What do all the things mentioned title have in common? You won’t know unless you attended Rutgers Ph.D. candidate Aminah Fernandes Pilgrim’s presentation on the historical narratives of Capeverdean American women. Whether it’s the oral tradition she draws on, anecdotal evidence, or written histories, Pilgrim seeks to show us just what kind of contributions the female immigrants and settlers of Capeverdean descent made to their communities and what she refers to in her abstract as “a unique approach to answering questions of identity construction and racial politics in this era.”
Located off the coast of Senegal, Cape Verde is actually made up of ten different islands with a population of mixed African and Portuguese descent. Discovered by the Portuguese in 1460, it was used as one of the first slave ports and finally became independent in 1975.
In the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy’s 17th Women’s Research Forum, sponsored by Women’s Studies, Africana Studies, the Trotter Institute, and the Office of the Chancellor, Africana Studies Professor Pilgrim told the tales of women’s experiences as they faced intragenerational and intracultural conflicts between the world they had left behind and the country they’d adopted. A self-defined “feminist historian,” Pilgrim sought to reveal the impact of machismo and patriarchal attitudes.
Pilgrim started off attempting to give the audience an idea of just how many Capeverdean immigrating settlers were female. In the between 1860-1864, 16.6% of were female, until 1864-1699, when it went up to 28.6%. Eventually, women made up roughly half of all Capeverdean immigrants to the United States.
Of Capeverdean descent herself, Pilgrim chose to focus on New England settlements where there existed large immigrant populations of Capeverdeans; specifically Onset, Harwich, and Falmouth. Since migration was, at first, heavily male, many wives were left behind, to be sent for, sometimes years later, once their husbands had become prosperous. Some came as “picture brides,” only seen by the men that chose them once they’d come ashore. Others ended up being left behind while their husbands remarried.
The study ran from 1901-1960, the years of Jim Crow laws that barred people of color from working certain jobs and promoted the doctrine of “separate but equal,” even though the treatment was anything but. Those coming to American shores usually went via “packet boat,” former whaling ships that had been adapted to transporting immigrants and mail.
The story of “A Man Named Seagull” was that of one enterprising single man living in a shanty. Seagull was so called because, like the bird, “he ate whatever he could find.” It was a tale that was by turns both amusing and sad to the listeners. The latter, because it indicated the level of poverty that many of the single men had to struggle through in order to achieve any means of surviving.
A “telephone piece” is the name of a cranberry bog, as well as another bit of history. Apparently, it is a little-known fact that many of the Capeverdeans who first came to the U.S. worked as pickers in the cranberry bogs, many of which were named by the workers in them. One woman, who had worked as a picker for years, named this one particular bog “the telephone piece” because it was shaped like one. She had become an expert in the cranberries and understood the science of the harvest.
“The dish” is another anecdote dating from the harvest-time tradition where men went out to kill and hunt to furnish the entire community with a meal. This way, everyone would have a chance to eat, including the poorest of them all.
Pilgrim tries to put a name to the faces of storytellers, in spite of research difficulties, like records told from the point of view of majority groups, nativism (biases against people born outside the country of the author), and anonymity in record-keeping. This is the first of five papers she hopes to publish. For more information about Cape Verde visit www.virtualcapeverde.net.