Interview with Carmen Boudier
IntervieweeInterview with
Carmen Boudier
(Jamaican, born 1945)
Date2001 February 18
Mediumdigitized audio cassette tape
DimensionsDuration (side 1): 46 Minutes, 18 Seconds
Duration (side 2): 21 Minutes, 19 Seconds
Duration (total runtime): 1 Hour, 7 Minutes, 37 Seconds
Duration (side 2): 21 Minutes, 19 Seconds
Duration (total runtime): 1 Hour, 7 Minutes, 37 Seconds
ClassificationsInformation Artifacts
Credit LineGift of the CHS Exhibitions Department
Description(a-d) Audio cassette tape of an interview with Carmen Boudier, who was interviewed by Fiona Vernal on February 15, 2001. (e-f) Two black and white portrait photographs of Carmen Boudier.
Topics dicussed include Boudier's childhood in Jamaica; coming to the United States at age 23 through the domestic labor program; leaving her contract because of illegal hiring-out and meeting a helpful family; getting a job as a nurse's assistant at Saint Mary Home in West Hartford and getting involved in union organizing in the healthcare industry; going to jail for what she believes in; citizenship and politics; settling in Hartford and Bloomfield; the West Indian Social Club; and women's roles in the Club and women becoming full members of the West Indian Social Club.
2013.26.24a-d consists of two sides, the tape, and a J-card.
2013.26.24e-f: photographs
Topics dicussed include Boudier's childhood in Jamaica; coming to the United States at age 23 through the domestic labor program; leaving her contract because of illegal hiring-out and meeting a helpful family; getting a job as a nurse's assistant at Saint Mary Home in West Hartford and getting involved in union organizing in the healthcare industry; going to jail for what she believes in; citizenship and politics; settling in Hartford and Bloomfield; the West Indian Social Club; and women's roles in the Club and women becoming full members of the West Indian Social Club.
2013.26.24a-d consists of two sides, the tape, and a J-card.
2013.26.24e-f: photographs
Object number2013.26.24a-f
NotesSubject Note: In 1999, the West Indian Social Club of Hartford and the West Indian Foundation asked the Connecticut Historical Society to join them in documenting the lives of the West Indian immigrants who first came to the Hartford area in the 1940s to work on local tobacco farms.
What began as a project designed to record the experiences of these early pioneers - mostly men from Jamaica - subsequently grew to include audio and videotaped interviews of men and women, elders and young people, longtime residents and more recent arrivals to the Greater Hartford area, both from Jamaica and the other English-speaking, independent countries in the Caribbean.
The exhibition explored a common thread that seems to link people’s individual stories: the challenge of putting down roots in a new place while maintaining ties with the people, history, and cultural heritage of their homelands in the West Indies.
The exhibition, "Finding a Place, Maintaining Ties: Greater Hartford’s West Indians," was on view at the Connecticut Historical Society from July 2, 2002 – August 31, 2003.
On View
Not on view
