“Sometimes You Can Just Sing Free”: Vocal Transmission, Intradiasporic Diversity, and Belonging in Cabo Verdean New England

In this article, I explore narratives of vocal transmission among Cabo Verdeans and Cabo Verdean Americans in New England, teasing out the threads of diasporic relationality—gathering, musical participation, and kinship—woven into my interlocutors’ stories about musical learning. Such narratives of transmission, I argue, are nuanced by divergent life histories among Cabo Verdean / Americans, which vary according to generation, island origin, and racial identification. Drawing on two ethnographic case studies, I theorize that diasporic actors perform not merely the semiotics of genre but indeed the traces of transmission as a means of claiming belonging within and cohering community across intradiasporic difference. This article brings voice and diaspora studies into dialogue, demonstrating how a fundamentally relational and diverse vision of diaspora might be performed through the cultivation of vocal gesture. Most crucially, the article insists that vocal transmission is in and of itself a complex cultural and aesthetic conciliation, rather than a mere pursuit of musical competency.