Marta Martinez didn’t set out to make an oral history. Born in Mexico and raised in Texas, when she moved here in the mid-1980s to attend Providence College, she just wanted to know more about the local Latino community. Out of that curiosity came Nuestras Raíces, which means “our roots,” a project collecting stories from the Rhode Island Latino community since 1991. We’ve partnered with them to record a series of intergenerational conversations highlighting stories of Latinos in Rhode Island. In the first part of this series, Martinez sat down to talk about her oral history work with Laura Tamayo, a student at Brown University who’s been working on the project.
TRANSCRIPT:
Laura Tamayo: And when you got to Rhode Island, how did you find out that there was an oral history story, or a Latino story to be told in Rhode Island?
Marta Martinez: I met some really wonderful people, and they were not really the people I was looking for, I was – to clarify, I was looking for Mexicans, which is where my community is. Instead, I found some Dominicans and Caribbeans, Puerto Ricans. And I really was very impressed with the neighborhood. It reminded me of the neighborhood I grew up in. It was, all the businesses were Latino run, there was a lot of Spanish being spoken, it was a very positive and happy neighborhood that I found. So I went to the library, wanted to know a little bit more, to see what else I could find, like on paper. And there was nothing, I found a few articles. And it was mainly about the negative side of the Latino community – who was arrested and all the drug addicts and those kinds of, they were portrayed in those kinds of images. And I knew that was not the case after spending a week on Broad Street. And so I did not … go out to do oral histories, I just knew that I wanted to create a narrative to find a more positive side of the Latino community. And so … I just started putting it together myself. I started writing and building the narrative. And that turned into the history project. Now it was an oral history project. But now it’s more of the history project of Rhode Island of of Latinos.
Tamayo: And what did you find during your time then and during your time now doing oral history that you felt like you enjoyed the most?
Martinez: What really inspires me is the response I get. First it’s more of a quizzical, it’s like “why me, you know, I don’t have a story to tell. I’m just a person doing what I do.” But then, as I set up the interview and we start to talk, it’s, they feel comfortable, first of all, that they – I’m gaining trust of a community that when I, that I did not belong to before, I didn’t feel I belong to before I moved to Rhode Island. … And I think just the idea that somebody wants to listen to – like the everyday citizen just goes through life, and many times they don’t have a chance to sit down and really tell people who they are. Nobody knows who they are until possibly after they’re gone. And so that moment of, somebody is interested in my story … that really tells them … that there’s something that they’re saying that somebody is interested in. … It makes me feel like the project is really making an impact in the community.
Tamayo: Do you have any specific memories or wisdoms from oral histories that you’ve done? Any stories that have really, really stuck with you?
Martinez: The one that sticks the most with me is the very first one I made because that I really watched the family. I was in a situation where I interviewed somebody named Josefina Rosario. We know her as Doña Fefa, and she’s become the center of my oral history. She was the very first person, but it was really her story that led to the connections of others that I’m interviewing. … And it was a family of Dominicans, and we’re sitting around with a house full of people, and they’re not necessarily listening to us. But when she started telling her story, there were young kids who were playing at her feet and all of a sudden they stopped playing and they looked up and then they start listening to her. And when that happened, the adults who were sitting in the next room in the kitchen, they noticed that, so they came into the room. And they just sat down and started to listen to the story. And the faces of the kids in particular, that they, when they heard the story of her life in the Dominican Republic and what it was like living under Trujillo, the dictator, and they turned to each other – and I got the sense, and later on they told me, they had never heard those stories before. … And it’s that moment that made me realize that this is what oral history is. It’s having, not just somebody telling you their story. But having those around, you realize the importance of communicating and having conversations with somebody who you see every single day. … And that’s how I approach the work that I do, I really make sure that everybody reflects, and realizes that their stories really do make a difference.
Tamayo: Lastly, I wanted to ask how you would like to be remembered.
Martinez: I hope that people remember as they start to read this history that did not exist – I mean, it did not exist until I started pulling it out of newspaper articles, and then the oral histories. And maybe 10 years, 50 years from now, the kids who are picking up their textbooks in school will be reading the history that was put together by this woman who lived in the 2000s. And that’s my contribution to Rhode Island’s history and to the Rhode Island Latino community.
Go to nuestrasraicesri.net to learn more about the history of Latinos in Rhode Island.
