January 11, 2012 - CommonWealth Magazine - By Yawu Miller

Contrasting experiences can give rise to sharply contrasting political views. Sometimes that happens even within a family.

Vinny deMacedo, a Republican state representative, and his brother Donaldo Macedo, a professor at the Univer­sity of Massachusetts Boston, may be sons of a close-knit immigrant Cape Verdean family. But they are worlds apart when it comes to political bearings.

Rep. deMacedo (the de was added to his last name in error by immigration officials) is trim and clean-cut in his dark business suits. He is a stalwart of the state Repub­lican Party, a small business owner, and a reliably conservative voice for Plymouth in the Legislature. His take on Occupy Wall Street? “Ultimately, we need banks,” he says. “Protesting against them isn’t going to change them.”

Donaldo, by contrast, says the Occupy protesters represent a good start. He looks every bit the part of a left-leaning UMass Boston professor who has coauthored books with Noam Chomsky, the late Boston University historian Howard Zinn, and Paulo Freire, the radical Brazil­ian educator best known for his 1968 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Their sharply divergent political views underscore ways the immigrant experience can give rise to outlooks at both ends of the spectrum. The brothers were born on the island of Brava in the Cape Verde islands, an archipelago 350 miles off the coast of Senegal that was colonized by the Portuguese and used as a transshipment point in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Donaldo, who is 15 years older, left the family home four years before Vinny was born to attend middle and high school on the island of Sao Vicente.

Donaldo, 60, traces the seeds of his radical leanings to the growing presence of Portuguese troops in Cape Verde, brought in to quell the nascent independence movement there. “I grew up in a fascist state,” says Donaldo, who at the age of 12 was punished by a teacher for speaking Cape Verdean creole in class in­stead of Portuguese, the official language of instruction in Cape Verde.

In 1966, when Vinny was 6 months old, the family moved to the United States, hoping to improve educational prospects for their children. They settled in Dorchester. Three years later, when the family moved to the small South Shore town of Kingston, Donaldo remained in the Boston neighborhood with his grandmother to finish his studies at English High School.

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