At a recent ceremony at the Quonset O’ Club, Warwick resident Marta Martinez was inducted into the Rhode Island Journalism Hall of Fame. Martinez is founder of Nuestras Raíces: The Latino Oral History Project of Rhode Island, and was honored for over three decades of work documenting the stories of Rhode Islanders.

“I had so many ups and downs of emotions,” Martinez says. “I actually wasn’t quite sure what qualified me to receive the award. I had to sit with that for a while.”

Born in Mexico, Martinez grew up in El Paso, Texas, part of a family that included six siblings. She moved east to attend Providence College, and by the end of her freshman year she met her future husband. After college, the couple spent a decade in Washington, D.C., returning to Rhode Island in 1988 because it felt like a better place to raise a family.

“I wanted to go into broadcast journalism,” Martinez says of her time at Providence College. “I wanted to be a TV anchor. I got an internship at Channel 12, which was an ABC station at the time.  That got me an interview with ABC in Washington when we moved there, but I realized then that broadcasting wasn’t what I wanted to do.”

Instead, Martinez got a job at Gallaudet University, a school for deaf students, and there she learned American Sign Language. During her time in Washington, she worked as an interpreter for both Spanish and ASL.

When Martinez returned to Providence, she started working with Hispanic Social Services, and from there got to know the South Providence and Elmwood neighborhoods.

“I started walking Broad Street and talking to people, and I was really introduced to the Latino community for the first time that way. In college I didn’t get out much, I stayed on campus.  Downtown felt very desolate. There was very little to do besides shop at The Outlet and maybe a few other stores. Well, I should say there was very little that I wanted to do downtown.”

Though Providence had a large Latino community, Martinez says that media coverage at the time was very limited and mostly negative. “It was all crime and stories about welfare,” she said. “So, I called the Providence Journal to ask why, and the person who answered the phone told me that if I wanted to see positive stories printed that I should start submitting them myself. So, I did. “

“The culture of Broad Street is very Dominican, and that was very foreign to me,” she says. “Mexican culture and Caribbean cultures are very different. I started learning more about that history.  I went to libraries and archives to get a sense of who they were. I came from Texas, where Latinos have been around for four hundred years, so it was very surprising to me that Latinos didn’t come to Rhode Island until the 1960s.  At the time, the 1960s wasn’t that long ago, so I thought it would be fun to meet some of the people who had arrived first. “

That began a three-decade career meeting members of local Latino communities and recording their stories, first to audiocassette and later digitally. Some interviews even became Providence Journal stories.

“It was very accidental,” Martinez says. “Rhode Island Council for the Humanities gave me my first grant, and I used that to learn more about what oral history is, because I hadn’t studied it. I found other oral historians and got very involved with the Oral History Association.”

There were few other oral historians in Rhode Island, let alone working specifically with Latino communities.  “A lot of people do oral histories in school, and it’s their big project for a year or for a semester. Then they move on to other things and you never see them again. And where do the histories go?”

In 1991, Martinez started Nuestras Raíces: The Latino Oral History Project of Rhode Island. Since then, the organization, has grown into a diverse collection of personal stories, photographs, and documents that capture the history of Rhode Island’s Spanish-speaking community, according to its website.

Nuestros Raíces lost some funding earlier in April when National Endowment for the Humanities funding was eliminated, even for projects that were already underway. Not only that, but the National Endowment for the Arts was targeted a few weeks later, impacting Rhode Island Latino Arts, Martinez’s day job.

“With Rhode Island Latino Arts I work with artists from every genre: visual artists, musicians, theaters, even culinary artists,” says Martinez. 

An NEA grant was awarded, and later rescinded, for the 10th annual Teatro en el Verano production, a new bilingual (English/Spanish) retelling of the story of Doctor Faustus, which will be performed in local parks and outdoor venues around the state. The play was already cast and moving forward when the funding was taken away. They are now looking for funding to keep the production going.

In addition to theatrical programs, RI Latino Arts hosts regular meetups for artists. (They’re normally held at the organization’s gallery space in Central Falls, although the next one will be held in the Roger Williams Park Museum of Natural History and Planetarium on June 5). Martinez also organizes a summer-long Museo del Barrio, in which Broad Street becomes a living museum with dance, drumming, performances, and tours of the historic neighborhood.

For more information, visit RILatinoArts.org