Will I find plátanos? Is usually the first questions I asked myself every time I have to move inside the United States? So far, I have been lucky! However, plátanos is not everything that Dominican immigrants might need to reach culturally appropriate food security. Not every immigrant and minority groups have access to culturally appropriate food or the markets to sell them if they are growing it. So, before my tenure in the Greater Providence concluded I worked on creating an inventory of ethnic markets, groceries, and bakeries serving the minorities and immigrants on RI.

You can find the inventory for the Greater Providence area here, the inventory by city here and the blog post about it here.

Disclaimer: These directories are not a fully comprehensive list of all ethnic markets, grocers, and bakeries of their areas, but it is a start. We hope to update this directory frequently and to continue to compile information about these ethnic markets to make available to our communities members. Please send us updates or missing markets information to vanessagarciapolanco@gmail.com. Thanks to Brown University and Michigan State University Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems Student for contributing to these projects. 

We also recognize the term ethnic could be diminishing, insulting and othering when talking about other foodways and cuisines. We only use as a way to identify and separate these grocery stores, corner stores, specialty stores run by a diverse group of immigrants and minorities. As other names such as bodegas prefer by the Caribbean and Latin American and international markets are limiting for the purpose of this project.