^ Team Carvalho. Evandro is second from left in back row.

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Of the four candidates seeking votes on April 1st, a mere 16 days from now, Evandro Carvalho may be the most traditional. He is of Cape Verdean lineage and, in a field with three candidates who are not Cape Verdean, hopes that his lineage will push him to the top. This is ethnic politics as it used to be.

It’s a feasible, even sensible, plan, because the 5th Suffolk District includes almost all of Boston’s Cape Verdean voters. They vote. In last year’s Mayor Primary, John F. Barros — Cape Verdean and a resident of the District –captured 2,071 votes within the 5th Suffolk’s precincts. He finished first of the then twelve Mayor hopefuls, almost 600 votes ahead of number two, Charlotte Golar-Richie, and 1300 ahead of Felix G. Arroyo, who finished third.

I interviewed Carvalho by telephone and then next day visited him at his Bowdoin Street headquarters. There, hard at work with laptops, voter lists, and canvassing packets were his field staff and his parents. Carvalho was on his way to door-knock, with his campaign aide alongside, and so I couldn’t supplement the phone interview — in which Carvalho told me of his work as an Assistant Suffolk county District Attorney — working for District Attorney Dan Conley — posted to the Roxbury District Court. There he prosecuted gun crimes — certainly one of the 5th District’s major concerns. As his hand out card adds, “there he saw first hand the cycles of poverty and violence that put our young men and women in the system” —  he means the criminal justice system. It’s what all the 5th District’s candidates talk about, and it is real. The 5th’s Bowdoin-Geneva neighborhood is one of Boston’s most violent.

Carvalho could make a fair case for electing him based on his prosecutorial experience alone, but he spends more time talking to me about education. “I am for universal pre-kindergarten,” he affirms, but is not “sure what to do about the charter cap. We have to keep funding the Boston Public Schools, and we need more of vocational career schools.” Schools funding is an issue that galvanized last year’s Mayor election and will certainly commit a large chunk of the 5th District Representative’s work on Beacon Hill.

He also supports raising the minimum wage to $ 11.00 an hour and wants to see a jobs and development initiative in the District — he’s glad to welcome such an initiative to Dudley Square, which lies just outside the 5th Suffolk, if as some reports have it, the initiative actually happens. But just as important are “more construction jobs within our community, and we just have to make it easier for people within the community to get access to loans, perhaps in partnership with the City.” The loans he has in mind are business loans, a major need throughout the 5th Suffolk, most of whose commercial streets feature only Mom and Pop store fronts of no great prosperity.

This is an issue which he certainly will be able to discuss — probably already has — with John Barros, who now serves as Mayor Walsh’s Chief of Business Development. Carvalho never comes out and says so, but one of his strongest appeals is to the Cape Verdean solidarity that centers on Barros, a local hero.

Carvalho doesn’t know yet which House Committees he’d like to serve on. He’s completely focused on getting elected. Can he ? The votes are there to make it happen, if they vote on April 1st. One advantage Carvalho definitely has : his votes are going to be his even if, as expected, expelled Representative Carlos Henriquez runs again in September once he’s out of jail. Henriquez commands a following that feels he got a raw deal. But Henriquez is not Cape Verdean. The votes that Carvalho gets will be his no matter what. He seems likely not to be just a temporary office holder.

This might just seal the deal for Carvalho, who as a prosecutor is the opposite of the man he seeks to replace

. —- Mike Freedberg / Here and Sphere