Road Trip USA: It’s a small world in Rhode Island

At just a hair over 1,200 square miles — 37 wide, 48 long and 14% underwater — Rhode Island is less than half the size of the county I grew up in in central Nebraska. By national standards, it is tiny. By the standards of a rural Nebraskan, it is the daily commute, the distance between neighbors, the stretch to the nearest gas station. To Carlos Garcia-Quijano, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Rhode Island, born and raised in Puerto Rico, it’s the closest he’s come to his homeland since moving to the mainland.

“I grew up in an island environment, and an island society where everybody knows one another. The way things work socially and politically here, good and bad, is the most like Puerto Rico I’ve experienced,” he tells me, reclining behind his desk, framed by anthropological readers and popular titles like One Hundred Years of Solitude and Luis Sepulvida’s The Old Man Who Read Love Stories. Built like a swimmer, he’s wearing a dirt-brown T-shirt with a puma on the front and speaks with a thick Latino accent. “Here in Rhode Island, just like in Puerto Rico, almost anybody you meet, you know their cousin, and not a distant cousin — their first cousin.”

It’s our fifth day in Rhode Island, our last, and I’ve tracked down the professor at URI’s flagship campus in Kingston. Along with a handful of his colleagues, Garcia-Quijano recently co-authored a paper in the journal Science related to sustainability and human well-being, a topic that — so far as I could tell from our campground at Fishermen’s Memorial State Park in Narragansett, the Atlantic within earshot, salt in the air — seemed relevant to the Ocean State. His research felt immediate, palpable — urgent, given reports of the hottest summer on record, the continual onslaught of global warming and its side effects. But the homeland is always on his mind — his family, and the small-scale fishermen whose working knowledge he’s made the focal point of his research — and it’s difficult not to compare his past to his present.

“I always pictured Rhode Island as a rural, coastal place with fisheries. But when I came here, of course, I found that gentrification and tourism are also big factors. In Narragansett, you probably saw it right away. Million-dollar mansions are popping up everywhere that fishing villages used to be,” he says. “One of the things I do when I’m teaching my class and giving talks to people around here is try to call attention to what you lose when you lose these long-standing communities built on solidarity with the environment and with each other.”

A few days prior, my fiancée Mel and I drove across Narragansett Bay to walk the Cliffs at Newport — the literal opposite of disaster tourism. As Garcia-Quijano talks, I picture the scene again. To the east, an exquisite view of Easton Bay, of the wind whisking chop across the blue-green waters, the bell tower at St. George’s Episcopal boarding school in Middletown cresting above the trees. To the west, the Newport Mansions, one after another after another, constructed in the Gilded Age by America’s industrial titans, each of them individually named: the Breakers, Chateau-sur-Mer, the Elms, Miramar, Rosecliff, Kingscote and more. A gaggle of English schoolboys wielding croquet mallets would not have seemed out of place. Downtown Abbey’s moody theme song scored our evening, and tourists up and down the walk — deemed a National Recreation Trail in 1975 — staged photos in the mansions’ sprawling green yards, pinkies out, noses upturned, all of them magnates for a minute or two.

I admit at no point during our stroll on the cliffs — at no point during our entire time in Rhode Island — did we consider, as Garcia-Quijano suggests, who or what may have been displaced by the apparent wealth of these coastal communities. Though Rhode Island is only the 17th wealthiest state in the country, Narragansett Bay alone boasts 400 miles of coastline, showcasing its richest citizens perhaps more than any other. But like most tourists, our first reaction to the mansions was one of awe, completely overwhelmed by the scale of it all. The Newport mansions couldn’t reflect more precisely the opulence of the era.

Since earning his PhD at the University of Georgia in 2006, Garcia-Quijano has steered his career toward the intersection of anthropology and ecology, toward what he and his colleagues in the field call “local ecological knowledge.” At the moment, he’s working to understand the ways in which said knowledge impacts the well-being of the culture surrounding it. How does first-hand knowledge of the migration of snapper or grouper, for example, affect the well-being of Puerto Rican fishermen? In Rhode Island, how does the everyday haul of Atlantic lobster, or channeled whelk, alter not just the economic condition of the community, but its overall happiness?

For Garcia-Quijano, the comparisons between his new home and his old don’t end with his research topics. Though he works in Kingston, he lives in Providence, the capital city, “one of the most Latino cities I’ve lived in,” he says, “so I feel right at home.” Indeed, Providence is nearly 40% Hispanic or Latino. Overall, roughly 30% of the population is foreign-born, and combined with — or perhaps because of — a handful of colleges in the city, including Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence feels cosmopolitan beyond its population of just 180,000.

After gawking at the opulence of the Newport mansions, Mel and I spent the next two days touring Providence. On the first morning, thanks to the generosity of the city’s top-notch visitor’s bureau, we enjoyed a complimentary cruise up and down the Providence River, hosted by the Providence River Boat Company and helmed by Captain Tom McGinn, an easygoing, big-bearded history buff with a knack for telling stories. We boarded at the Hot Club, a staple in the downtown bar scene and a filming location for the 1998 comedy classic There’s Something About Mary.

We shared the boat’s open deck with a group of German journalists, everyone swapping suggestions for the rest of their Rhode Island adventure. As Captain Tom narrated, we passed through the Fox Point Hurricane Barrier, a $14 million dollar collection of earthen dikes and massive vehicular gates built in the 1960s to safeguard downtown Providence from the kind of damage it saw following the Great New England Hurricane of 1938, which completely submerged the city. In the other direction, we motored beneath the Crawford Street Bridge and past dozens of empty metal cages later to be filled with logs and set ablaze as part of WaterFire Providence, the city’s widely praised art installation. The boat turned around in Waterplace Park, where picnickers camped out on the concrete steps of the amphitheater and businessmen and women crossed back and forth over Venetian-style footbridges.

After the 45-minute tour, we walked through the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, a fascinating exhibit by fashion designer Todd Oldham on display, and then on to the Capitol Building, where we giddily climbed the narrow, winding steps of the State Library.

But thinking back on it in now in Garcia-Quijano’s office, it’s hard not to think about the development of Rhode Island and its coastal cities within this framework. Who populated the banks of the Providence River before they were stabilized and bridged over, before motorized riverboats ran between them? First it was the Narragansett Tribe, and after colonization, small-scale fishermen and other maritime trades, eventually full-scale industry. Today, we call that evolution “progress,” but that is only half the story, an economic smokescreen veiling another half of the equation.

It is not a situation unique to Rhode Island or to Puerto Rico. Development and gentrification are happening all around us, all the time. But Garcia-Quijano’s questions are less important, surely, for questioning the past than for planning the future, and as my fiancée and I continue to travel the country, one state at a time, it is something we pay attention to more and more: Who is most connected here, and what is lost when that connection to place is severed? Much like travel itself, Garcia-Quijano’s research reminds us there is always another side to the story, another layer to peel back. Development never airs in black and white.

“I think there’s the geographic home, what social scientists call placed-based community, but there’s also a relationship home, what social scientists call a network-based community. A lot of my work is about when both the place and the networks are disarticulated by larger processes like gentrification, standardization of the workforce and the streamlining of economic activities,” he says. “When you lose that, a lot of well-being is lost. And this is very hard to engineer. It happens on its own.”

He reminds us, too, that money isn’t everything, that a mansion on the cliffs doesn’t necessarily make a home. As we pull our cramped 16-foot travel trailer away from Fishermen’s Memorial State Park and head to Massachusetts, we hold the idea tight.

Previously in this series:

Road trip USA: Don’t forget Delaware!

Road Trip USA: When bad things happen on good trips

Road Trip USA: Pepperoni rolls, Google Maps mishaps in W.Va.

Road Trip USA: A walk on the wild side in Asheville, N.C.

Road Trip USA: In Savannah, heritage comes in many flavors

Road Trip USA: Seaside camping in Texas by the glow of the refineries

Road Trip USA: Rugged landscape, reclusive author enliven Arizona stop