Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican: A Cape Verdean American Story
Posted May 4th, 2007 by Scribe Video CenterClaire Andrade-Watkins worked for over ten years to tell the history of her beloved Cape Verdean Fox Point section of Providence, Rhode Island. Full of childhood memories, textures and sounds of the l950s, l960s and early l970s, Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican, chronicles her community's music, ties to the old country, and the maritime/seafaring traditions, especially the longshoremen, who "worked the boats" in the Port of Providence. Three generations of Cape Verdeans were born and raised in this tight knit neighborhood that stretched along the waterfront. But the story is also of tragedy and scandal as this vibrant community of immigrants was forcibly displaced by urban renewal in the 1970s.
Who Cape Verdeans are remains a largely untold story, hence the film’s title. Cape Verde, lying 240 nautical miles off the coast of West Africa, is a tiny, archipelago of ten islands. Cape Verdeans were the only Africans to travel freely to America as they left their drought stricken islands to work in the whaling trade and arrived on the shores of New England. The anguish of the separation from their home is immortalized in Cape Verdean music, especially the "morna", popularized internationally by such artists Cesaria Evora. Again uprooted by urban renewal in the l970s, the disbanded Cape Verdeans scattered to other parts of Rhode Island, but Fox Point remains "home" for...
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Claire Andrade-Watkins, a historian and filmmaker, has published extensively on French and Portuguese language African cinema in leading academic journals and film publications including Framework, International Journal of African History, Journal of Visual Anthropology, and The Independent. She is coeditor of Blackframes: Critical Perspectives on Black Independent Cinema. From 1995 to 1996 she was a Fulbright Scholar in Cape Verde, where she conducted research on indigenous cinema. She was an Associate Producer on Odyssey, a PBS anthropology and archaeology documentary series, and Assistant to the Producer on Haile Germia’s Sankofa. She is an Associate Professor of Visual and Media Arts, at Emerson College in Boston. She founded Spia Media to document, preserve and disseminate cultural productions from Africa, the Caribbean and the United States, with a particular emphasis on Cape Verdean-American and Cape Verdean history, culture and traditions.