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“My mother was a single parent, and she had to survive. The only thing that was really going on that women could work at was basically the fish houses.”
Debra Soares
Debra is a Cape Verdean American accountant whose mother, Mary “Gee” Soares, worked in seafood processing for 30+ years. In this excerpt, Debra paints a picture of growing up with a hardworking, single mom in Bay Village in the 1960s and 70s where everybody looked after everybody. She describes the limited opportunities available to Cape Verdean women, the sacrifices of her mother and aunts who worked in the fish houses cutting, scaling, and packing fish, and the pride that her own education brought her mother’s generation.
This interview was originally conducted in English.
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Background Information:
Debra talks about growing up in the Bay Village, New Bedford’s oldest surviving public housing project built in 1941. There were limited job opportunities for Cape Verdean women like her mother who found employment in the fish houses where workplace injury and illness were common due to harsh conditions and long hours. The construction of Route 18 to make transporting seafood more efficient, displaced many Cape Verdeans from their homes and cut Bay Village off from the waterfront.
