Giao Van Dang
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.
Ngoc Tran
Kathleen Le
Giao Van Dang was a scalloper who left his homeland of Vietnam as a part of the boat exodus after the Vietnam War. Like the other refugees in the boat, Giao fled the country with the hopes of finding better opportunities. Through hard work and determination, Giao was able to carve out a life for himself in America, returning to the ocean that he loved. Giao is currently happily retired and still stays connected to the ocean.
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