Last Monday, I watched the riveting Cape Verde vs. Spain soccer match in a pub in central London as the World Cup debutantes shocked sports enthusiasts with a 0-0 draw. There, I saw fellow pub-goers move from having no idea what or where Cape Verde is, to becoming passionate fans.<\/p>\n
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<\/figure>\n<\/div>\nThat small pub crowd was a microcosm. <\/p>\n
The soccer world has Cape Verde fever this week. <\/p>\n
And, for good reason.<\/p>\n
The island nation located some 350 miles off the coast of West Africa\u2019s Senegal has barely more than a half-million residents. Until this week, all but the most diehard geography nerds would have been hard-pressed to find the ten Cape Verde islands on a map. Even journalists have gotten it wrong. I saw one Boston-based journalist claim Cape Verde is \u201cin South Africa,\u201d while a TV news anchor\u2019s map placed it on another continent entirely \u2014 in South America.<\/p>\n
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<\/figure>\n<\/div>\nNone of that surprises me. Even living in Rhode Island \u2014 the U.S. state with the largest per capita <\/em>population of Cape Verdeans \u2014 I am often greeted by confusion when I tell people that I conduct research with Cape Verdeans.<\/p>\n \u201cDo you mean Cape Cod?\u201d is a frequent response.<\/p>\n An Instagram post by a Cape Verdean friend last week seems to sum up what Cape Verdeans everywhere are now experiencing: <\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m never going to get over seeing the Cape Verde map on <\/p>\n everyone\u2019s TV screen!\u201d<\/p>\n The soccer world is especially enchanted by the team\u2019s until-recently-unknown goalkeeper nicknamed Vozinha. To the Spanish team\u2019s dismay, Vozinha heroically fended off seven serious would-be goals attempted by seven different fierce opponents in his country\u2019s first-ever World Cup game.<\/p>\n What a difference 36 hours makes. The morning after that achievement, Vozinha had gone from 50,000 to nine million Instagram followers. Make that 15.8 million<\/a> now.<\/p>\n Much has already been written by sports journalists about this charming, come-from-nowhere story. After all, the professional betting establishment had predicted that Spain had a 99% chance of beating Cape Verde in that game. Who doesn\u2019t love an underdog?<\/p>\n The Cape Verdean blogosphere was immediately filled with striking images and ecstatic messages. The one of Cape Verde as David and Spain as Goliath is probably my favorite.<\/p>\n Ever since it was announced that their national team had qualified for the World Cup, Cape Verdeans everywhere have talked of little else.<\/p>\n Cape Verdeans surely know what Nikki Giovanni meant when she once wrote: \u201cYou\u2019ve got to find a way to make people know you\u2019re there.\u201d<\/p>\n Until this week, every Cape Verdean I know in the U.S. has lamented feeling invisible. That invisibility is founded in a history that is, truly, unique. Their society was created on islands that were uninhabited by humans before Portuguese navigators discovered them in the 1450s. From there, the Portuguese set about settling the islands, with a mixture of Portuguese and other European adventurers, Jewish refugees fleeing the Portuguese and Spanish Inquisitions, and, increasingly, Africans kidnapped by a growing class of career slave traders. A volatile mix of peoples produced what historians consider the first truly \u201ccreole\u201d population of the modern world. The historian Tobias Green considers Cape Verde the place where \u201cwe\u201d became modern.<\/p>\n Yet, ironically, in the U.S. in particular, their uniqueness normally renders Cape Verdeans invisible. Typically, Cape Verdeans in the U.S.:<\/p>\n When these factors combine, they produce an identity that, for many Cape Verdeans, simply renders them hard to categorize \u2014 even \u201cillegible.\u201d<\/p>\n A Cape Verdean-American woman once recounted to me:<\/p>\n With my look, people always say: \u201cI\u2019ve seen you somewhere, I\u2019ve met you somewhere.\u201d <\/mark><\/p>\n I don\u2019t know what it is. When I go to Florida, people start speaking to me in Spanish \u2014 [to them] I <\/mark><\/p>\n look Spanish. When I went to Montreal, people started speaking to me in French. When I went to <\/mark><\/p>\n Tennessee, an African American gentleman who thought I was beautiful just said, \u201cWhat the heck<\/mark> <\/p>\n are you?\u201d<\/mark><\/p>\n \u201cWhat are you?\u201d is, indeed, a common question asked of many Cape Verdeans in the U.S., often accompanied by a look of genuine confusion.\u00a0 The title of an acclaimed film by Cape Verdean-American filmmaker-historian, Claire Andrade-Watkins, \u201cSome Kind of Funny Porto Rican?\u00a0A Cape Verdean American Story,\u201d speaks to many Cape Verdeans in the U.S. who are not easily categorized.<\/p>\n Taking such confused reactions in stride is part of what defines the daily experience of Cape Verdeans in the U.S.\u00a0That nonchalance is historically rooted.\u00a0Cape Verdeans delicately and, often, graciously balance multiple ethnic, racialized, and religious selves.\u00a0As such, as I suggest in the book I have just completed writing (Africa across the Seder Table: Conversations about Jewish Identity in Cape Verde and Its Diaspora<\/em>), Cape Verdeans offer a model by which others in the modern, globalized world might approach diversity.\u00a0Their seemingly obscure outpost of the Black Atlantic may represent, at once, the spectacular failures and inspiring promises of the modern condition \u2014 both the epitome and the promise of what happens to our species when difference<\/em> claims a key part of our identity.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, against all odds \u2014 and, literally, overnight \u2014 sports fans everywhere have heard of Cape Verde. And that\u2019s a lot of people. FIFA is projecting <\/a>that \u201capproximately 6 billion people<\/strong> will engage with the tournament in some form across traditional broadcast, streaming, digital platforms, and out-of-home viewing \u2014 a figure that would make it the single most-watched sporting event in the history of global media.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s ironic that Cape Verdeans have felt invisible for so long. In the 16th and 17th centuries, they were at the center of world trade. Tragically, that trade involved commerce in humans. For the first century-and-a-half of what became the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the Cape Verde islands stood at the crossroads of Africa, Europe, and the Americas. During that era, probably most kidnapped Africans passed through those islands before being forced into the treacherous Middle Passage. Then, France and the U.K. battled for domination of the ignominious role of trafficking in humans. But, beyond Cape Verdeans themselves, their position in that early history is now entirely forgotten.<\/p>\n After relinquishing their place in the slave trade, the islands were rediscovered by the global whaling industry. Starting in the late 18th century, Cape Verdean men eagerly volunteered as sailors for the whaling ships whose captains recruited cheap labor up and down the Atlantic. After two years at sea, these sailors could claim citizenship in the U.S., stepping onto land at the New England port where their ships docked.<\/p>\n From there, they began bringing over their families\u00a0\u2014 spreading, especially, across southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island. In the 19th century, Cape Verdean laborers picked the bulk of the cranberry crop growing on Cape Cod. The cranberry sauce that graces most Americans\u2019 Thanksgiving tables owes its life to Cape Verdean chain migration. <\/p>\n Today, the heart of the Cape Verdean community in the U.S. is still in New England. A Cape Verdean man living in Lisbon once told me: <\/p>\n \u201cBoston is basically a suburb of Cape Verde.\u201d<\/p>\n The islands that Portugal both colonized and impoverished have offered equal doses of charm and misery. So, as much as they love their homeland, Cape Verdeans think diasporically. Those islands in the Atlantic that might seem isolated are, for Cape Verdeans, anything but. Every Cape Verdean I know has relatives on at least three continents. <\/p>\n Online, Vozinha\u2019s Instagram motto for himself is: <\/p>\n \u201cNever forget who you are, and where you came from\u201d [my translation].<\/p>\n That life philosophy could stand in for much of the global diaspora of Cape Verdeans.<\/p>\n Consider this quintessential Cape Verdean diaspora story. Before their World Cup debut, the Cape Verde team played a \u201cfriendly\u201d game against Bermuda in Hartford, Connecticut to get some stress-free practice in. Some 10,000 diasporic Cape Verdeans from across New England showed up for that game.<\/p>\n No wonder brilliant Coach Bubista recruited his national soccer team globally. Fewer than half the current team was born in Cape Verde. Of the fourteen players from the diaspora, six are from the Netherlands (Rotterdam has a large Cape Verdean community), while another eight were born in the United States, Ireland, France and Portugal.<\/a> <\/p>\n Those fourteen players are part of a global diaspora that, by some accounts, is equivalent to up to twice the population of the islands. A new project <\/a>by the nation\u2019s National Statistics Institute <\/a>(funded by the World Bank) is finally mapping the global Cape Verde diaspora.<\/p>\n The takeaway lesson from the remarkable Group H games played so far in this season\u2019s World Cup?<\/p>\n \u201cPutting Cape Verde on the map\u201d means highlighting not just ten tiny islands in the Atlantic, but a big chunk of the world to which those islands are connected\u2014and, have been since the mid-15th century.<\/p>\n But, enough of me. I\u2019ll give the last word to a popular image I\u2019m seeing across the rapidly expanding Cape Verdean blogosphere:<\/p>\n \t\t\t\n\t\t<\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/almagottlieb.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/CV-Map-on-Field-TV-Screenshot.png\")
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<\/figure>\n<\/div>\nRelated<\/em><\/h3>\n<\/p>\n