Broad Street in Providence is packed with Dominican restaurants and all kinds of Dominican-owned businesses. Marta Martinez loves to give people tours of “La Broa,” as it is affectionately called.
“My first entry to the Rhode Island Latino community was here and it was like my senses exploded,” Martinez said. “It’s like I’m home.”
Martinez has been studying the history of Latinos in Rhode Island for more than 30 years. To understand why communities like La Broa are shaped the way they are, Martinez said people have to study the past and learn about a woman named Josefina Rosario, better known as Doña Fefa.
“Doña Fefa was — if I can just define her in one sentence — she’s the mother of the Latino community. She and her husband, Tony, moved to Rhode Island … they opened the first bodega,” Martinez said. “She was looking for her food, and she wanted platanos and yuca and she couldn’t find it. So she says, ‘Well, I’m going to open a bodega.’ And she did.”
Fefa’s Market opened on Broad Street in the early 1960s. It became a welcome site for Dominicans who left an impoverished country. Martinez said Doña Fefa offered new immigrants more than a taste of their homeland.
“She would first help them find apartments or housing or jobs or schools for the kids, driver’s license,” Martinez said. “She was like an informal social worker and the bodega became the place where you went to ask Fefa, you know, ‘I need a job. My kids need a place to live.’”
Martinez sat down with Fefa in 1991 to document her story. Listening back to the crackled audio, Martinez recalls asking Fefa about her early memories of life in Rhode Island.
Fefa died in 2018. She’s one of more than 110 Latinos in Rhode Island who Martinez has interviewed for the Latino Oral History Project of Rhode Island.
When asked what sparked her interest in collecting the history of Latinos in Rhode Island, Martinez said she initially did not set out to do that.
“I went to school here and I left and then I came back … I was hired to work for a Latino organization, a Hispanic organization at the time,” she said. “And I thought, well, if I’m gonna be working representing this group, I want to know who they are. And so I went out to look for them, if I may put it that way.”
Martinez found a welcoming community of Latinos on Broad Street and was eager to see what else she could learn.
“Outside of walking Broad Street, I went to the library and looked in newspapers and tried to find information, and there was nothing. The only thing I could find were newspaper articles that were negative. Latinos arrested, Latinos in poverty, and it just didn’t seem right to me,” Martinez said. “And I just felt that it was important that people got to see a positive side of the Latino community.”
That positive side includes telling people about what Martinez describes as the state’s Latino pioneers, including Roberto Gonzalez.
In 2004, Gonzalez, who is from Puerto Rico, was sworn into the Providence Housing Court making him the first Latino judge in the state. Another Latino pioneer in the Ocean State is Miriam Salabert Gorriarán. She left Cuba with her siblings in 1961 as part of Operation Peter Pan, a program that helped 14,000 children come to the United States to escape Fidel Castro’s communist regime.
When asked what has most surprised her regarding the interviews that she has done, Martinez said, “How similar their stories are and the hidden stories behind the individuals.”
“Most people think, ‘Well, I just did what I did. I’m not, I’m nobody special.’” she said. “But I remind them, you know, what you did was huge.”
Martinez said there are countless stories of sacrifices. Those are the stories she wants students to learn about. Too often, she said, Latino history is only briefly mentioned in history books.
“I just felt that that wasn’t right,” she said. “The people needed to know more about the Latino children and the young people needed to know about the Latino history here. And who are the important people.”
If not for the work that Martinez has been doing for decades, she said she doesn’t know how others would learn about the influence that Latinos have had in Rhode Island.
“I do sit back and think about that. And I’m very conscious because aside from the oral histories, I’m trying to create the narrative,” she said. “I spend a lot of time in archives and libraries because I think there’s gotta be stuff here. And I do locate it, but it’s always buried. And my job, I feel, is to bring it to the surface and to share it.”
