I haven’t heard a lot of negative things about the Cape Verdean community until recently. Perhaps this is because I am not Cape Verdean, and so when I hear about street violence, and Cape Verdeans are involved, I really would not know that the victims or perpetrators are Cape Verdean. I would attribute it to inner city violence. Plus part of this news site I feel is to highlight the positive aspects of the community. From an outsiders perspective when I think Cape Verdean, I think about the people I went to school with, and then community leaders like John Barros and Evandro Carvalho, and then the many leaders I have interviewed through the blog. But I did hear a story so interesting to me, as a Martial Artist and as a person watching shows like “The Iron Fist” that I felt it was worth sharing even though it isn’t positive.
A friend Cape Verdean man I worked with who moved away from Cape Verdeans to get away from them said to me, “You Cape Verdeans are crazy..” and then began listing many stories that are famous in the community where a store owner got shot over nothing or people murdered and murdered and murdered and get deported back to Cape Verde where they murdered a ridiculous amount because there was no punishment. His narrative made me value the importance of law in order, even in a system that is skewed. I had never heard so much violence, which he attributed to the American Gangster lifestyle and movies like Scarface and kids trying to live out that lifestyle and succeeding, until they die, just like the movie. It sounded like stability is a little more important than equality. That you need stability before you can start thinking about whether the system is equal for everyone.
I wondered at the fact that I had never heard ANY of these stories, mainly because it was not in my community, so I just never paid attention. But I thought back to interviewing some old generation people at the Onset Cape Verdean festival and recalling how they mentioned that when they heard about the newer generation of Cape Verdeans that they heard a lot of negative things.
But one story in particular stood out. It was about a man who called himself the Devil….
