Diasporas in the New Media Age: Identity, Politics, and Community

6 Cyber CVs

110 6 Cyber Cvs Online Conversations on Cape Verdean Diaspora Identities gina sánchez gibau The question of identity has been a long-standing matter of contention among people who claim Cape verdean heritage. While the politics of identity formation have played out largely within the national and transnational spaces in which Cape verdeans reside, these debates are now echoed in cyberspace, through discussion forums, blogs, and Listservs. Cape verdean usage of information and communication technologies (ict s) illustrates the ways in which diasporic identity formation has become increasingly facilitated by technological advances, such as the Internet. In this chapter, I will examine how diasporic Cape verdeans utilize colonial, postcolonial, and transnationalist discourses in online discussion forums in particular to leverage their positions on the never-ending conundrum that is Cape verdean identity formation. Specifically, I will focus on how Cape verdeans, in the islands and in the diaspora, express a variety of ideas about the significance of race, nationality, language, and culture in the construction of “Cape verdeanness.” This examination highlights the complexity of defining Cape verdeanness across diasporic experiences and how Cape verdeans have utilized the deterritorialized venue of cyberspace as a tool of identity authentication and legitimization. t h e c a p e v e r d e a n d i a s p o r a 111 My ongoing research focuses on how members of the Cape verdean diaspora in the United States reconcile their unique cultural identity with their socially ascribed, racialized minority status. I have been most interested in the self-identification practices of Cape verdeans in terms of “reflexive identity politics,” or how they “identify their identifications” (Eriksen 2001, 45). In previous research conducted among Cape verdeans in Boston, I found that the Cape verdean diaspora, fragmented into Cape verdean American and Cape verdean immigrant segments, offers up competing definitions of Cape verdeanness and negotiates their cultural and “racialized” identities by enacting situational identities on an everyday basis (Sanchez 1999; Gibau 2005). This process of situational identity enactment takes on added dimensions as it occurs in the larger forum of cyberspace, where virtual social interactionism generates multiple interpretations of Cape verdeanness. Examining how Cape verdeans define Cape verdeanness for themselves and to others within the context of a virtual community provides insight into how diasporic identities are continually created, negotiated, articulated, and circulated. Likewise, it illustrates how discourses of race, nation, and culture are continuously destabilized in the formation of contemporary diasporic identities. historical context The origins of contemporary debates concerning Cape verdean identity can be traced back to the initial settlement of the islands.1 The colonial project was initiated by the Portuguese who first populated the uninhabited islands during the 1460sand then relied on the enslavement of West Africans thereafter .2 In Cape verde slavery produced close master-slave relationships, frequent manumissions, tolerance of miscegenation, and a large multiracial population. Over time, these circumstances led the inhabitants to adopt both Portuguese and African cultural practices. Extensive miscegenation in Cape verde produced a majority mestiço (mixed) or Creole population, who as free individuals occupied interstitial socioeconomic positions undesirable to the colonizers yet unattainable for the enslaved (Meintel 1984).In their service as colonial administrators within Portugal’s other West African colonies (e.g., Guinea and Angola), Cape verdeans became a racially mixed buffer group between the white Portuguese and the black Africans. Cape verdeans also relied on social and economic status to determine position within the social hierarchy. For example, according to Richard 112 d i a s p o r a s i n t h e n e w m e d i a a g e Lobban, the term branco (white) was used to describe persons who were not only of “apparent European origin” but also “in positions of power” (1995,54).Moreover, according to Lobban, “higher levels of wealth, power, educational status, and class position . . . lighten[ed] a person’s ‘racial’ classification , while poverty, uncouth behavior, and illiteracy ‘darkened’ it” (ibid., 57).The resultant social hierarchy in colonial Cape verde created social distinctions based on a combination of ancestry, phenotype, skin tone, social class status, and island of origin. Given this history, many Cape verdean migrants entered the United States with preestablished notions of race and colorism, which were subsequently reinforced by the U.S. environment of racial hierarchy. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the ideology of “racial democracy” was...