Cape Verdean Americans

CAPE VERDEAN AMERICANS. Hailing from the Cape Verde Islands located off the west coast of Senegal, Africa, Cape Verdean Americans hold a unique place in the nation’s immigrant mosaic, representing the first voluntary mass migration from Africa to the United States in American history. Most historians agree that the islands were uninhabited until the mid-fifteenth century when Portuguese explorers landed there. Almost from the very beginning of settlement, the Portuguese brought West African slaves to labor on sugar and cotton plantations, but the arid climate of these Sahelian islands prevented truly successful commercial cultivation of the land. What soon became more important to the Portuguese than agricultural production was the strategic location of the archipelago as a crossroads in the expanding slave trade. Situated near the Guinea coast and on the trade winds route to Brazil, the islands served as an entrepôt for the distribution of goods, for supplying foreign vessels with needed supplies and salt, and for transporting slaves to the New World.

As these exchanges were taking place, the sparse Portuguese population intermingled with the greater numbers of West Africans to produce a rich and distinctive society and culture. In this mesh of African ancestry, Catholicism, and Western presence, it has not always been possible to discern whether the European or the African influence predominates. Rather the interweaving has been so complete that it is most appropriate to speak of the evolution of a separate culture with its own distinctive customs, folklore, cuisine, music, literature and finally, language of its own, Cape Verdean Kriolu.

Always plagued by scanty and erratic rainfall, the effects of the dry climate in the Cape Verde Islands was exacerbated by colonial mismanagement of the land, so that by the end of the eighteenth century, the people of the islands were experiencing severe and recurrent drought with its resulting famine and high mortality. Unable to escape overland to more favorable conditions, young Cape Verdean men seized the chance to leave home in search of a better life as crew aboard the United States whaling ships that were beginning to arrive at the archipelago's protected harbors. By the late nineteenth century, some of these recruits began to settle in southern New England, particularly in and around the ports of New Bedford, Massachusetts, and Providence, Rhode Island. They were able to find jobs in maritime-related occupations and fill the demand for workers on the cranberry bogs and in the burgeoning textile industry. Women and children also began to arrive in significant numbers forming families that changed the pattern from a sojourner to a settler population. Thus began the establishment of a Cape Verdean American community that stands at several hundred thousand today.

Although initially Cape Verdean immigrants were not known for their labor activism, by the early 1930s, like so many other American workers, dissatisfaction with low wages and the abysmal job conditions reached such levels that many joined the rank and file in both agricultural and maritime organizing. Contrary to the popular images of local Yankee families embarking on a Sunday’s outing of cranberry picking, the cranberry industry early began to require a large and intensive agricultural work force, particularly during the autumn cranberry harvest. The Italians, Poles, and Finns all provided the necessary labor in turn, but by 1910, the Cape Verdean immigrant completely dominated the harvest.

The earliest account of labor unrest among Cape Verdean settlers dates to 1900, when a riot at a cranberry bog occurred. By 1933, however, partly due to the organizing efforts of the local Left, 1500 cranberry pickers from forty bogs went on strike demanding a rise in wages, guaranteed employment until the end of the season and recognition of their right to union representation. The labor dispute escalated, with charges of “outside agitators,” until violence erupted. Although strike efforts did not result in a general pay increase or unionization, in some cases settlements were made for higher wages on individual bogs. More importantly, this was the first strike by agricultural workers in the history of Massachusetts, as well as the only labor dispute that involved primarily Cape Verdean immigrants. Subsequently a number of Cape Verdeans in New Bedford and elsewhere joined or supported the Communist Party. A larger number reportedly joined the Left-led International Workers Order. Also in 1933, the dockworkers of Providence organized the first black labor union in New England, the International Longshoremen’s Association, Local 1329 comprised largely of Cape Verdean membership. The job of loading and unloading was physically demanding and, especially before unionization, was completely lacking in occupational safety standards. As a result, casualties were frequent. Three years after the longshoremen got organized, the New Bedford dockworkers also unionized.

Left activity among Cape Verdeans resurfaced in the late 1960s and early 1970s in two areas of political life, the New Bedford chapter of the Black Panther Party and the American Support committee of the PAIGC, the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. In the revolutionary struggle for black liberation, primarily young Cape Verdean community leaders joined other members of the African American population in New Bedford to form the Black Panthers. Urban riots broke out, resulting in the wounding of several Panthers and the death of Lester Lima, a young Cape Verdean man. Two other Cape Verdeans, brothers Parky and Ross Grace, were charged with murder and imprisoned. During the early 1980s a movement to free Parky Grace—who maintained his militancy and Left politics during his years of incarceration—was initiated on grounds that he had been framed. In 1984 the group succeeded in obtaining Grace’s release.

In the 1950s, under the leadership of the revolutionary Amílcar Cabral, the Cape Verde Islands and Guinea-Bissau together created a national independence movement, including a protracted armed struggle to overthrow Portuguese rule. While Cape Verdean American support for the PAIGC was never widespread, a small group of political sympathizers formed in New England to disseminate information and raise funds for the independence movement. The identification with Cabral’s revolutionary ideology and with African liberation movements represented a departure from the primarily Portuguese identification that had historically characterized much of the first wave of Cape Verdean immigrants. Since the successful revolution and the establishment of the Republic of Cape Verde, Cape Verdean Independence Day, 5 July 1975, has been celebrated in this country with well-attended parades, speeches, and cultural events. Cape Verdean communities in the United States have continued to grow since 2000, the Boston-area population by nearly 60 percent.

Cabral, Amílcar. Unity and Struggle. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979.

Halter, Marilyn. Between Race and Ethnicity: Cape Verdean Immigrants, 1860–1965. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Halter, Marilyn. “Diasporic Generations: Distinctions of Race, Nationality and Identity in the Cape Verdean Community, Past and Present.” in Community, Culture and the Makings of Identity: Portuguese-Americans along the Eastern Seaboard, eds. Kimberly DaCosta Holton & Andrea Klimt. Dartmouth, Massachusetts: Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture, 2009: 525-55.