The Cape Verdean "community" in Portugal

Thesis

This dissertation is based on a fifteen months' period of multisite fieldwork and sets out to analyse the notions of Cape Verdean 'community' and 'identity' in Portugal by viewing their construction through three different perspectives: the perspective of an old colonial elite of Portuguese Cape Verdeans, the perspective of the Cape Verdean labour migrants, and the perspective of the Portuguese mainstream society.

The archipelago of Cape Verde, a former Portuguese colony, is the homeland of the two groups who make up the Cape Verdean 'community' in Portugal. These two groups have separate identities based on linguistic, social and cultural differences, as well as time and place of origin. On the one side, there is an old Portuguese Cape Verdean colonial elite constituted by those who were born in Cape Verde while this was still a colony. Most of them left the archipelago at an early age to study in Portugal, then the metropole, and never returned. Some have remained in Portugal, but most found positions within the colonial administration of the other Portuguese colonies. They distinguish themselves from the other Cape Verdeans by their light complexion and their higher level of education. They view their Cape Verdeaness as part of an old colonial 'national' identity, seeing themselves as Portuguese and Cape Verdean at the same time without sensing any contradiction in this. On the other side, there are the Cape Verdean labour migrants who started to come to Portugal in the mid-1960s, when Cape Verde was still a colony. These are mostly uneducated peasants who were escaping the effects of drought and famine in Cape Verde. Most are black and come from the island of Santiago and speak Creole at home.

The elite and the labour migrants live in completely different worlds: the first in middle-class suburbs and the second in shantytowns and council housing projects. Notions of 'race' and 'class', based on differences in complexion, education and wealth, contribute to the existence of these two groups of Cape Verdeans as separate entities. While the elite Portuguese Cape Verdeans are almost invisible within the mainstream society, the Cape Verdean labour migrants are highly visible because of their poor social integration. While the descendants of the elite are diluting within the Portuguese mainstream, the descendants of the labour migrants are occupying the fringes of Portuguese society and developing an oppositional identity in relation to the Portuguese mainstream. The first part of this thesis gives a detailed description of the Cape Verde archipelago and the foundations of its colonial society, and of the important issue of Cape Verdean migration. The second part presents the life of the two groups of Cape Verdeans in postcolonial Portugal and the ways the Portuguese mainstream perceive them.

Authors: Batalha, L

• Alternative title: anthropological constructions from within and without
• Publication date: 2003
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Subjects: Portugal; Cape Verdeans; Social life and customs