Immigrants in need

Boston's Cape Verdean community wants social services, not deportation sweeps

by Sarah McNaught

CITYSCAPE

Francisco Marques turned 20 on March 16, but he wonders whether it will be the last birthday he spends with his family. On March 22, he went before a judge to determine whether he is to be deported back to his native Cape Verde, an economically depressed group of islands off the coast of Africa, which he left for Dorchester in 1994. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) Court judge Eliza Klein ruled that Marques could stay in the US, but the INS has 30 days to appeal that decision.

Marques was one of 18 Cape Verdean men targeted in a pre-dawn sweep orchestrated in January by the Boston Police's Youth Violence Strike Force and the INS. The police say the immigrants arrested were "aggravated felons" and that deporting them would help stem a wave of crime and violence that has engulfed Boston's Cape Verdean community since July 1996.

But Dorchester community organizers and other critics counter that such sweeps are not the way to restore peace. Many of the Cape Verdeans picked up were back on the streets, awaiting appeal, just days later. Others seem to have been wrongly targeted; one turned out to be a US citizen. And as for Marques, police questioned in preliminary hearings could not tie him to any gang-related violence. His criminal record is limited to a two-year-old shoplifting conviction.

There's no doubt that troublemakers are out there: in a single three-month period last year, police recorded 75 shootings believed to be related to Cape Verdean gang activity. According to police, the spate of violence was spurred by the 1996 murder of Ediberto Casildo, a gang member who was fatally stabbed on George Street in Dorchester. Since the killing, infighting among Cape Verdean youth has escalated. Despite meetings held in December between gang members, law-enforcement officials, and church and community leaders, the shootings, break-ins, and assaults continue -- and this at a time when Boston is enjoying national attention for its decrease in gang-related and other violent crime.

Yet community advocates say Cape Verdeans have been neglected when it comes to the social services that reduce and prevent crime. Compared to other immigrant groups that have settled in Boston, Cape Verdeans have few youth-outreach organizations, English classes, legal-assistance programs, and other services in their own community. Consequently, Cape Verdean parents struggle to adjust to unfamiliar cultural values -- and to control their children in the face of child-protection laws that they believe undermine parental discipline. The city has just hired its first Cape Verdean street worker, and it is hoped that the Office of New Bostonians, a four-month-old city agency that will provide outreach to all of Greater Boston's immigrant groups, can help. Still, many say these are token efforts and not enough.

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The people of Cape Verde, a former Portuguese colony, have been immigrating to the US since before the Civil War. According to a Massachusetts Department of Public Health report released in May 1998, 400,000 Cape Verdeans currently live in Massachusetts -- primarily in Boston, New Bedford, and Brockton and on Cape Cod.

"These are hard-working people who barely speak the language and believe in traditions such as strict discipline," explains Jose Barros, a community organizer at the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative and a Cape Verdean who immigrated as a 25-year-old in 1977. "There is no one to teach the adults the language or explain the laws to them, so as their children become Americanized, they cling to the old ways. The end result is a community of parents who have lost control of their kids and have nowhere to turn for help."

In Cape Verde, says Barros, corporal punishment is a common way to impose discipline. Parents, teachers, and even neighbors feel free to keep children in line through physical force. But Cape Verdean parents run into trouble when they try to maintain the old ways in their new country. The kids, who know American laws better than their parents do, call the Department of Social Services, claiming abuse. "The social workers show up and tell the parents they can't hit the children," says Barros. "Then they give the kids their business cards in case it happens again. But at no time do they offer any alternatives to the parents."

Within the Cape Verdean community, Barros says, teachers and even doctors must relay all information through the children because the parents speak only Portuguese. "How about offering the parents some help, like English classes or intervention programs?" he asks.

In recent years, social-service agencies in Boston have reached out in just such fashion to a wide range of other immigrant groups. Case workers fluent in Chinese and other Asian languages staff shelters for battered women; local health facilities, neighborhood centers, and even schools print bulletins in both English and Spanish; Vietnamese small-business owners benefit from city incentive programs; and Ethiopian immigrants have a vocal and powerful immigrant association in Cambridge. Very few such programs exist for Cape Verdeans. There was once a Cape Verdean community center in Roxbury, but it was abandoned in 1989 because of poor supervision and other problems.

"Cape Verdeans are quiet and keep to themselves," says Robert Brennan, the attorney handling Francisco Marques's hearing and several other deportation cases. "We need to show the courts and the rest of the community that if there is a problem among Cape Verdeans, whether it be crime or lack of resources, there are structures in place to deal with it. Unfortunately, we can't, because those programs don't exist and the people necessary to run them are few."

Noemia Montero is one of those few. For more than five years, the 30-year-old Cape Verdean immigrant has taught at the Log School Family Education Center on Bowdoin Street, which serves the entire Dorchester community. She offers a 15-week course called the Nurturing Program to Cape Verdean families in which the children are acting out in ways that range from talking back to skipping school to gangbanging. "We also educate them on the language, the laws, the economy, and their immigrant rights," explains Montero, who came to Boston 15 years ago. "We also do home visits, and I hold a girls' group."

Montero stresses that she has received much support from fellow Cape Verdeans fed up with being ignored. Still, she says, the job is too big for her to do alone. Montero is currently working with local clinicians, teachers, and concerned parents to establish a Cape Verdean Community Association, but she says the city has done little to help. "With no resources or government interaction, our plans seem, at times, unreachable," she says.

Another immigrant taking steps to help his community is Justin Fernandes, a 28-year-old Cape Verdean immigrant who in January began a youth-outreach program called United We Will Stand. Fernandes, who immigrated with his family 19 years ago, says that he and six other board members organize weekend outings for kids and hope to develop an after-school program.

"We are working on grants to get our own space and establish ourselves as a legitimate Cape Verdean organization," Fernandes says. "Unfortunately, the city is giving us the runaround. Since we have asked for assistance, the city has made us fill out reams of paperwork but done nothing to process it or assist us in establishing ourselves as a neighborhood organization with city sponsorship."

So far, the city's answer to local activists' pleas for help has come largely in the form of one man. On February 24, Amilcar Moreira, a 24-year-old father of one who came to Boston from Cape Verde when he was two years old, was hired as a street worker with the Boston Community Centers, a city agency that administers many neighborhood initiatives.

Even that modest step was hard won: when Moreira applied for the job six months ago, he never received a reply. "So I went to work at the Log School with the kids," he says. "I was only reaching a handful of kids, though. It wasn't enough." It took five months of meetings between the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative's Barros and city officials before the city gave him the job. To Barros, it's still not enough.

"He is a wonderful young man who loves his culture and his community, and I believe the kids trust him," Barros says. "But he is just a boy. He is just beginning. He has no formal training and no supervisor with youth-services training to guide him."

The Reverend Cheng Imm Tan, director of the Office of New Bostonians, is scheduled to meet with members of the Cape Verdean community later this month. "We have someone in place who is currently meeting with the different immigrant communities to find out what the issues are," explains Tan. "I haven't gotten to the Cape Verdean community yet, but I believe their issues, or at least some of them, will be similar to those of other immigrant communities."

The problems may be similar, says Moreira, but where other groups have already benefited from outreach efforts, Cape Verdeans are in increasingly desperate straits.

On a drizzly Tuesday a few weeks ago, Moreira stood on the corner of Dudley and East Cottage Streets talking to a group of Cape Verdean teens. It was around noon, when most people their age are in class, but these youths had dropped out of school. As Moreira talked to them about getting into GED programs, an unmarked police car came by.

Moreira, whose face is not yet familiar to local authorities, says he expected the officers to stop and talk to the kids, if only to question why they weren't in school. "Apparently, seeing groups of Cape Verdean kids skipping school was not of any importance," says Moreira. "It's like the kids are throwaways. And they are starting to realize that no one is supervising their actions. If there are continued problems, it's because of a lack of guidance, something every kid needs -- good or bad."

Sarah McNaught can be reached at smcnaught@phx.com.