They call it La Broa’. You will not find that name on any street sign, but turn onto lower Broad Street in South Providence and the red, white and blue stripe painted down the centre of the road tells you exactly where you are. Those are the colours of the Dominican flag. From the bodegas to the chimi trucks to the bachata spilling out of a barbershop, this stretch of Rhode Island has been the heart of the Dominicans in Providence, Rhode Island, for more than half a century.
It began with one couple, one store, and a back room where strangers off the bus from New York could speak Spanish and find a job.
Broad Street and South Providence: The Place
Broad Street runs south from downtown Providence through Upper and Lower South Providence toward the gates of Roger Williams Park. It is the commercial spine of a working-class district that also takes in Elmwood and the West End, neighbourhoods of triple-decker frame houses and brick storefronts.
The corridor sits hard against Interstate 95, which slices through the South Side. For generations of new arrivals this was where the cheap rent and the factory jobs were. Today the locals simply call the street La Broa’, and the businesses along it lean overwhelmingly Dominican.
How Broad Street Became Dominican
Before the Dominicans
South Providence was not always Latino. In the first half of the twentieth century lower Broad Street served large Jewish and Irish communities, with synagogues, kosher butchers and Catholic parishes lining the South Side.
As those families moved out to the suburbs after the Second World War, the storefronts emptied and the rents fell. That decline is exactly what opened the door for the people who came next.
The Dominicans Arrive
The story has a beginning you can point to. In the 1960s a Dominican woman named Josefina Rosario, known to everyone as Doña Fefa, arrived in Providence from New York City with her husband Tony. They are remembered as the first Dominican couple to settle in Rhode Island.
At 1232 Broad Street they opened Fefa’s Market, the first Dominican-owned bodega in the state. Doña Fefa stocked the foods her countrymen missed: plátanos, yuca, cilantro, and coffee, alongside Dominican newspapers shipped up from New York.
The store became far more than a grocery. Doña Fefa added a small kitchen and counter at the back, and the place turned into the first central gathering point for Hispanics in the city. New arrivals came to speak Spanish, play dominoes, listen to merengue, and ask for help.
She told them where City Hall was and where the employment office sat. Her bilingual daughters translated documents. The Rosarios even housed Dominican newcomers until they found work and a place to live. She is remembered today as the mother of Rhode Island’s Latino community, because she built the thing the rest grew out of.
What pulled thousands more behind that first couple was work. Providence had been the costume jewellery capital of the world, and through the 1970s its jewellery and textile mills were hungry for labour.
By one account jobs were so plentiful that factory owners went out into the streets looking for workers. Dominicans, many of them stepping off buses from New York’s Washington Heights, found steady wages on the bench lines. The same chain migration that built the great Dominican enclave uptown in Manhattan reached north into New England, and you can read that fuller story in our piece on the Dominicans in Washington Heights, Manhattan.
Broad Street at Its Peak
By the 1970s more Dominican bodegas and small businesses had sprung up along La Broa’. Through the 1980s and 1990s the growth was explosive. Rhode Island’s Hispanic population grew by 132 percent between 1980 and 1990, then by another 98.5 percent over the following decade.
Providence stayed the city of choice because it was where the first families had settled, and chain migration did the rest. Each arrival sponsored the next: a cousin, a neighbour from back home, a sister with three children.
Daily life organised itself around the corridor. Broad Street, Elmwood Avenue and Cranston Street filled with bodegas, restaurants and beauty salons, and the smell of mangú in the morning and sancocho on a Sunday became part of the neighbourhood’s character.
Other Latino communities settling in industrial New England towns followed a parallel arc. The Dominican mill story in nearby Massachusetts, told in our piece on the Dominicans in Lawrence, Massachusetts, rhymes closely with what happened along Broad Street.
The Change
The change here was not decline but consolidation. As the jewellery factories shrank in the 1990s and 2000s, the community that the factories had drawn did not leave. It put down roots in business and in politics instead.
The lower end of Broad Street, once home to Jewish and Irish families, became known informally as the Latino Cultural Corridor. The transformation was gradual, generational, and by the 2000s it was complete.
The Landmarks of Dominican Broad Street
Fefa’s Market, 1232 Broad Street. The origin point. Opened in the 1960s by Doña Fefa and Tony Rosario as the first Dominican bodega in Rhode Island, it doubled as a translation office, a job centre and a living room for the whole community. The market is gone, but its place in the story is permanent.
La Gran Parada, 937 Broad Street. A long-running Dominican restaurant where the menu reads like a Sunday table back home: mofongo, sancocho, and steak. It is one of the spots that has kept the corridor’s kitchens Dominican for decades.
Saboriza, 933 Broad Street. A Dominican and Latin eatery on the same block, part of the dense run of restaurants and counters that make lower Broad Street a destination for Dominican food in New England.
Nuñez Fruit Market, 1437 Broad Street. One of the bodegas and produce markets that descend directly from Fefa’s model: a neighbourhood store stocking the plantains, yuca and tropical produce a Dominican kitchen needs.
The painted flag stripe on Broad Street. The red, white and blue line running down the middle of La Broa’ is not decoration. It marks the route of the annual Dominican parade, and it tells anyone driving through whose neighbourhood this is.
Roger Williams Park, Temple to Music. At the southern end of Broad Street, the park’s Temple to Music hosts the Dominican Festival of Rhode Island each August, the cultural anchor of the community’s calendar.
Quisqueya in Action. The non-profit that organises the Dominican Parade and Festival, dedicated to preserving Dominican traditions in Rhode Island. By 2024 the parade and festival had reached its 38th year, counted among the most important Hispanic events in New England, with the parade stepping off at Thurbers Avenue and Broad Street.
Where the Broad Street Dominicans Came From
Most Dominican immigration to the United States before the early 2000s flowed from two areas: the Cibao region in the north of the country, including the cities of Santiago and Salcedo, and La Capital, the area around Santo Domingo.
Providence drew from that same well. Families from the Cibao valley and from Santo Domingo carried their food, their music and their saints north, first to New York and then on to Rhode Island.
If your own family passed through the island on the way to the South Side, tracing the town, the province and the journey is exactly what Atlas of Home was built to help you do.
Broad Street Today
Today the Dominicans are the largest Latino group in Rhode Island, and they are the largest single Hispanic community in Providence. The city’s Dominican community numbers roughly 25,000, about half of all Hispanics in Providence, and ranks as the fifth-largest Dominican community in the United States.
As of the 2020 census, around 45 percent of Providence residents identified as Hispanic, concentrated most heavily in Elmwood, the West End, and Upper and Lower South Providence. Puerto Ricans, Guatemalans and Colombians live alongside them, but the Dominican stamp on Broad Street is unmistakable.
The second generation has moved from the bench lines into city government, the schools, and the storefronts their parents opened. Juan Pichardo, who won his seat in 2002, became the first Dominican-American elected to a state senate anywhere in the United States. In 2010 Angel Taveras, the son of Dominican immigrants who grew up on the South Side, was elected the first Latino mayor of Providence.
This is one of several immigrant stories layered along these same streets. Federal Hill carries the memory of the Italians in Federal Hill, Providence, and across town Fox Point holds the legacy of the Cape Verdeans in Fox Point, Providence. The Dominican chapter is the one still being written, in a city where the South Side speaks Spanish and the flag is painted on the road.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Dominicans settle in Providence, Rhode Island?
Dominicans began settling in Providence in the 1960s and 1970s, drawn by abundant jobs in the city’s jewellery and textile mills when Providence was the costume jewellery capital of the world. Many came by way of New York City, following the first Dominican family, Doña Fefa and Tony Rosario, who opened Fefa’s Market on Broad Street. Cheap housing in South Providence and chain migration from earlier arrivals did the rest.
Is Broad Street in Providence still Dominican today?
Yes. Broad Street, known locally as La Broa’, remains the commercial and cultural heart of the Dominicans in Providence, Rhode Island, lined with bodegas, restaurants and salons. A red, white and blue stripe in the colours of the Dominican flag is painted down the middle of the road, and Dominicans are now the largest Latino group in the state.
What are the most famous Dominican landmarks on Broad Street?
The original site of Fefa’s Market at 1232 Broad Street is the symbolic birthplace of the community. Long-running restaurants such as La Gran Parada at 937 Broad Street serve mofongo and sancocho, and the annual Dominican Parade and Festival, organised by Quisqueya in Action, runs along the street to Roger Williams Park each August.
Where in the Dominican Republic did Providence’s Dominicans come from?
Most came from the Cibao region in the north of the country, including the cities of Santiago and Salcedo, and from La Capital, the area around Santo Domingo. These were the same regions that fed the larger Dominican migration to New York before families moved north to Rhode Island.
When did Dominicans first arrive in Providence?
The first Dominican couple, Josefina Rosario, known as Doña Fefa, and her husband Tony, arrived from New York City in the 1960s and opened the first Dominican bodega on Broad Street. Larger numbers followed through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s as factory work pulled thousands of Dominicans into South Providence.
If your family’s story passed through Broad Street, or any of the places the Dominicans made home, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a town in the Cibao or a barrio in Santo Domingo, to the South Side of Providence, to wherever you are now. Explore your story →
Sources: Providence, Rhode Island (Wikipedia) and Juan Pichardo (Wikipedia).