Kimberly DaCosta Holton recognized for her teaching and scholarship with Hosford Scholarship
Growing up in Wilmington, Delaware, Professor Kimberly DaCosta Holton had the good fortune of traveling to a Portuguese-speaking country each summer – conveniently only six hours north on Interstate 95, in a small town in Rhode Island.
Holton’s maternal grandparents – one of whom had been born in Rio de Janiero, the other whose family had emigrated from the Azores – were the epicenter of Holton’s world growing up, and they lived in one of the East Coast’s largest Portuguese enclaves: East Providence, Rhode Island.
“My mom grew up there. When we’d go, it was almost like going to a foreign country,” Holton says. “My grandparents and their neighbors spoke Portuguese, no English at all. The food, music, language, it all lasted into second and third generation, and it left an indelible mark on me.”
Holton would nurture her cultural identity and turn it into a career, becoming a professor of Lusophone culture first at Wesleyan University, and then at Rutgers-Newark in 2000, where she took the fledgling Spanish and Portuguese Studies Department and turned it into a vibrant, visible entity with deep ties to the Portuguese communities of Newark and northern New Jersey.
For her outstanding teaching, scholarship and program-development work over the last decade-plus, she recently was awarded the prestigious David Hosford Scholarship for 2012-’13.
The Hosford Scholarship was established in 2004 in recognition of David Hosford, a former Rutgers-Newark Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean deeply committed to academic excellence. NCAS faculty who exemplify the Hosford legacy are chosen annually, serve for one year, receive a research stipend and can devote additional time to scholarship.
Like all Hosford scholars, Holton recently presented a major address on her work to the campus community.
“This honor came as a complete surprise and means a tremendous amount,” says Holton, “in part because I knew David before he retired. It also gives me a chance to return to a topic I’ve had on the back burner for many years – a musical form called Fado – and conceptualize a book-length project about its place in the Portuguese diaspora.”
Holton earned her B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in performance studies from Northwestern University. She studied German in middle- and high-school and took Spanish and Portuguese in college. She first visited Portugal at age 19 and fell in love with it and after graduation returned for three years to teach English, study Portuguese intensively, and work at a theater company in Lisbon.
She came stateside to do her graduate work, focusing on ethnography and “expressive cultures,” or performance forms, in the Portuguese and Brazilian world.
“Performance can be broadly defined in this interdisciplinary field: fan rituals at sporting events, religion, theater, music,” says Holton. “But the holy trinity of ethnography is food, music and language, along with religion. My interest spans all of these, and is closely tied to ethnomusicology, only broader. I tend to focus especially on language, music and theater.”
Her first book looked at ranchos folclóricos, groups of amateur musicians and dancers who perform turn-of-the-century popular tradition and have acted as cultural barometers of change through Portugal’s shift from dictatorship to democracy to EEC member. These groups, once aligned with the dictatorship, have remained popular in Portugal’s post-authoritarian state, especially in emigrant and diasporic communities.
At first focused solely on Portugal, Holton expanded her book to include folklore performers in northern New Jersey, including Newark, Elizabeth, Kearny, Harrison, North Arlington, Union and Perth Amboy. Those communities, along with her Lusaphone students, have been fortuitous for Holton, as publishers look for multi-sighted approaches to ethnographic studies.
“It’s serendipitous that I ended up at Rutgers-Newark. My students and all of these folks have been incredibly fertile ground for my research, and I am grateful for their involvement,” says Holton. “These are people from Lusaphone countries around the world who have truly inspired my work.”
With this in mind, Holton started the Ironbound Oral History Project in 2000 as a way to train her students in doing ethnographic interviews. The subjects are older Lusophone folks from the Ironbound section of Newark, many of whom are monolingual. The project boasts 300 interviews at the moment, some of them of publishable quality. Holton hopes to one day make them available to the public for scholarly research.
“There’s actually a grad student from the MFA program at the University of Iowa who wants to mine the interviews,” says Holton. “He’s writing a novel about the Ironbound Portuguese community."