A history of Providence’s Broad Street can begin in a storefront. For Dominican newcomers, Marta V. Martínez recalled, Doña Fefa’s market was a place to hear Spanish, find familiar food, ask about housing or work and meet people who understood the journey. No civic monument was needed for that work to matter. In La Broa’ (Broad Street), playwright Orlando Hernández turns that kind of everyday infrastructure into theater, drawing from Martínez’s oral histories of Latino Rhode Islanders.
The original Trinity Repertory Company production ran January 18 through February 18, 2024, directed by Tatyana-Marie Carlo. The theater’s casting notice describes Ana, a Latina college student who meets Doña Rosa on Broad Street and encounters the histories of Dominican, Colombian and other Latin American neighbors. Trinity credits Hernández’s play as inspired by Martínez’s Nuestras Raíces project. That distinction matters: these are dramatized characters shaped by testimony, not transcripts presented as stage dialogue.
Martínez began recording oral histories in 1991, she said in a 2026 interview. She described the trust required to make an ordinary conversation part of a historical record. That labor is easy to overlook when an archive becomes a finished play. Someone had to ask questions over years, preserve the answers, and resist the idea that a neighborhood’s history begins only when a large institution notices it.
The play’s bilingual form addresses a second kind of erasure. Hernández told American Theatre that audiences have different relationships to English and Spanish; a Latino audience cannot be assumed to know both languages, nor can an English-speaking audience be assumed to know neither. A play about migration that made every line equally effortless for everyone would smooth out one of its central experiences. Letting language carry different degrees of familiarity gives the street more than one public voice.
Broad Street also complicates the usual map of Latino America. The national story often moves between border states, New York and Miami, leaving a Rhode Island corridor looking peripheral. Martínez’s interviews and Hernández’s script insist otherwise. A bodega, a sidewalk and a college student’s encounter become evidence that communities were building institutions and exchanging knowledge in places the national imagination had not bothered to record.
A 2026 outdoor adaptation, La Broa’ en tu barrio, brought the story back into parks and public spaces, Martínez said. That later version does not replace the 2024 theater production; it shows the material’s capacity to travel back toward the neighborhoods that gave it life. The strongest claim of La Broa’ is that local memory belongs neither only in an archive nor only on a stage. It has to remain available to the people who made it.