Managing African Portugal
Samuel Weeks
(Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa)
Obra recenseada: Kesha Fikes, Managing African Portugal, Chapel Hill, NC, Duke
University, Press, 2009, 195 pages.
Managing African Portugal by US anthropologist Kesha Fikes is an ethnographic
account of how Portugal's mid-1990s economic and social integration into the
European Union (EU) fundamentally changed everyday encounters between
Portuguese citizens and African immigrants. Fikes' book is a thoughtful
assessment of how colonial legacies impact contemporary social relations in an
EU context and is a poignant critique of how government-sponsored
multiculturalist programs can increase the marginality of the people they
purport to help. She records the roughly fifteen years of Europeanization in
Portugal, a period defined by modernization, profound shifts in the job
market, and changing attitudes towards race. During this time, Portugal ceased
to be a country from which people left, but instead became a country of
immigration, a shift corroborated by the visibility of African migrants.
Fikes' protagonists are the Cape Verdean peixeiras(fishmongers) of Cais do
Sodré (a transportation hub in Lisbon), who experienced a racialization of
their low-wage workplace starting in the mid-1990s, as Portuguese women left to
find work in less-stigmatized professions. As Portugal joined the Euro monetary
zone in 1999, the Cape Verdean peixeiras' fish selling near Cais do Sodré
became increasingly criminalized, often under the guise of sanitary concerns;
their marginal, but fulfilling livelihoods came to be seen as incompatible with
a vision of Lisbon as a European city of global commerce and tourism. Yet
peixeiras continued their work amidst police harassment and indifference on the
part of citizens, moraliz[ing] the act of selling fish as a working-class
necessity and thus as a righteous political stance. [Peixeiras] thereby
embedded themselves in the national working-poor narrative about the right of
the poor to maintain themselves (p. 106). Regardless, come the mid-2000s, only
the few Cape Verdean peixeiras who had amassed enough capital to rent or
purchase vending booths in newly approved facilities were able to continue
selling fish. Notably, poor older Portuguese women continued to sell flowers
and candy without licenses on an irregular basis at Cais do Sodré, while Cape
Verdean peixeiras had left the site for good by early 2005. To Fikes, this
inconsistency reveals that the government was concerned more about who was
working informally than about the presence of a supposedly antiquated means of
earning a living.
Frustrated, the majority of Cape Verdean peixeiras who left the trade took up
the work of urban-poor Portuguese women: thelimpeza (cleaning) of the city's
homes and businesses. Though poorly paid and tightly controlled, work in
limpeza became widespread in the 1990s. The EU-fueled expansion of the Lisbon
metropolitan area, together with the emergence of larger middle and upper-
middle classes, increased the demand for cleaning and other domestic services.
Through this process, attitudes were changed about the old divisions of
labor; the country's new Europeanness was thought to be compromised by the
presence of Portuguese women in low-wage jobs such as limpeza. Fikes attests
that the association of poor African women with limpeza came to confirm
Portugal's newfound modernity, as they took up their proper role in service
of white Portuguese citizens. In the move to limpeza, notes Fikes, Cape Verdean
women were disempowered vis-à-vis a drastic reduction in their monthly income
and estrangement from the general populace with whom they could no longer
interact as self-functioning entrepreneurs.
Portugal's integration into the supranational EU and neoliberal global market
during the 1990s profoundly changed the relations between the state, its
citizens, and immigrants. In the ethnographic portion of her text, Fikes
describes these distant, yet polished interactions, in which former
colonizers and the colonized perform normality as a strategy of coexistence.
As the project of constructing a European identity accelerated, African
immigrants came to be used in defining what the new Portugal was and was not,
while their existence reinforced Portugal's rightful place in white Europe.
Fikes asserts that the Portuguese citizen now reproduces his/her citizenship by
means of encountering the migrant. These enactments of EU modernity gave
birth to a new practice of engaging difference in Portugal, one that privileged
European multicultural or integrationalist models instead of the Portuguese
Lusotropicalism of the middle-twentieth century. As a result, Fikes maintains,
the famed mestiço colonial subject became Africanized, and the former
collective Lusotropical empire gave way to the separate spaces of Lusofonia.
These efforts served to clarify any pre-existing Lusotropical confusions
regarding who was and was not Portuguese.
Fikes' work in Portugal has not been without its critics. Luís Batalha (2004,
The Cape Verdean Diaspora in Portugal: Colonial Subjects in a Postcolonial
World, Lanham, MD, Lexington Books: 146-147) writes,
According to [Fikes], there is a national, racialized public conflict'
between the Portuguese state and the black badia [from the Island of Santiago]
peixeiras, through which the Portuguese white mainstream society was trying to
disempower the black Cape Verdean women, preventing them from peddling in the
streets and consequently throwing them into limpeza It is as if there were a
sort of national racial conspiracy aimed at cornering black Cape Verdean women
in the janitorial and cleaning services, which, according to her, are seen by
the white post-colonial mainstream as the proper trades for black women.
Batalha objects to Fikes' idea that the Portuguese state is racializing the
job market of limpeza, forcing black Cape Verdean women out of peddling and
throwing them into the domestic and janitorial services (Batalha 2004: 148).
Believing that Fikes misrepresents the world of limpeza in Portugal, Batalha
disagrees with her assertion that cleaning is the only work currently allowed
to African women, citing as evidence that jobs in limpeza are offered to women
from other migrant groups as well.
In her interpretation of the fish selling-limpeza trajectory of Cape Verdean
women, however, Fikes neither points to a conspirator who explicitly
prevented the peixeiras from selling fish and cast them into limpeza, nor she
does mention a conspiracy [to route peixeiras] into limpeza (Batalha 2004:
150) or that the Portuguese state has promulgated a racial conflict. To
postulate the turn to limpeza in terms of a conspiracy to disempower Cape
Verdean women and help Portugal define an EU identity of opposition, as
Batalha believes Fikes' work does, implies causality, a mechanism of causation,
and a certain notion of historical time. Rather, Fikes explains why the Cape
Verdean peixeiras went to work in limpeza, but she does not say this change was
inevitable. Like Foucault, Fikes practices a history that exposes the
contingency of what came to be, without saying that there was a plan that
steered events toward an intended result. It seems that she would agree with
Foucault's premise that there is no locus of power that dictates social order;
rather, power functions in capillary form through decentred networks of
institutions and apparatuses (Michael Hardt, 2010, Militant life, New Left
Review, 64: 152). Furthermore, Batalha's mention of non-African women working
in limpeza, a fact recognized by Fikes herself (pp. 139-142), does not
sufficiently refute Fikes' assertion that the field came to be thought of as
black work. That Cape Verdean women are not the only workers in limpeza does
not mean that the field cannot be associated with the African woman. Lastly,
Batalha overstates the definitiveness that Fikes gives to her own work. Like
many works of contemporary anthropology, Fikes' ethnography is provisional and
non-teleological, and she makes no universal claims about the authority of her
project. This impermanence, however, does not mask her hope for real change
and progress towards achieving what she values, namely a more just world for
people who suffer from discrimination, a group that includes the Cape Verdean
ex-peixeiras of Cais do Sodré.
