What Are We?

By The Harbor February 21, 2026

We’re Cape Verdean

Your father tells you where you come from. Cape Verde. He says it with certainty because his father said it the same way. You grow up knowing the food, the music, the language. You check a box on a form and move on with your life. Cape Verdean. That’s what you are.1

But there’s a question underneath that answer. One your father never asked — not because he was hiding something, but because nobody told him to ask it.

  • Author’s account. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

    • The Box

    The U.S. Census didn’t have a box for Cape Verdean. It still doesn’t. So your family checked something. Black. White. Portuguese. Other. Depending on the decade, depending on the town, depending on who was asking. Each generation picked the box that caused the least trouble.1

    The box wasn’t identity. It was survival.

  • Kurimeo Ahau, A System of Colors // DO YOUR GENEALOGY TO KNOW WHO YOU ARE. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

    • NFL Roster

    You’re up at 2 AM watching a man on YouTube turn the pages of a colonial-era ledger. Name after name after name. It looks like an NFL roster — page after page of people who clearly weren’t what the record says they were. Then you see a name you recognize. Your mother’s last name, staring back from a document written centuries ago.1

    The record doesn’t say Cape Verdean. It doesn’t say African. It says Indian.

  • Author’s account. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

    • The Half-Story

    Your dad wasn’t wrong. Cape Verde is real. The culture is real. The islands are real. But Cape Verde was a processing center — a place where people were taken to, not where they were originally from. He gave you the hub. Nobody gave him the spokes.1

    The question isn’t whether you’re Cape Verdean. The question is what Cape Verdean actually means.

  • Kurimeo Ahau, Pt. 18 — Nations of The World // Cape Verdeans / American Indians / Sephardic / Portuguese / Whalers. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

    • The DNA Pitch

    They’ll sell you the answer for $59.99. Spit in a tube and know your tribe. The test comes back with percentages — 23% this, 14% that — a pie chart of identity. Clean. Clinical. Wrong in every way that matters.1

    DNA tells you what populations your markers correlate with. It doesn’t tell you what happened. It doesn’t tell you who was taken, who was relabeled, or why the records say one thing and the blood says another.

  • Kurimeo Ahau, SPIT HERE AND KNOW YOUR TRIBE FOR $59.99. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

    • The Definition Nobody Reads

    Gina E. Sanchez defines Cape Verdean Americans as “persons of Portuguese descent and American Indian descent.” Not African descent. Portuguese and American Indian.1

    Seventy percent of the Mashantucket Pequot tribal nation is Cape Verdean mixed with Native American heritage.2 These families didn’t discover foreign ancestry. They uncovered what was taken from them.

    This Book

    This book follows the trail backward. From the identity your family gave you, through the islands, through the processing center, through the wars and the laws and the relabeling — all the way to the people who were taken.

    It’s written to the person you were before you found that video at 2 AM. The person your dad was. The person who checked a box and kept moving.

    Read it in order. The answer is at the end, but only if you walk the whole road.

    1. Gina E. Sanchez, “The Politics of Cape Verdean American Identity.” ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

    2. Mashantucket Pequot tribal enrollment documentation. ↩

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