Silvino “Sal” Sequeira
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.
Eldric R. Abreu
In this interview, Silvina “Sal” Sequeira speaks about immigrating from Cape Verde to Portugal as a child with his family and then from Portugal to the United States with his wife as an adult. He discusses his luck in having the opportunity to learn how to weld, which helped him obtain the job he has held as an industrial welder for 27 years at Blue Fleet Welding in New Bedford, MA. He talks about how physically demanding his job is but also notes that he relishes the challenges and is happiest when his work requires a variety of skills and knowledge.
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