Claire Andrade-Watkins’s indie documentary portrays the fate of the Cape Verdean community from the Providence neighborhood Fox Point. The Emerson College professor and filmmaker navigates well between her own nostalgia of growing up in Fox Point and the larger history of immigration and urban gentrification. Close-knit and thriving through the 1950s, the Cape Verdean–Americans were displaced by “urban renewal” projects and the extension of I-95 through the heart of their residential area. Some Kind of Funny Porto Ricans? hides more treasures than its unexceptional PBS æsthetic reveals at first inspection. The colorful, engaging interviewees intimate larger themes of racism and social change with wisps of tales about zoot suits and South Main Street strolls. And Andrade-Watkins succeeds in representing her former community as not just another hyphenated American ethnic subculture.
