Description

Author Luís Batalha's ethnographic study of the Cape Verdean community in Portugal focuses on two distinct groups: the middle-class white elite and the darker-skinned, migrant laborers. This challenging and unique work strips bare the social relations--race, gender, and class--that structure lived experience in this post-colonial society. Based on the life stories of fifty Cape Verdeans living mainly in the metropolitan are of Lisbon, this study provides an important analysis of these two remarkably disparate groups and illustrate what it is to be part of the present day Cape Verdean 'community' in Portugal. In addition to painting a complex and realistic portrait of this world, Batalha further sheds light on the social, national, and international dynamics of societies who struggle with a racialized social order imposed and maintained for decades and, in some cases, centuries.