Cape Cod Cape Verdean Museum and Cultural Center bridges generations

She created the museum to change that for future generations of Cape Verdeans – and to educate other visitors about everything from Cape Verde’s volcanic geology to its crucial revolutionary leader, the late Amílcar Cabral. Housed in an old farmhouse built by immigrants from the Azores in the early 20th century, it is “a small museum with a big heart,” according to Burgo.

Hers is also the only museum in Massachusetts dedicated solely to celebrating Cape Verdean history and culture; deepening the long-standing connection between Cape Verde, which has approximately 600,000 inhabitants, and Massachusetts, the US state with the largest Cape Verdean population (over 70,000 people), according to 2020 Census data. In July, the Prime Minister of Cape Verde visited , José Ulisses de Pina Correia e Silva, the museum and awarded it a medal of cultural merit.

The museum’s cultural programming is where its “big heart” shines: teaching Kriolu language classes; collecting Cape Verdean American oral histories from elders; practicing the farming, cooking, quilting and music practices of the motherland; and, most ambitiously, working with Falmouth Public Schools to establish a sister school program linking them with an English language school in Cape Verde.

“Barbara is a force,” said Henry St. Julien, director of diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging for Falmouth Public Schools, who added that without Burgo’s “continued, faithful pushing and pushing” the sister school program “wouldn’t have gotten done.”

Data on Cape Verdean immigration to Massachusetts is traceable back to the 18th century, according to Angelo Barbosa, director of the Institute for Cape Verdean Studies at Bridgewater State University, also a partner in the sister school program. “From the beginning, they were very skilled when it came to sailing the seas,” Barbosa said, referring to the Cape Verdeans’ contributions to the local whaling industry.

Despite the significant Cape Verdean presence in Massachusetts, Burgo feels it has “been a long, hard journey” to get its culture and history recognized by most Bay Staters.

That’s why she started the museum in the first place; to recreate the sense of heritage and belonging that many Cape Verdeans maintained and sacrificed when they came to the United States under Portuguese colonial rule, which lasted until 1975.

Wesley Leite, the museum’s other co-founder, said Boston was lonely growing up in the 1950s because he “didn’t fit in with black kids or white kids.” Leite was motivated to study hard and get good grades in school so that his mother would take him to live with his family in Harwich. As a child, he said, it was “the only time I was around so many people like me.”

Two trips helped Burgo get to know himself.

The first was to Washington, DC, in 1995 for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, an annual exhibition of international living cultural heritage that celebrated the twentieth anniversary of Cape Verdean independence that year. At the time, Burgo had two children getting ready to go to college, so she didn’t have much money, she said, “but something inside me said, ‘I have to go.'”

As she walked down the National Mall that day, Burgo said, she was amazed. She smelled Cape Verde’s most famous dish, a stew called cachupa, while she was cooking; saw Cape Verdean men laying perfectly flat cobblestones with nothing but their eyes to measure; and enjoyed traditional dances.

The second trip was to Cape Verde. In 1997, Burgo attended Rhode Island College as part of a summer seminar. The experience was so moving that she returned the following year, and again in 2000.

After that, “I knew I would have a museum one day,” Burgo said. It was her ‘destino’ – destination.

The current version of her museum, which opened in 2021, is not her first attempt.

In 2018 she opened a Cape Verdean museum in Harwich. There, Burgo encountered a barrier that many small museums suffer from – lack of financial support – and closed after a year. Together with Leite, she packed the museum pieces and put them away.

Two years later, she filed a request for proposal to lease a historic building owned by the Falmouth City Council.

So the museum does not have donors with deep pockets Burgo, Leite and museum treasurer Roy Rose asked to operate rent-free for a year to build a visitor base and were given two years in exchange for free admission. Instead, the museum is taking optional donations at the door, which Burgo says gives them more revenue than admission fees in Harwich ever have.

Still, “I have to work because not only do I help subsidize the museum, I also have to pay for gas to get there,” said Burgo, who also works as a pharmacy technician at Stop & Shop. Leite has a food truck and works in construction.

The duo actively pursued partnerships, which produced an agreement with Falmouth Public Schools for every second grader to visit the museum as part of the grade-level curriculum.

Students tour the museum’s five rooms, including one with a timeline of Cape Verdean history; there is also Nana’s Kitchen, a replica of a typical Cape Verdean grandmother’s kitchen; a service room highlighting Cape Verdeans in public sector jobs; a ship’s room that tells the story of the schooner Ernestina-Morrissey, which returned from Cape Verde to the United States in 1982; and the newest room, dedicated to Cape Verdeans in sports such as former Boston Celtic Dana Barros.

The museum’s collaboration with the school system is expanding. In mid-October, museum staff and seven employees from Falmouth Public Schools traveled to the capital, Praia, to visit their sister school, English Language Learners of Cabo Verde. The teachers exchanged ideas. Then it is the students’ turn. They hope to send Falmouth students to Cape Verde in the spring, while Cape Verdean students will eventually spend time in Falmouth as well.

Culture, customs, language: “We have a lot to offer them,” says Zita Vieira, founder and director of English Language Learners of Cabo Verde. She is excited to “give students the opportunity to see the difference” between the two countries.

It’s the kind of opportunity Burgo could only imagine as a child.

“People always ask me, ‘Is this the realization of your wildest dreams?’ Well, I couldn’t have even dreamed that high,” Burgo said emotionally. ‘I don’t know what’s in me to do this, but I’m compelled. I can’t stop.”

THE CAPE COD CAPE VERDEAN MUSEUM AND CULTURAL CENTER

67 Davisville Road, East Falmouth

Open Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., or other days and times by appointment.

www.capecodcvmuseum.org

Julian EJ Sorapuru is an arts reporter at the Globe and can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on X @JulianSorapuru.