Colleen Pina-Garron
Casting A Wider Net: A Community Oral History Project
Casting a Wider Net is a community oral history project developed to collect and share the stories of Cape Verdean, Vietnamese, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Guatemalan, and Salvadoran members of the commercial fishing industry. The project provided ethnographic training for 9 individuals from those communities who led the documentation effort, conducting 14 interviews in English, Spanish, Kriolu, and Vietnamese.
Casting a Wider Net is funded in part by a Wicked Cool Places grant from New Bedford Creative, a grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and an Expanding Massachusetts Stories grant from Mass Humanities, which receives support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and is an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Paula Robinson Deare
Cape Verdean men have struggled for generations to work in professions, guaranteeing enough income to provide for their families. They have gained a foothold on New Bedford’s docks unloading and loading foreign ships, particularly because workers on those ships often don’t have passports or papers that allow them to debark from the ship within the United States. Thus, longshoremen up and down the United States seaboard provide those services. Those longshoremen have come to be known to be part of the International Longshoremen’s Union abbreviated as the ILA.
Colleen Pina-Garron, daughter of Henry Pina (father of eight children), a stevedore in New Bedford from the 1950s through the 1970s, tells of her experience of her father’s routine and work as he provided for his family and spouse. Henry Pina fought to provide himself, his peers, and neighbors work unloading ships in New Bedford before many of the current safety protocols were put into place. Further, much of the storytelling here explains the family/work lifestyle, friendships, and contributions of the longshoremen who worked the ports of New Bedford during this period.
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