LaVerne Gomes
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.
Ellen Huggins
In this interview, LaVerne Gomes begins by speaking about growing up in Wareham, Massachusetts, before moving to New Bedford, where she was raised by a single mother in a large Cape Verdean family. After dropping out of school at the age of 16, she pursued work in the Frionor Kitchen in New Bedford, where she worked in the cold fish house for 27 years, preparing frozen fish as it came off the conveyor belt. LaVerne speaks about the unionization that she helped to organize while at Frionor, the friendships that she made with her fellow co-workers, and how she reconnected with her Christian faith while on the job. She describes the long-lasting effects of fibromyalgia that she sustained after 27 years at Frionor, as well as the arthritis that has afflicted many of her female friends and relatives who have also worked in the fishing industry. She concludes the interview by speaking about her goal of paying off the mortgage on her home, in order to pass ownership of the house to her daughter and granddaughter in the future.
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