Interviews

The Legacy of Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican?: A Cape Verdean American Story

Filmmaker Claire Andrade-Watkins explores the lasting bear on of her seminal film nearly Cape Verdean culture in Fox Point, Providence

Claire Andrade-Watkins's documentary Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican?: A Cape Verdean American Story is the seminal picture show about Greatcoat Verdean civilization in Trick Point, Providence. The first in her trilogy of documentaries about the Cape Verdean customs, Andrade-Watkins highlights the people and exposes the tragic displacement of generations of Greatcoat Verdean immigrants due to gentrification and urban renewal. Since its premiere at the Museum of Fine Fine art in Boston in 2006, Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican? has continued with audiences around the world with its frank delineation of displacement and its effect on the immigrant community.

A Black woman in front of a white background.

Claire Andrade-Watkins

By focusing on her personal story equally role of the Cape Verdean customs of Fob Point, Andrade-Watkins captures a universal theme felt by many immigrant communities. Her mission with all her films is to "build history one story at a time, in different forms and media and create a sustainable legacy that engages and draws from the voices, memories, hopes and dreams of a customs." This is why she started SPIA Media Productions, Inc. in 1998. "SPIA" means to "meet" in the Cape Verdean language, and the name is fitting equally her work tells the stories of forgotten communities.

Andrade-Watkins expressed that she was drawn to create Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican? to document "the search for my 'home' that inexplicably vanished, with no reason, explanation, other than we had to move. It was an invisible violence that spun everyone and everything I loved into total chaos." Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican? is her mode to make sense of that chaos, while spotlighting the malignant side of gentrification on affected (and frequently silenced) communities.

Due to their uprooting, the history of the Cape Verdean community was relatively unknown. Even the proper noun of Play a trick on Point was erased, instead existence touted equally the Lower East Side in social club to garner Brown Academy and RISD students to the area. This repression made it difficult to finance the motion-picture show. As Andrade-Watkins remarks, "The 'unknown' history of Cape Verde and Cape Verdeans meant it didn't show up on the radar of grant making/funders. 1 of my mentors/friends, Camille Billops, who was a stalwart supporter from day one, said that 'it was a pocket-size cabbage path,' pregnant it was a minor, regional story, and not a big enough 'Black' story."

In fourth dimension, she was able to become the film made with the help of grants from MFH/Humanities, RICH and LEF, to name a couple, besides as strong support from the customs. Through a fiscal agent, donations streamed in, every bit customs members were eager to have their stories told.

At one piece of work-in-progress screening on an early Dominicus forenoon, scores of Cape Verdeans and Fob Bespeak residents crammed into Cable Automobile Movie theatre in Providence to watch a sneak preview of the motion picture. It was the first fourth dimension they saw themselves and their story on the screen. Andrade-Watkins remembers the date fondly—April 17, 2005—as "that solar day marked the 'rebirth of a customs' in a venue that was taken as office of their deportation by urban renewal, gentrification, structure of I-195 and the expansion of Dark-brown University and RISD." Their faces and voices were forever documented on the screen. Their stories could no longer become memories destined to die away.

A black and white still photo of a staircase outside.

A even so from Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican?

Andrade-Watkins continues to capture the history of the Cape Verdeans. SPIA is currently working on a digital mapping of a chronological timeline that reconstitutes the history of Fox Point Cape Verdean community on existing and emerging digital platforms.Working the Boats: Masters of the Craft, a half dozen role webisode, the second documentary in the trilogy about Fox Indicate, premiered in 2016 at the MFA in Boston. Currently in mail-productions are ii characteristic documentaries, includingAtlantic Portals: Total Circumvolve, the 3rd documentary in the trilogy on Fox Point that brings the story to the nowadays.

In the current political climate, it is more than important than always to share the experiences of immigrants. Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican? serves equally a reminder of the destructive furnishings that deportation and gentrification can have on immigrant communities and why these cultures must be protected. As we wait forward, nosotros must also look back and preserve our history. This past fall, Andrade-Watkins' film received widespread support through a public nomination entrada for its inclusion in the National Film Registry. If the Library of Congress hears and answers that call, information technology could be one of the handful of films added to the list and would help articulate the demand to preserve this story for generations to come up. And that's exactly what this list is intended to do.