New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center (FHC) has been awarded an Expand Massachusetts Stories — Story Forward Grant from Mass Humanities to share the Casting A Wider Net (CAWN) exhibit with the greater New Bedford community in a new initiative called Sharing the Catch.
The funding will allow FHC to travel the CAWN exhibit to three sites across New Bedford in 2026, create tie-in programming and curriculum materials, and develop a CAWN digital exhibit on FHC’s website.
The exhibit will travel to the Greater New Bedford Community Health Center, the Community Economic Development Center, and Global Learning Charter Public School. This will allow students and community members who were not able to view the exhibit at FHC a new opportunity to learn about and connect to the stories of immigration, labor, and family that are integral to New Bedford’s fishing industry in the spaces they frequent most often, breaking down barriers to access and bringing the archive to life.
The Casting A Wider Net Community Oral History Project was developed to collect and share stories of Cape Verdean, Vietnamese, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Guatemalan, and Salvadoran members of New Bedford’s commercial fishing industry. The project was designed to honor the integral role they play in our food system, build bridges of understanding between newer and older immigrant groups, expand capacity for people to tell their own stories in their own language, and ensure fisheries science and policy are informed by those voices.
CAWN provided ethnographic training for nine community members who led the documentation effort. They conducted, transcribed, and translated fourteen interviews in four languages: English, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Kriolu.
The interviews, interview transcripts, and associated photographs are now publicly accessible on the Center’s online collections database and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Voices Oral History Archive. Learn more about CAWN on FHC’s website: https://fishingheritagecenter.org/programs/community-documentation/.
These interviews provided the basis for the CAWN exhibit, which was on display at FHC from November 2024 to June 2025. The exhibit featured photos, videos, and audio excerpts in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Cape Verdean Kriolu, and Vietnamese, and opportunities to reflect on and respond to narrators’ stories. The exhibit then travelled to the Cape Verdean Veterans’ Memorial Hall and was on display during the Cabo Verdean Heritage Month in July to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Cape Verde’s independence from Portugal.
The exhibit opening featured a panel of Cape Verdean CAWN community ethnographers and narrators who spoke about the project and its significance for New Bedford’s Cape Verdean community. The exhibit remained on display through the end of August 2025. Project funding for CAWN was provided by: the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a Mass Humanities Expanding Massachusetts Stories Grant, and a New Bedford Creative Wicked Cool Places Grant.
The CAWN traveling exhibit is supported in part by: A Wicked Cool Places grant funded by the City of New Bedford through its Arts, Culture & Tourism Fund, and by the New Bedford Economic Development Council, which receives support in part from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.
