Brazilian RoundtableDiversity, Citizenship, and

Community

April 13, 2007

Sandra Faiman-Silva, Ph.D.Professor of AnthropologyBridgwater State College

Bridgwater, MA 02325

Provincetown History in the [present] tense/tension[s]…

1700s-1890s “Old” Yankee dominance1890s-1980s Portuguese hegemony1980s-2007 LGBT-Q-S pluralism2007- ? New International workers of color

First wave Portuguese ethnics:an amalgamated community

“Portuguese ethnics brought a unique history and heritage to New England generally and Cape Cod specifically. Drawn form diverse locales—the Azorean islands of Horta, Pico, and Fayal; the island community of Mederia….and the Cape Verdean island of Brava….In the early 19th Century Portuguese and Cape Verdeans settled throughout Massachusetts, including the coastal towns of Falmouth and Harwich, where they worked in the seasonal cranberry and strawberry industries. Fishermen picked up from the Azores, Madeira, and the Cape Verde Islands crewed on Yankee schooners that fished the rich waters of the Grand Banks.”

Faiman-Silva, p. 35-36

Commercial St @ Standish, 1902showing railroad heading toward

MacMillan Wharf, to right

Portuguese ethnics and dominant constructions of race

• Portuguese ethnics in New England entered a society entrenched in Old World notions of racial differences and organized into a well-established racial, social, and cultural hierarchy, with old New Englanders at the apex and newcomers ranked by color and class below. Northern and western Europeans, especially English and Germans, were superior to the Irish, who ranked above Italians, Poles, and other southern and eastern Europeans, with Jews and African Americans at the base.

• Jews, Italians, Poles, and Portuguese brought different languages cultural traditions, and religious backgrounds to the area, and the existing society adjusted with unease to the influx of Irish Catholics and later Jews. These new immigrants, differentiated by language, religion, social class, and appearance, challenged old New Englander notions of racial and religious homogeneity and privilege. Most were rural folk, illiterate and unskilled….They were, as Karen Brodkin (1998) notes, “not quite white.”

Portuguese Hegemony—Cape Cod’s new majority

Provincetown’s interethnic relations between Portuguese and old New Englanders were framed within this racial and social hierarchy, albeit in a democratic small-town milieu. In geographically bounded and isolated rural settings, citizens had to overcome cultural and social differences to forge local community life.

Writing in the early 20th Century, Mary Heaton Vorse reported, “The interwoven strand of the Portuguese and New England culture is so close you can’t tell where one begins and the other ends….Their customs have been intermingled with ours. Deep Portuguese speech is everywhere on the wharves, in the streets. The same boy who shouted to his father in Portuguese will talk in the most unadulterated New England accent about the ‘habbor’ the next minute. They are so much a part of the town that today one could not imagine Provincetown without them….” In in environment of religious liberalism and social acceptance, racial amalgamation became common, and Portuguese, Yankees, and Nova Scotians intermarried freely, noted Vorse. “There are several families who are [Cape Verdean] Bravas but do not admit it. They have ‘passed.’”

Provincetown: Portuguese fishing

village L. 1900s-2000s

How did Provincetown become so Queer and what can it tell us about US inter-

ethnic relations?

As each new immigrant group entered Provincetown’s social scene—Portuguese in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and gay men and lesbians at 20th century’s close, each vied for full citizenship status and in so doing displaced an earlier majority class. Since the late 19th century Provincetowners have struggled to preserve the integrity of their imagined community and yet incorporate newcomers as citizens not only politically but also socially and culturally. Such dilemmas of citizenship—essentially about inclusion and exclusion, argues Bart van Steenbergen (1994:4)—continue to dog Provincetown as they do many communities globally.

Early 21st C

street theatre

Women’s Week Prom,

2001

Citizenship, ‘others,’ and crossing social divides

• T.H. Marshall (1950) defined citizenship along three axes: political, civil, and social. “The civil element is composed of the rights necessary for individual freedom—liberty of the person, freedom of speech, thought and faith, the right to own property…and the right to justice…rights protected in the courts; the political aspects of citizenship consist in ‘the right to participate in the exercise of political power….Aspects of citizenship defined as social are subject to educational institutions and social-service arrangements….”

Day of Portugal Festival

Youth on Commercial StreetOn a quiet spring afternoon

Provincetown ‘street theatre’

Radical democratic citizenship and the politics of “others”

According to Pakulski (1997) cultural citizenship rights “are the rights to unhindered and dignified representation, as well as the maintenance and propagation of distinct cultural identities and lifestyles.”

Cultural citizenship is a radical form of cultural democracy predicated on a universal politics of recognition, which is rooted in tolerance for diverse identities.

The imperative of full cultural citizenship, then, is acceptance of diversity and inclusiveness. This ‘moment of citizenship’…is achieved through “recognition and respect for alternative ways of being” (Weeks 1999).

The ethics of citizenship

• A truly ethical citizenship, or what Gorman (2000) calls a politics of conciliation, mandates a “political community that is able to accommodate the fact of otherness and diversity.”

• Provincetown is an important site where boundaries of citizenship generally and sexual citizenship in particular can usefully be queried….The pressing problem of citizenship…rests in this tension between individual liberty and social responsibility—or in other words, between public good and private rights. “We cannot say: here end my duties as a citizen and begins my freedom as an individual…..(Mouffe 1992)

Bishop Sean O’Malley blesses Provincetown fleet, 1997

Provincetown fishermen carry Statue of St. Peter to St. Peter’s Church for Fleet Blessing prayer service, 1997

Dilemmas of citizenship in plural communities

• Conflicts in Provincetown render citizenship problematic on two ways. First, which sexual minorities will citizens tolerate, and to what extent will they do so? Will Provincetown permit discrete sexual trysts among gay men or nudity in theatrical performances, the arts, and adult entertainment? Second, as Provincetown shifts from mostly straight to mostly gay, how will the community accommodate to this new sexual culture?

‘Others’:dominant constructions ~ intersecting

realities

Although straights dominate Provincetown’s mainstream ritual life, as for example the Veteran’s Day Celebration (above), GLBTS participateas spectators (right).

Boundaries of citizenship • These questions, in this instance framed as issues of

sexual citizenship, have wider implications for citizenship generally. For example, minorities of color are embraced only as long as these individuals behave as “good black citizens.” Jamaican dreadlocks, street speech, and rap music peppered with profanities are unacceptable.

• Sexual minorities, too, query how far community members are willing to go to allow them full citizenship status. Can a community such as Provincetown embrace democratic citizenship principles to include others whose lifestyles do not accord with mainstream, heteronormative, white social and cultural standards and norms? This is the dilemma of democratic pluralistic citizenship for all communities, not just Provincetown.

New immigrants; New cultural realities;

New challenges

radical—and ethical—democraticcitizenship, conclusion• “a collectivity of strangers sharing equal regard” (Stein

2001)

• a “concept of the city as a political community that is able to accommodate to the fact of otherness and diversity”

• “The citizen exists not only for the other, but also for the Other’s sake, taking an interest in his or her aspirations, projects and possibilities” (Gorman 2000)

• A truly ethical citizenship…mandates a ‘political community that is able to accommodate the fact of otherness and diversity. (Gorman 2000)