Santiaguense Cape Verdean women in Portugal: Labor rights, citizenship and diasporic transformatio

This project examines the lives of Cape Verdean women from the island of Santiago who reside in Lisbon, Portugal, their former colonial metropole. The aim is to understand how their colonial histories of forced, post-slavery labor and migration (1863) situate their opportunities as workers in Portugal. Further, the study observes how memories of work and citizenship from the colonial past serve as post-colonial resources for community building and economic empowerment. Focusing on the lives of peixeiras, Santiguense women who have "unlawfully" chosen to sell fish as undocumented vendors, this project locates their decisions to 'market' within Portugal's colliding political economies of colonial and post-colonial order.;'Post-independence' Santiguense transnationality has involved new negotiations of 'self' and 'community'. These strategic mediations, once again, contend with Portuguese politics of 'work' and 'national belonging' and the disciplining projects that maintain these ideals. This negotiation is also linked to how Santiaguense women choose to assume their post-colonial positionality, within the constraints of Portugal's preferences for black women's entry into domestic services. The experience of migration to Portugal, hence, and the strategies one pursues to negotiate their 'worker' and 'citizenship' status there, mirror Santiaguense local-national struggles over their labor, income and emigration rights in Cape Verde. In this sense, Santiaguense decision-making for everyday living in Cape Verde, and the means through which Santiguense have been forced to create networks of inter-dependency on locally circulated money, is not unlike the challenge of 'post-colonial' living that one encounters in Portugal. Subsequently, Santiaguense transnationality is about a fluid, trans-spatial contention with the bureaucracies of worker status and its associations with national belonging and citizenship.