Ragás: A Memoir of Home, Migration, and African Decolonization

A memoir of a mother and daughter’s return to Cabo Verde reveals the legacies of national liberation, a story of memory and migration, and the psychic and physical landscape that colonialism has wrought.

When Sonia Vaz Borges accompanied her mother, Maria Isabel Vaz, home to Santiago Island, Cabo Verde, it was the first time she experienced the island where her mother and family were born, and where her mother left forty years earlier. As a historian, documentarian, and a Black Cabo Verdean young woman born in Portugal, she booked a trip to a native land she’s never been to in order to conduct research on the history of militant resistance to Portuguese colonialism, of the education initiatives of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea Bissau and Cabo Verde (PAIGC), and the lessons for freedom available for today.
What she discovers are lifelong lessons as illuminating as anything her PhD revealed to her. The fragments of memories, episodes, and encounters in Cabo Verde that she assembled in this travel diary reveal an experience of ＂homegoing＂ that is rich with the legacies of national liberation, the story of a Black woman’s migration during the height of colonial oppression, of separation from family and nation, and memories of an island transformed since Independence, and the psychic and physical landscape that the legacy of colonial rule has wrought. As mother and daughter travel home together for the first time, they embark on a journey that takes them to new places in their relationship to each other, a return and a rediscovery of a place and people imagined and conjured through memory, where history and place blur and where stories are created and shared.
Ragáaacute;s is a Cabo Verdean creole word for the space created between the waist and the knees when seated: the lap. Here, it is a place to find nurturing, a place to be embraced, protected, and cared for, a place for reconnection and return to the memories that others carry for you when migration means both leaving and being left behind.

Sónia Vaz Borges is a militant interdisciplinary historian and socialpolitical organizer. She received her PhD in History of Education from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU). She is the author of the book, Militant Education, Liberation Struggle, Consciousness: The PAIGC education in Guinea Bissau 1963-1978 (2019). As a result of her research Vaz Borges co-authored the short films, Navigating the Pilot School (2016) and Mangrove School (2022). Vaz Borges is also the author of the book Na Pó Di Spéra. Percursos nos Bairros da Estrada Militar, de Santa Filomena e da Encosta Nascente (2014), and editor of the Zines, Caderno Consciência e Resistência Negra (2007-2011). Vaz Borges is currently an Assistant Professor in the History and Africana Studies Program at Drexel University in Philadelphia (USA). Vaz Borges continues to write on education and liberation struggles and is now working on her concept of the ＂walking archive.＂

Maria Isabel Vaz was born and raised in Cape Verde in the Santiago Island, in the municipality of Santa Catarina. She migrated to Portugal with all her family in 1972 during the colonial occupation in Cape Verde and the PAIGC liberation struggle in Guinea Bissau. In Portugal she worked as a domestic worker, where she married and became a mother of five. A humble and caring woman with strong values and beliefs, she made sure to transmit her knowledges, life experience, and social justice principles to her daughters. Gardening and farming are her passions, an inheritance brought from her life in the countryside in Cape Verde. Maria Isabel Vaz is now retired and lives in Amadora, Portugal.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a prison abolitionist and prison scholar. She is the author of Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation, Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition, and the award-winning Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Gilmoreis the Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and professor of geography in Earth and Environmental Sciences at The City University of New York.

Craig Gilmore is an organizer with the California Prison Moratorium Project, which he cofounded in 1998. He is a regular contributor to Prison Focus and is coauthor with Kevin Pyle of The Real Cost of Prisons Project. He has been active for years in Californians United for a Responsible Budget, the No New Jails Coalition, and LA Prison Times newspaper. Gilmore is a board member of A New Way of Life Reentry Project in Los Angeles and in 2003 was awarded the Ralph Santiago Abascal Award for Environmental Justice Activism.