Remember The Old Times: Cape Verdeans in Providence

How does an immigrant community shape the identity of a city, a university, and a culture? What right, and what precautions, do museums and curators have to take in order to “speak for” a cultural heritage that has been displaced?

While taking a class with Professor Steven Lubar in the American Civilization Department, entitled “Methods in Public Humanities”, a group of students and I considered these questions and other ethical issues of public humanities while designing a final exhibit on the Cape Verdean immigrant community of Providence, Rhode Island from the “golden years”, 1920-1945, before many of the Cape Verdeans were forced out of Providence and into surrounding towns in Rhode Island by Brown University officials.

The class learned to balance historical research and general exhibition ethics through this project, and on a very short timeframe. An exhibit that generally takes 6 months to a year to produce was completed in less than 8 weeks. Luckily we were helped by Erin Wells of Wells Design with the practicality of exhibit design, Claire Andrade-Watkins, a visiting scholar of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America and a Swearer Center Community Fellow, and Lou Costa, a Providence resident with a large repository of photographs of Cape Verdeans from the early 1900’s-present day. Claire was especially helpful; she grew up in Providence and produced a documentary film called “Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican” on her experiences as a 2nd generation Cape Verdean and the experiences of other Cape Verdean immigrants in Providence. With this network of educated and connected professionals and 30 energetic undergraduates and graduate students at Brown, the project was underway.

My involvement, practically speaking, was working on the exhibit design of the Bar Scene. Along with two other students, we were in charge of completely outfitting a display with labels, text, useful information/background information, and time-period bar architecture, bottles, coasters, picture frames, and signs that would have been in a bar on Wickenden Street of Providence, Rhode Island in the 1920’s-1945’s. With the help of Erin Wells, we set out with the intention of making our bar as realistic as possible–maybe a half-smoked cigar and some ashes in an ash tray? Antique bottles filled with colored liquid? We also asked ourselves, starting out, some of the general ethical questions: Would we touch on alcoholism in a label or panel? Would we idealize the poverty and despair sometimes associated with bars, which were often associated with fathers and brothers being out of work, or drowning their wages in a cup of whiskey?

The first, practical lesson we had was that “historical recreations” emphasize re-creation to such a degree that it can be considered fabrication. Nothing is malicious, just out of practicality our group had, at best, 2 photographs of bars from our time period in Providence to work off of, and “authenticity” was second to recreating the feel and carrying the message of the exhibit to the visitor. We couldn’t find original bottles and the contemporary alcohol labels did not fit with our aesthetic, so many hours were spent peeling labels off of wine, gin, and whiskey bottles found in recycling bins around Providence. The bar was built by the John Nicholas Brown Center carpenter and 2 days were spent staining it to look authentic. Each section of the exhibit had a rough budget of $100, which we spent on two stools and boxing gloves, the one authentic (in terms of time-period) object in our exhibit, but not from Providence. We bought some heinously cheap cigars from the local tobacco store and set up our dream half-smoked cigar with soot on an ashtray. We also discovered that coasters were first invented in Germany in the 1880’s and didn’t reach popularity in America until the late 1950’s, which was outside our time period. In all, the practicality of the exhibit design was my favorite part, and became our group’s obsession for the final two weeks before the exhibit opened. We stressed every detail, from the correct recipe of food coloring to recreate Jack Daniels to the color of the framed photos.

Ethically, we decided to avoid the topic of alcoholism completely and instead focus on general bar culture of immigrants in Fox Point (the neighborhood of Providence where most of the Cape Verdeans lived) and the popularity of boxing among the immigrants. We didn’t feel bad about this, because in general there were plenty of topics being “avoided” by this exhibit: such as the fact that there was an enormous, comparable Irish immigrant community living in Fox Point as well, and that women were not allowed in the bars, etc. This seems to be one of the big ethnical cruxes of most recreational, historical exhibits: when one thing is focused on, there are at least three other potential focuses that are eliminated, excused, or avoided. Of course we know that life is not that simple: personally, I took issue with the “Home and Household” design on the other end of the exhibit hall, which seemed extremely idealized and stereotyped to me, with a cross hanging on the wall, a rocking chair in the corner, and welcome mat on the floor.

It really begs the question what is the purpose of the exhibit, is it to protect and display artifacts (such as old photographs that would otherwise sit in a box in someone’s basement), is it supposed to recreate the reality or complexity of a time period, or is it solely educational, with everything a facade, re-fabricated, just to veil the fact that the exhibit is trying to push information and history onto its visitors.

In short, every exhibition is a combination of all three, with the asterisk being that all of these speculations are in reference to history exhibits, not art or performance exhibits. Personally I am far more interested in art museum exhibits, but I am also intrigued by how the two relate. I’m sure they overlap.

“Remember the Old Times: Cape Verdean Community in Fox Point, 1920-1945″ will be open at the John Nicholas Brown Center Carriage House exhibit space until October 16, 2009. Exhibit hours are Monday-Friday, 1-4pm, and free and open to the public.

John Nicholas Brown Center

357 Benefit Street

Providence, RI 02912