On Between Race and Ethnicity

This is such an interesting book and I’m so glad that I discovered it. Here, Halter examines the case of an immigrant group that had been in the United States for as long as the “new” immigrants of the 1880s-1920s but had been effectively invisible. The reason for that is because Cape Verdeans are what Halter calls a “ethnic-racial” group. When they did appear on documents like censuses, they would generally be marked as either “black” or “Portuguese.” Other times, they might be marked as “Atlantic Islander” (along with people from the Azores and Madeira) or “African Portuguese” (combined). In the American Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, the author of the segment on Cape Verdeans made the reassuring remark that it is virtually impossible to quantify the number of Cape Verdeans that came to the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Well, luckily for us, Halter managed to pull it off. In producing this work, she examined hundreds of ship manifests traveling between Cape Verde and the United States, especially southeastern New England, and noted where Cape Verdeans came on board and where they disembarked. Most of the first Cape Verdeans in the United States had initially joined whaling crews based out of New Bedford. Additionally, they joined ships in the US’s African Squadron, which had the mission of policing the Atlantic and preventing the slave trade after its abolition by the US in the early 19th century. As both whaling and the need for patrolling African waters subsided, Cape Verdeans often bought these ships at a discount and turned them into packet fleets. As a result, Halter argues that Cape Verdeans were the only group of Africans in the nineteenth century that came to the United States voluntarily. When they settled in the United States, more than half of all Cape Verdeans settled in Providence and New Bedford. Others moved to other New England cities and a handful went to work in cranberry bogs, especially in Plymouth County, some of which came into Cape Verdean ownership.

Perhaps Halter’s most significant intervention is her wrangling with both race and ethnicity. The traditional view in American scholarship is that whites have “ethnicity,” while everyone else has “race.” While these two concepts can be conflated into being the same, the patterns of prejudice experienced by racial groups are distinct from ethnic groups—the Japanese, not Italians, were interned in the mid-20th century; Natives, not Dutchmen, were exterminated and/or placed in reservation; black people, not the Irish, were enslaved on plantations. However, the case of Cape Verdeans problematizes the status of “ethnicity” as a white phenomenon. Cape Verdeans immigrants are historically interesting because their status as mixed-race (Portuguese and African) people means that their classification depends on how a viewer sees them. Most Cape Verdeans saw themselves, above all, as Portuguese, but “white” Portuguese people did everything they could to distance themselves. At the same time, Cape Verdeans attempted to create the same distance between African Americans that the white Portuguese tried to create towards them. Black Americans often did not include Cape Verdeans in the same category, although white Americans might group the two together.

Although it seems obvious to us in the present that other “racial” groups also have ethnicities (Asians can be categorized into Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, etc., for instance), this is not ordinarily historicized very well, and this is what Marilyn Halter does best.