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Charles “Chachi” Carvalho is an unofficial mayor of Pawtucket, a multi-talented performing artist and dedicated advocate. The Pawtucket native’s latest hip-hop album
release, “Legacy,” has been embraced by audiences worldwide. Carvalho also made history, becoming Pawtucket’s first chief equity officer.
Below is an edited and condensed version of host Anaridis Rodriguez’s interview with Carvalho. You can watch the in-depth conversation here.
ANARIDIS: You are about a year into your role as the chief equity officer. Tell us what that entails, and what’s your reflection being almost a year into the job?
CHACHI: Yeah, some days, you know, it feels like I’ve been there for seven years, and many days, it feels like I’ve just got there, because there’s so much to learn, and the job didn’t exist prior to me taking over. It’s been so interesting, but it’s been challenging as well. A big learning curve, just adjusting from the education space into city government, trying to understand all the nuances of the different moving parts to build relationships across the different departments, but it’s been great. I love the city and getting a deeper understanding of how the city works has put me in a position to be able to better serve my community.
ANARIDIS: How do you support Pawtucket as the chief equity officer?
CHACHI: Yeah, so in my role, I have an opportunity to work with a lot of small community-based organizations to assess the needs that exist there, to also make sure that all of the opportunities that are available to the residents of Pawtucket are available to all residents of Pawtucket. So trying to be a bridge in terms of expanding communication into folks that exist in the margins, and then working across different departments to ensure that policies, procedures, and that the city is moving in a direction of being more inclusive, more diverse, and more of a reflection of the community.
ANARIDIS: Have you been able to achieve that in your short time?
CHACHI: I think so.
ANARIDIS: What’s your vision?
CHACHI: In the short time I’ve been there, we’ve been able to create and launch some new programs, specifically aligned with empowering the youth. We’ve formed some partnerships with some larger nationally-based organizations to provide more resources to the community. We’ve had an opportunity, currently, at the moment, the city has its most diverse staff in history under Mayor Grebien’s leadership, and I’m just happy to serve on that team. The administration, the team is great over there. They’re very supportive, extremely hard-working. The clock doesn’t stop in City Hall. So it’s been fun. It’s been an adventure.
ANARIDIS: All right. Let’s talk about your latest album, “Legacy.” You’ve been recording music for a really long time. ... Tell me what’s different about this album. How is it different from other works that you’ve done before?
CHACHI: This one specifically was, you know, our studio was shut down. You know, big shout out to my partner Edgar Cruz, Vertygo, who hosts things down at Beatbox Studio. You know, we had to close the doors due to COVID, but what that did was it created a space for us two to just kind of lock in together, and we were like, man, we’ve never worked on a — and he’s an incredibly talented producer — but we never worked on an entire project together, just us two, and this is my business partner that we’ve owned a studio together for a long time. So we were both going through a lot of personal issues, like the whole world was during that time in 2020, and it was an opportunity for us to just release, and we challenge ourselves to exist outside of the box of what folks were accustomed to hearing from us, and we tried new things.
I, like, sang a little bit, and we tried to play around in some different genres, and it was beautiful, and each song we did felt like it belonged with the previous one, and so, yeah, I’m happy. I’m excited about that project. We didn’t really do much to promote since releasing it. We kind of just allow it to exist in the space that it’s in, and hopefully folks gravitate to it, but, yeah, it’s an important piece for me. I did a lot of reflecting personally, a lot of reflecting on family, on the role that my father had, and the last song on the album features my older sister, Nancy, Sultra Divine, who lives in Kentucky, and features my father, and at that point, in 2020, it was 10 years after he had transitioned, but we were able to resurrect a small piece of recording that we were able to, like ... Build music around and created a new song.
