5 minute read
Fefa’s Market and the Latino Cultural Corridor On Providence's Broad Street
by MARTA V. MARTÍNEZ
Marta V. Martínez, PhD, is the founder and current executive director of Rhode Island Latino Arts (RILA), where she has led the organization since 1988. In 1991, she also founded Nuestras Raíces: The Latino Oral History Project of Rhode Island, and the collection of oral histories has become the main focus of her work at RILA. In 2014, she published Latino History in Rhode Island: Nuestras Raíces (History Press).
There’s a place called Broad Street in South Providence, Rhode Island, where, as you walk, you will see stores selling plátanos and yuca; where you can smell the delicious aroma of freshly made tostónes, arroz con gandúlas, and pollo frito. On any given evening, you’ll see residents lined up at the many Chimi trucks parked along this busy street, and you can spot the hand-lettered signs and hear orders for this Dominican specialty in the Spanish language.
More than fifty years ago, Broad Street looked and sounded very different. Hy’s Deli sold bagels and lox for fifteen cents, Collier's Bakery made soda bread each morning, and most of the residents were Irish or Jewish. It was during this time, however, when families began moving south to the suburbs. Postwar prosperity and the relative cheapness of automobiles made the tightly packed houses and three-deckers around Broad Street less inviting than a ranch house in neighboring and more affluent cities.
Soon, in the time-honored American way, new immigrants moved in.
Many of these newcomers were Latin Americans and although their Rhode Island numbers were almost non-existent before the early 1960s, in 2023 more than thirty-nine percent of the state's workforce is Latino, twenty-four percent are Providence residents, and more than half of Latino children still live in a home where English is not the first language.
If we had to find one person who we can say is responsible for the growing Latino influence in Rhode Island, it would have to be Josefina “Doña Fefa” Rosario who, even after her death in 2018, is loved, respected, and celebrated as the "Mother of the Hispanic Community." Through her efforts, Dominicans are now the largest group of Latinos in the state, but in 1959 when she arrived, she was convinced that she was the first such person. By 1962, after driving to New York and back to purchase her favorite foods, Doña Fefa opened a bodega (market), known as Fefa's Market, where she sold the foods she missed from her home country, including plátanos, yucca, café, and cilantro. She stocked Dominican newspapers and gave the newcomers advice on where to find a job, how to get a driver's license, and made sure they registered their children for school. She was a one-woman welcoming committee, and her bodega provided familiar comforts in a new and strange world.
Doña Fefa’s story and the site where her bodega stood were a little-known part of Rhode Island’s history until 1991 when, as a way to preserve this history, I began collecting oral histories and documenting all that I learned. As a result, Rhode Island Latino Arts (RILA), the organization which I founded, has become the first and only community-based organization that holds the state’s only comprehensive collection of Latino history.
Fefa’s story was also the inspiration for the continuation of oral history work in the Blackstone Valley and specifically in Central Falls, Rhode Island, a small city one-square-mile in size. Central Falls has a rich industrial history and, as I discovered, is where the first Colombians who arrived in Rhode Island to work in the textile mills settled.
Through the collection of oral histories, RILA has given a voice to a history that has been overlooked by local historians and that before 1990 no one was collecting and documenting on a consistent basis. Through collective organizing and outreach, these stories are now accessible to the general public and we continue to work creatively to include digital storytelling through a website called Nuestras Raíces (www.nuestrasraicesri.net), which includes a platform for community members to document their own histories by sharing stories and/or photographs online.
Through place-based arts programming like a traveling art installation called Café Recuerdos, living history Barrio Tours, public art, and hosting performances on the site of Fefa’s Market, we educate others about Latino history.
I’m also pleased to have launched a program that trains emerging Latinx oral historians who will collect and share their own stories while growing the collection. Through this program we pair elders and young people to ensure that today’s and future generations of Latinx people don’t forget who they are and where they came from.
