged and transcribed, the oral histories will be linked to through the webpage. In addition, the exhibit, after being hosted at the public libraries, will become a digital exhibit, which will allow continuing interaction with this local community’s story.
Sonia Pacheco (co-PI)
Sonia Pacheco is the social sciences and history library for the Claire T. Carney Library; previously she held the position of librarian archivist for the Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese American Archives, the Luso-Afro-Brazilian Archives Collections and the Southeastern Massachusetts Historical Collections in the Archives and Special Collections department.
She has over eighteen years of experience as an information and heritage professional, and her current position draws on her interdisciplinary experience and past jobs as an archivist and museum coordinator for a historical society, community development librarian, and librarian archivist at public libraries. She received a master’s degree in Information Studies (Archives focus) from the University of Toronto and a master’s in History from the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Her professional interests include the relationship between archives and immigrant communities, capturing and preserving community memory, and teaching primary source literacy.
She may be contacted via email (click for link)
Memory Holloway (co-PI)
Memory Holloway is the humanities advisor and has long-term teaching experience in the humanities at university and at the local level as part of the Clemente Program in the Humanities for the past sixteen years.
Her Ph.D is in art history (Courtauld, London University,) supplemented by service and engagement with Portuguese speakers in New Bedford. She has taught in the men’s and women’s prison as part of a rehabilitation program, and has been a board member for the Salvation Army in New Bedford where she cooked for over twelve years. For this work she was awarded a Commonwealth of Massachusetts House of Representatives Award for Service to Portuguese Community.
She has extensive experience in interviewing local subjects as an art journalist and as part of research for exhibitions and public presentations. She has developed exhibitions in New Bedford and Paris, published papers and has edited academic journals on art history in Africa including Cape Verde. Of note in particular is her published paper on Cape Verdean whalers in “Making Waves: Cape Verdean Whalers and the Voyage of the Sunbeam in Transnational Archipelago: Perspectives on Cape Verdean. Migration and Diaspora. (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press), 2008. She is an active member of the NAACP, New Bedford.
She was awarded a NEH Summer Fellowship; a Gulbenkian Fellowship, Lisbon; a Luso-American Foundation Fellowship Grant; and a President’s Public Service Award (UMD) and has worked as Chair for the Ford Foundation in awarding fellowships.
These activities and her dedication to using the humanities to include and educate are the basis for her work in interviewing, recording and working with the Cape Verdean community.
James Lopes (advisor)
Mr. Lopes is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, he is a retired intellectual property attorney and currently teaches in the Communications Department at Rhode Island College. He also serves as Visitor Services Supervisor at Fall River Heritage State Park, where he creates and presents programs and exhibits that interpret local history. Previously, he served as the Vice President of Education & Programming at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. During his tenure, he expanded its vision to be more inclusive of African American, Cape Verdean, and Native American cultures. Under his guidance, the Museum created Captain Paul Cuffe Park and the Cape Verdean Maritime Exhibit and presented Old Dartmouth Roots, a local genealogy conference. In Boston, Lopes contributed to exhibits at the Roxbury Heritage State Park and wrote the first guide to the Boston Black Heritage Trail. Mr. Lopes is the co-founder of the international Cape Verdean Genealogy Society. He is also an award-winning documentary producer and has conducted oral histories of whaling families and Cape Verdeans of the south coast of Massachusetts. Mr. Lopes serves on the New Bedford Historical Commission and is a former board member of Mass Humanities, as well as the New Bedford Whaling Museum, where he served as Vice Chairman.
