The cooks call it cachupa. A slow stew of hominy and beans, pork and chouriço and whatever else the week has provided, simmered until the corn breaks open and the pot smells like something your grandmother in Brava made on a stove an ocean away.
On any given lunch hour in Brockton, you can walk into half a dozen kitchens off Main Street and find a pot of it ready. Outside, the language drifting across the sidewalk is Kriolu. And the first Cape Verdean sailors who put down roots in this part of Massachusetts arrived before the Civil War, on whaling ships out of New Bedford.
This is the story of the city that Cape Verdeans now call the eleventh island.
Brockton, The Place
Brockton sits twenty-five miles south of Boston, in Plymouth County, on the inland edge of what locals call the South Shore. It was built on shoes. By 1900, ninety-seven shoe factories ran here at once, and the city earned a national reputation for boots, work shoes, and the gear that put soldiers through two world wars. The street grid is laid out around Main Street and Montello Street, two long commercial spines that still carry most of the city’s commerce.
The factories are gone now. The last of them, Footjoy, shut its doors in 2006. What remains is a working-class city of around 105,000 people, the seventh-largest in Massachusetts, with three-decker houses, brick storefronts, and a population that has reinvented itself twice in the last hundred years. In 2020, Brockton became the first majority-Black city in New England. A significant share of that figure is Cape Verdean.
How Brockton Became Cape Verdean
Before the Cape Verdeans
The first Brockton was an offshoot of Plymouth Colony, a quiet stretch of farms called North Bridgewater until it was renamed in 1874. The shoe industry was already roaring by then, pulling in Yankee mechanics, Irish labourers fleeing the Famine, and French Canadians coming south from Quebec. By the late nineteenth century, Italians, Lithuanians, Swedes, and Poles had filled the boarding houses around the factories. Each group worked the leather lines, then moved up and out as the next arrived.
Cape Verdeans were arriving in southeastern Massachusetts during this same period, but along a very different route. They were not coming through Ellis Island. They were coming through New Bedford harbour, on the deck of a whaler.
The Cape Verdeans Arrive
American whaling captains had been calling at the Cape Verde islands since the 1790s, putting in for water, provisions, and crew. The islands sat on the trade winds, halfway between West Africa and the Caribbean, and a hard man from Brava or Fogo could be signed for a Pacific voyage with a single mark in the ship’s book. The first known Cape Verdean settlers in southeastern Massachusetts arrived in the 1830s and 1840s on whalers returning to New Bedford and Nantucket.
Then came the droughts. In the mid-nineteenth century, repeated famines on the islands killed tens of thousands and pushed an entire generation onto the packet ships. Between 1860 and 1965, Cape Verdean owners would come to operate forty-one percent of the schooners running between New England and the islands. The most famous of these, the Ernestina, still sails out of New Bedford. The packet trade made New Bedford and the small mountain island of Brava sister ports for nearly a century.
The migration peaked between 1890 and 1921. When whaling collapsed, the new arrivals followed the work. Cape Verdean families fanned out across southeastern Massachusetts: into the cranberry bogs of Cape Cod and Plymouth County, the textile mills of Fall River, the merchant docks of New Bedford. By 1924, one anthropologist estimated that Cape Verdean labour was bringing in ninety percent of the Massachusetts cranberry harvest.
And many followed the trolley line inland, to the shoe factories of Brockton.
Brockton at Its Peak
The shoe factories were the first foothold. A Cape Verdean man who could pick cranberries in October and stitch uppers in February was a man with year-round wages, which was more than most of the family back home could imagine. Pay packets travelled by mail to Brava and Fogo. Cousins followed. Siblings followed. By the 1950s, a recognisable Cape Verdean Brockton had taken shape around the southern end of Main Street and the working-class blocks of Campello.
The community grew sharply after 1965. The Hart-Celler Act ended the national-origins quota system, and Cape Verdeans, who had been categorised as Portuguese for visa purposes, found the door reopened. Then on July 5, 1975, Cape Verde won its independence from Portugal. The PAIGC, the liberation movement whose founder Amílcar Cabral had been assassinated two years earlier, finally raised the new flag. A fresh wave of post-independence arrivals followed, and Brockton, with its existing community, its cheap three-deckers, and its proximity to the New Bedford anchor, became the natural landing place.
The Cape Verdean Association of Brockton was founded in 1977, the year after the last shoe factory shrank to skeleton operations. It began in members’ basements and living rooms. By 1999 it had bought its own building on North Montello Street, where it still operates today.
The Change
The Brockton that came after the factories closed was not the Brockton of the brochure. White flight, foreclosures, a hollowed-out tax base, the opioid years. Through all of it, the Cape Verdean community grew. By 2010, more than ten thousand Cape Verdean-born residents lived in the city. By 2020, the U.S. Census counted around nineteen thousand Cape Verdean-Americans in Brockton, close to one in five residents. Add the broader region and Massachusetts now has the largest Cape Verdean population of any U.S. state, roughly seventy thousand strong.
The second generation moved into the schools, the police force, the city council, the hospital corridors. A Cape Verdean immigrant named Moisés Rodrigues, a U.S. Navy veteran who once served in the Cape Verdean National Parliament, became Brockton’s acting mayor in 2019, then in 2025 was elected outright. He was sworn in in January 2026 as the first popularly elected mayor of colour in the city’s history.
The Landmarks of Cape Verdean Brockton
The Cape Verdean Association of Brockton, 575 North Montello Street. Founded in 1977 by a handful of families working out of basements, the Association is the spine of the community. It runs adult education, citizenship classes, youth programmes, and the volunteer corps that has produced most of Brockton’s Cape Verdean political class. Buying the Montello Street building in 1999 was a turning point. It gave the community a permanent address.
Saint Edith Stein Parish, 71 East Main Street. Part of the Brockton Catholic Tri-Parish Collaborative, Saint Edith Stein is the spiritual home of the city’s Cape Verdean Catholics. Saturday vigils and weekday Masses are offered in Cape Verdean Creole, and Father Joaquim Garcia serves as Parochial Vicar for the Cape Verdean Community. On a Sunday morning the parish car park sounds like Praia.
The Cape Verdean Day Festival, late July. Started in the mid-1990s as a small gathering on Brockton City Hall Plaza, the festival has become the largest annual Cape Verdean celebration in the United States. It has moved over the years from City Hall Plaza to Snow Park to Keith Field, and most recently to Campanelli Stadium, home of the Brockton Rox. It draws Cape Verdean families from across New England every summer, timed to the July 5 independence anniversary.
Main Street, Campello. The southern end of Main Street, in the Campello neighbourhood, is the closest thing the United States has to a Cape Verdean high street. More than sixty Cape Verdean-owned businesses cluster along here and the surrounding blocks: restaurants, salons, barbers, money-transfer offices, immigration services, music shops, small grocery stores stocked with cornmeal and dried fish for cachupa.
Luanda Restaurant and Lounge. Opened in 2013 by Amelia Gonçalves, Luanda serves Cape Verdean and Angolan cooking with the seriousness of a wedding feast. Cachupa, grilled lobster, lagostada, fried pastels. It is one of a generation of Brockton restaurants, including Panorama, Sunset Café, Sodade, Cardoso Café, and Preto’s Island, that have turned Cape Verdean food from a home tradition into a public one.
The Verdean Veterans Memorial Hall. A community function hall and meeting space honouring Cape Verdean-American military service, the Verdean Veterans Memorial Hall is the venue of choice for first communions, wedding receptions, anniversary parties, and the kind of long Saturday night where the Funaná accordion does not stop until two in the morning.
The Brockton Public Library, 304 Main Street. The main library houses one of the most active Cape Verdean Creole collections in the United States, alongside Portuguese-language books and an oral-history project documenting the migration story. Community groups have used the library for Kriolu literacy classes and for events around Cape Verdean Independence Day.
Where the Brockton Cape Verdeans Came From
Cape Verde is an archipelago of ten volcanic islands, nine of them inhabited, sitting about four hundred miles off the coast of Senegal. Each island sent migrants to southeastern Massachusetts, but five sent the most.
Brava. The smallest inhabited island, a fog-bound green ridge in the southern Sotavento group, has the longest and deepest tie to New Bedford and Brockton. The whaling captains called there first in the 1790s, and the village of Furna became a packet port for the United States. So many Bravans crossed that islanders sometimes joked the village of Nova Sintra had more relatives in Massachusetts than in Cape Verde.
Fogo. Brava’s larger neighbour, dominated by the live volcano Pico do Fogo, has long sent its sons to sea. A major eruption in 1680 had already pushed many Fogo families to Brava, and the same restless tradition put them on Yankee whalers a century later. Fogo coffee is still served in Brockton kitchens.
Santo Antão. The mountainous northwestern island, terraced for sugarcane and grogue, sent waves of emigrants in the twentieth century, particularly after 1975. Many of Brockton’s recent arrivals trace back to villages above Ribeira Grande and Paul.
São Vicente. The cosmopolitan port island, home to the city of Mindelo, has long been the cultural capital of Cape Verde. It is where Morna and Coladeira were polished into the music Cesária Évora carried to the world, and Mindelo was the main embarkation port for Cape Verdean emigrants for most of the twentieth century.
Santiago. The largest island, home to the capital Praia, sent fewer migrants in the whaling era and many more after independence. Santiago is the birthplace of Funaná, the accordion-driven dance music that fills Brockton wedding halls.
São Nicolau, Boa Vista, Maio, and Sal complete the list of inhabited islands. All have descendants in Brockton.
Brockton Today
If you arrived in Brockton today and walked the southern length of Main Street, you would hear Kriolu before you heard English. You would pass a barber shop with a Cape Verdean flag in the window, a money-transfer office wiring funds to Praia, a bakery selling pastel and cachupa to go. You would see second-generation kids in Brockton High sweatshirts and grandmothers in church scarves, sometimes on the same block.
The community is no longer just immigrant. It is now layered. A second and third generation has built lives here. Cape Verdean names appear on the rosters of Brockton High football teams, on the city council, in the police department, in the offices of the South Shore hospitals. Brockton is the city that elects Cape Verdean mayors and runs Cape Verdean radio shows and crowns Cape Verdean queens at Carnival.
It is also still the city that the new boat is heading for. Cape Verdean arrivals continue, alongside newer immigration from Haiti, from West Africa, from Latin America. The eleventh island is not a museum. It is a living place. Somewhere on Main Street this week, a cousin is unpacking a suitcase, a grandmother is starting a pot of cachupa, and a teenager is texting friends in three languages at once.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Cape Verdeans settle in Brockton?
Cape Verdeans first reached southeastern Massachusetts in the early 1800s on whaling ships out of New Bedford and Nantucket. As whaling declined, they followed steady work inland, into the cranberry bogs of Cape Cod and Plymouth County and then into the shoe factories of Brockton. Family chain migration did the rest, and a community took root that has now grown for more than a century.
Is Brockton still Cape Verdean today?
Yes. The 2020 U.S. Census counted close to nineteen thousand Cape Verdean-Americans in Brockton, roughly one in five residents, and the community continues to grow. In 2025, Cape Verdean immigrant Moisés Rodrigues was elected the city’s first popularly elected mayor of colour, and the southern end of Main Street remains an active Cape Verdean commercial district.
What are the most famous Cape Verdean landmarks in Brockton?
The Cape Verdean Association of Brockton on North Montello Street is the institutional centre. Saint Edith Stein Parish offers Mass in Cape Verdean Creole. The annual Cape Verdean Day Festival, held around the July 5 independence anniversary, is the largest Cape Verdean celebration in the United States. Cape Verdean restaurants such as Luanda, Panorama, Sodade, and Preto’s Island anchor the Main Street and Montello commercial corridors.
Where in Cape Verde did the Brockton Cape Verdeans come from?
The original whaling-era migrants came mostly from the small island of Brava and its neighbour Fogo, both in the southern Sotavento group. Later twentieth-century waves brought larger numbers from Santo Antão, São Vicente, and Santiago. Every inhabited island in the archipelago now has descendants somewhere in Brockton.
When did Cape Verdeans first arrive in Brockton?
Cape Verdean sailors began settling in southeastern Massachusetts in the 1830s and 1840s, working New Bedford whaling crews. The first significant flow into Brockton itself came after 1890, as Cape Verdean families moved inland from the docks and bogs to take jobs in the shoe factories. The community grew rapidly after the 1965 immigration reform and again after Cape Verde’s independence in 1975.
If your family’s story passed through Brockton, or through New Bedford, or through any of the small mountain villages of Brava and Fogo that sent so many sons to the whalers, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the packet ships out of Mindelo to the three-deckers of Campello, to wherever you are now.