A rare insight into the life of a Cape Verdean American, this memoir tells of an everyday woman's life of extraordinary measure—the small ways in which she contributed and inspired those around her. Belmira Nunes Lopes worked for equality, for the recognition of her culture, and fought a personal battle of identity. Composed from interviews with her niece, Belmira's story speaks of her upbringing in America without fully understanding her full ethnic and cultural background until adulthood, details how her family immigrated from Cape Verde and struggled to make a life in their new nation, and covers the impact she strove to have on the world during her long and unique life.

A rare insight into the life of a Cape Verdean American, this memoir tells of an everyday woman's life of extraordinary measure—the small ways in which she contributed and inspired those around her. Belmira Nunes Lopes worked for equality, for the recognition of her culture, and fought a personal battle of identity. Composed from interviews with her niece, Belmira's story speaks of her upbringing in America without fully understanding her full ethnic and cultural background until adulthood, details how her family immigrated from Cape Verde and struggled to make a life in their new nation, and covers the impact she strove to have on the world during her long and unique life.

Portuguese and Cape Verdean immigrants have had a significant presence in North America since the nineteenth century. Recently, Brazilians have also established vibrant communities in the U.S. This anthology brings together, for the first time in English, the writings of these diverse Portuguese-speaking, or "Luso-American" voices. Historically linked by language, colonial experience, and cultural influence, yet ethnically distinct, Luso-Americans have often been labeled an "invisible minority." This collection seeks to address this lacuna, with a broad mosaic of prose, poetry, essays, memoir, and other writings by more than fifty prominent literary figures--immigrants and their descendants, as well as exiles and sojourners. It is an unprecedented gathering of published, unpublished, forgotten, and translated writings by a transnational community that both defies the stereotypes of ethnic literature, and embodies the drama of the immigrant experience.

Arriving in New England first as crew members of whaling vessels, Afro-Portuguese immigrants from Cape Verde later came as permanent settlers and took work in the cranberry industry, on the docks, and as domestic workers. Marilyn Halter combines oral history with analyses of ships' records to chart the history and adaptation patterns of the Cape Verdean Americans. Though identifying themselves in ethnic terms, Cape Verdeans found that their African-European ancestry led their new society to view them as a racial group. Halter emphasizes racial and ethnic identity formation to show how Cape Verdeans set themselves apart from the African Americans while attempting to shrug off white society's exclusionary tactics. She also contrasts rural life on the bogs of Cape Cod with New Bedford’s urban community to reveal the ways immigrants established their own social and religious groups as they strove to maintain their Crioulo customs.

Charles Manuel “Sweet Daddy” Grace founded the United House of Prayer for All People in Wareham, Massachusetts, in 1919. This charismatic church has been regarded as one of the most extreme Pentecostal sects in the country. In addition to attention-getting maneuvers such as wearing purple suits with glitzy jewelry, purchasing high profile real estate, and conducting baptisms in city streets with a fire hose, the flamboyant Grace reputedly accepted massive donations from his poverty-stricken followers and used the money to live lavishly. It was assumed by many that Grace was the charismatic glue that held his church together, and that once he was gone the institution would disintegrate. Instead, following his 1960 death there was a period of confusion, restructuring, and streamlining. Today the House of Prayer remains an active church with a national membership in the tens of thousands. Daddy Grace: A Celebrity Preacher and His House of Prayer seriously examines the religious nature of the House of Prayer, the dimensions of Grace’s leadership strategies, and the connections between his often ostentatious acts and the intentional infrastructure of the House of Prayer. Furthermore, woven through the text are analyses of the race, class, and gender issues manifest in the House of Prayer structure under Grace’s aegis. Marie W. Dallam here offers both a religious history of the House of Prayer as an institution and an intellectual history of its colorful and enigmatic leader.

The essays assembled in Crossing Boundaries reflect the international dimensions, commonalities, and discontinuities in the histories of diasporan communities of colour. People of African descent in the New World (the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean) share a common set of experiences: domination and resistance, slavery and emancipation, the pursuit of freedom, and struggle against racism. No unitary explanation can capture the varied experiences of black people in diaspora. Knowledge of individual societies is illuminated by the study and comparison of other cultural histories. This volume, growing out of the Comparative History of Black People in Diaspora Symposium held at Michigan State University, elaborates the profound relationship between curriculum and pedagogy.Crossing Boundaries embraces the challenge to probe differences embedded in Black ethnicities and helps to discover and to weave into a new understanding the threads of experience, culture, and identity across diasporas. Contributors includ Thomas Holt, George Fredrickson, Jack P. Green, David Barry Gaspar, Earl Lewis, Elliott Skinner, Frederick Cooper, Allison Blakely, Kim Butler, and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn.

In this book, Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas explores how Puerto Ricans in Chicago construct and perform nationalism. Contrary to characterizations of nationalism as a primarily unifying force, Ramos-Zayas finds that it actually provides the vocabulary to highlight distinctions along class, gender, racial, and generational lines among Puerto Ricans, as well as between Puerto Ricans and other Latino, black, and white populations. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, Ramos-Zayas shows how the performance of Puerto Rican nationalism in Chicago serves as a critique of social inequality, colonialism, and imperialism, allowing barrio residents and others to challenge the notion that upward social mobility is equally available to all Americans—or all Puerto Ricans. Paradoxically, however, these activists' efforts also promote upward social mobility, overturning previous notions that resentment and marginalization are the main results of nationalist strategies. Ramos-Zayas's groundbreaking work allows her here to offer one of the most original and complex analyses of contemporary nationalism and Latino identity in the United States.

Cabo Verdean Women Writing Remembrance, Resistance, and Revolution: Kriolas Poderozas documents the work and stories told by Cabo Verdean women to refocus the narratives about Cabo Verde on Cabo Verdean women and their experiences. The contributors examine their own experiences, the history of Cabo Verde, and Cabo Verdean diaspora to highlight the commonalities that exist among all women of African descent, such as sexual and domestic violence and media objectification, as well as the different meanings these commonalities can hold in local contexts. Through exploring the literary and musical contributions of Cabo Verdean women, the Cabo Verdean state and its transnational relations, food and cooking traditions, migration and diaspora, and the oral histories of Cabo Verde, the contributors analyze themes of community, race, sexuality, migration, gender, and tradition.

Cape Verdean Americans are the only major group of Americans to have made the voyage from Africa to the United States voluntarily. Their homeland, a drought-stricken archipelago off the west coast of Africa, had long been colonized by the Portuguese. Arriving in New England first as crew members of whaling vessels, these Afro-Portuguese immigrants later came as permanent settlers in their own packet ships. They were employed in the cranberry industry, on the docks, and as domestic workers. Marilyn Halter combines oral history with analyses of ships' records to create a detailed picture of the history and adaptation patterns of the Cape Verdean Americans, who identified themselves in terms of ethnicity but whose mixed African-European ancestry led their new society to view them as a racial group. Halter emphasizes racial and ethnic identity formation among Cape Verdeans, who adjusted to their new life by setting themselves apart from the African American community while attempting to shrug off white society's exclusionary tactics. Ethnographic analysis of rural life on the bogs of Cape Cod is contrasted with the New Bedford, Massachusetts, urban community to show how the immigrants established their own social and religious groups and maintained their Crioulo customs.