For generations, a robust manufacturing economy in Pawtucket offered newly arrived immigrants a gateway to the American dream. But with the steady decline of factory jobs in small industrial towns across America, the story in Pawtucket is quite different today.
Even a twenty years ago, there was a pattern that a new immigrant could follow here in Pawtucket: arrive, get job in a factory, raise your children here, and hopefully retire better off than your parents did. That’s what happened in Lisa Antunes’ family, when they came here from Cape Verde, off the coast of West Africa.
“My mom got here in 1978, we came in ‘79,” Antunes said, standing inside Star Cuts barbershop on Smithfield Ave in Pawtucket. “She worked for a long time, where you have Stop and Shop now, used to be a jewelry factory. And that’s where she worked for a long time, until she retired.”
Antunes’ story is familiar to Hassan Merhi, another customer in the shop. His parents came from Senegal, by way of Lebanon, and worked in the Pawtucket mills during the same period.
“We were supposed to be here, like three months,” Merhi said. “But once we got here, my mom told him ‘no.’ She was looking out for us, for the kids. She knew maybe this would be better to educate us here, and let us grow here, than going back.”
Both say life was good – difficult – but good, because there were jobs and factories willing to hire immigrants with limited English skills and little education.
“There was jobs everywhere, bunch of factories, mills,” Merhi said. “You could go from job to job. But now a lot of these mills are gone. I don’t know if I was to come in now to the United States, you would have to have some kind of education.”
The owner of Star Cuts is also an immigrant. Lucidio Bala traveled to Pawtucket from Cape Verde in the late 1980s. He followed a long line of Cape Verde nationals who have come to New England since the late 19th century for jobs in the factories and on the fishing boats.
He is now in his 80’s and shares a second-floor apartment with his wife Augusta, across town from the barbershop. They tell their story from their dining room, where a large framed photo of a grassy hilltop in Cape Verde is a reminder of what they left behind.
When Lucidio came to Pawtucket, he says he found work as a machine operator at the American Insulated Wire factory. After five years, he had saved enough money to quit and open his own barbershop. Augusta, who arrived in Pawtucket in 1994, held down work at a factory, while he opened the shop.
“Is good at the time, is good,” Augusta said. “Because I came, one year I got the job. I work in a factory for 15 years.”
But the factory began laying employees off and Augusta feared she would be next. So she found work as a housekeeper at a nursing home, and now works part-time stocking coffee and tea at an office park in Smithfield.
“A lot of things change, because there is no more factories in Pawtucket,” Augusta said.
“Thirty years ago Pawtucket was very good,” Lucidio said. “Lot of work. Making money, spend little, everything was cheap, now everything is expensive. With a little money, you could do better than right now with a lot of money.”
What happened? Lucidio and Augusta reference concerns, echoed nationwide: wage stagnation, inflation, loss of manufacturing jobs to technology and other countries.
According to the Rhode Island department of labor, manufacturing in Pawtucket has decreased by more than half since 2002, when the department first began measuring. As of last year only about 3600 people worked in industrial jobs in the city.
For the next generation in Pawtucket, that reality has had an impact on the jobs they find, the work they do and the lives they lead today.
At just 27, Belmiro Bala, Lucido and Augusta’s son, has already held several different jobs. He’s trained as an airplane mechanic, served in the military, and now works in sales and marketing in downtown Pawtucket.
Companies like Sprint hire Bel, as he’s known, and his team to get people to sign up for low-cost cell phone services. They set up tables outside offices that offer social services, like WIC or food stamps.
Bel’s job is a far cry from the factory work his parents had. And there are a lot more uncertainties in his career path. But he’s also more hopeful about the city’s fortunes than his parents are.
“It’s just a switch of industries, and there are people who are thriving and people who are suffering,” Bel said, and the people who made the switch and are ahead of the curve, they’re growing their businesses, they’re employing people they’re offering opportunity.
And he seems to be doing well. We’re driving one of several cars Bel owns. He’s helping pay for a vacation house for his father back in Cape Verde. More importantly, Bel says he’s choosing a path outside of factory work that he finds more satisfying.
“You have one life that you can live, and you can live it with I’m going to go to work for forty hours a week, for forty years, retire with forty percent of my pay, or I can do something different,” Bel said. “It’s going to take a lot of effort, but what kind of legacy is that going to leave behind.”
But what opportunity will there be for the new immigrants who continue to flock to Pawtucket? The Latino population for example has almost doubled in the last twenty years. And there’s no question that, for a lot of them, life is harder. We’ll have that story as part of our series One Square Mile – Pawtucket.
