INTRODUCTION
This essay is about an underworld of sorts that operated between the hours of 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. in a place that no longer exists. I describe a series of scenarios that were not supposed to happen, at least not according to the ways that labor is understood to organize social relations between migrants and citizens. I analyze conversations that took place at Docapesca, a wholesale fish market in Lisbon. This market was shut down in October of 2003 and relocated beyond the city limits of Lisbon. The facility space covered some thirty-two hectares and housed over 120 wholesale companies. An estimated 5000 persons were directly and indirectly affected by the switch. Prior to the shutdown, workers (vendors and facility employees) and their labor representatives demonstrated, distributing information on the employment crises that would ensue. Docapesca (1989–2003) was purchased by a group of developers who were competing for the 2007 America's Cup bid, which they lost to Spain. Regardless, since the new facility would be the largest and most technically sophisticated wholesale fisheries and auction business in the European Union (EU), the move was supported by the state and private industry. It was one of many examples that publicly demonstrated Portugal's management of its 1986 integration into the European Economic Community, now the EU.
Cape Verdean peixeiras, or women fishmongers—who generally sold fish without city licenses—had been participating in this Lisbon-based economy since at least the mid- to late 1960s, before Cape Verdean independence. As most Cape Verdean women's migrations to Lisbon occurred through a colonial family reunification program (see Fikes 2006), working-poor Cape Verdean women who tied their respectability to work inserted themselves into a fishmonger economy that was dominated by working-poor Portuguese2
Portuguese and African are treated as juxtaposed racial locations throughout the essay. I treat national identity and the way that it establishes an official relationship between the migrant (the former colonial subject) and the citizen (the former colonizer) as the condition that dialectically determines how people engage and recognize various forms of hierarchy and fixation such as raced difference.
As Portugal contemplated the consequences of losing UN membership in the late 1950s (because it would not decolonize from Africa), António Salazar (Portugal's dictator, 1936–1968) adopted Gilberto Freyre's lusotropicalist ideology (Freyre 1957) on the nature of Portuguese contact with indigenous others (see Castelo 1998; Bastos 1998). The aim was to emphasize Freyre's celebration of Portugal's mythic involvements in miscegenation as proof that Portugal and its colonies were one political entity that operated under a doctrine of racial democracy.
These transformations are essential to understanding the contents of dialogue in the facility: the relocation of Portuguese vendors was tied to modernizing interests that reconfigured the meaning of the colonial past—which was blamed for Portugal's decaying economy—while re-imagining how subjects should formally interface with each other in public spaces. In addition, though the transfer of workers was never intentionally about disrupting Cape Verdean women's entrepreneurship, the relocation of the facility had precisely that effect. Coupled with the fact Cape Verdean women's fish-vending activities no longer sustain transnational Cape Verdean households (in Portugal and in Cape Verde), the relocation of Portuguese citizens (the vendors and facility workers) needs to be understood through the types of sociality that were dismantled and generated by this infrastructural shift. In this sense, by focusing on interactions that occurred prior to the facility's relocation, this essay is retrospective; it describes some social practices that are no longer possible.4
In this essay, I have decided to privilege race as the active site of difference. Age, gender, and class, among other modes, do operate in varying degrees in the dialogues presented. However, in the interviews that I conducted with Cape Verdean women fish vendors, they did not conflate race with these other modes. References to different subject modes were narrated independently of each other, with the exception of slippages made between race and class. In addition, while one could argue that the gendered nature of the Portuguese language meant that race and gender were commonly grammatically conflated, Cape Verdean Kriolu—the language I used in interviews and the languages of the collective response that was often directed at vendors—is gender neutral. Thus I have decided against presupposing how race, gender, and even sexuality are cumulatively interpreted as explanations for the actors in question. Because there is public consensus, in a political sense, regarding the existence of racial difference and the existence of racism, I have decided, again, to privilege race in my analysis.
The focus here will be upon the sales exchanges that occurred between wholesale fish vendors, who were Portuguese men, and Cape Verdean (women) peixeiras, the vendors' clients. This was a curious market setting. It was a space where each party was invested in engaging in productive transactions, yet productivity was affected by the flow of rhetoric between participants during the course of a sale. Generally, vendors chose to recognize5
The concept of recognition is drawn from Taylor's (1994) Hegelian interpretation of this idea, where the presence and absence of recognition are politicized as movements that yield to or detract from equality, respectively. Here, however, I also address those moments when recognition is precisely about the conscious enactment of injury.
I address how Portuguese racial knowledge could be tied to ideals of colonial Africa within the context of contemporary Portugal. I observe how this connection established familiarity and distance in market exchanges. In fact, because of the market context in which raced information was deployed, race operated as a form of currency. For this reason, I treat race in this context as something that emerged through its subsidiary value, or rather something that could add to or subtract value6
I thank Jacqueline Goldsby, Jean Comaroff, and John Comaroff for comments that helped me to frame the argument in this way.
I borrow the idea of the misappropriation of racial knowledge as racist from Seshadri-Crooks (2000).
The broader objective of this essay is to contribute to conversations on the pervasiveness of racial knowledge, noting how “race” generically stands in for the identification of sameness and difference. I want to draw attention to the infinite moments within a given day where we shift in and out of identifying such information as something to be publicly contested, something to be met with silence or “allowed to slide,” or something that is socially neutral or disassociated from racist intent. My argument is that each of these responses is fragile, spontaneous, and unpredictable. Their conditions of possibility lie at the intersection of racial politics that mobilize fixed responses to raced information (i.e., those statements or beliefs that are politicized as racist), and the commodity field in which this information becomes paradoxical in the market place.
THE CURRENCY IN RACE
The interactions that occurred in this setting varied. The circumstances under which each community had been introduced to this night world—through formally recognized or informal means—affected the ways that interactions were initiated and interpreted. At Docapesca there were moments when the deployment of a raced utterance was publicly treated by all participants as a mode of identification that could exist outside the practice of racism. Treatment refers to the ways that race references were initiated and exchanged under circumstances that were publicly expressed or performed as amenable to the immediate situation, i.e., “humane” and profitable. The accomplishment of appropriate race usage between Docapesca actors, however, was a momentary occurrence; it could not be rehearsed in advance of a transaction. Because Portuguese vendors initiated the raced information that I observed, the appropriate treatment of the reference relied upon its reception by the peixeira. Thus these were carefully negotiated encounters: every second of every moment of an exchange hinged upon a peixeira's decision to ratify the comment, in public. Ratification was accomplished by either confirming the statement or providing a rebuttal that situated the racial statement as the ground for further discussion. In addition, conditional forms of ratification were sometimes met with silence and/or the decision to ignore a remark, as though one had not heard it. In general, these conditions conveyed to the vendor that the sale could continue, provided that the vendor dropped or altered the immediate emphasis on race.
As the decision to ratify a statement was never a given, vendors' statements could be rejected if peixeiras walked away, and especially if they chose to claim racism. Portuguese vendors' engagements with claims of racism, by contrast, were generally rebuttals to having been called racists. Thus the public treatment of race as a neutral concept was a sensitive occurrence that could always slip into circumstances that the peixeira could type as racist, in public. These claims, importantly, were never about the rejection of race as a form of recognition. Instead, being labeled a racist temporarily damaged the social face of the vendor, from the perspectives of peixeiras and vendors alike. In this sense, the issue was always about the intentions behind difference recognition. The consensus, then as today, is that racism is immoral and fascist. The label racist can refer to a Portuguese national who is not “civilized,” or who does not have the human capacity to express affect or empathy toward “differently raced others.”8
Gilberto Freyre's ideology in Casa Grande e Senzala (1957) was grounded in the mythic union between the Black woman and the White man, and biological reproduction and sexual intimacy were treated as signs of racial democracy. Thus Salazar's administration had to figure out a way to embrace the democratic core of this narrative in a way that could maintain and secure White family values and their reproductive capacity in the colonies. Compassion was identified as the key to its policy. The administration emphasized the inherent affective qualities of being Portuguese through Catholic discourses on charity and compassion rather than miscegenation. Thus, internally, race continued to be imagined as a finite, blood-determined state of being; its recognition had no connection to discrimination. Racism, in contrast, was popularly defined as the colonizer's absence of human compassion toward differently raced others. Significantly, racism was not tied to ideals of material possession, nor to an individual's access to rights and freedoms, in an Anglo sense. It was simply about the colonizer's display or absence of affect.
I emphasize the public aspect of claims of racism because claims—as social facts—require audiences: Docapesca was no exception. Interestingly, the claim of racism did not work when Portuguese participants were out of ear-reach; their presence was required to confirm that an injustice had been done and to engage in the collective act of shaming that effectively ratified the claim, as other vendors generally disassociated themselves from the shameful act. In short, the racial politics of sales exchanges were about abiding by the rhetorical market principles that could produce clear distinctions between race as a neutral descriptive, and racism as the misappropriation of such recognition (cf. Seshadri-Crooks 2000). The different treatments of race and racism in this space were important. I consider the subject-specificity of these treatments—in which race recognition was the domain of vendors, while charges of racism belonged to peixeiras—to be key to understanding how identity politics continue to hierarchically shape the terms of contact within everyday life.
Though Docapesca was a market space where the “neutrality” of race was related to its commodity treatment, the knowledge that went into deciphering race from racism was not disassociated from the very colonial history that brought African migrants to this space. Here, I refer to Portuguese colonial history and the sluggish process of decolonization that involved the relocation of Cape Verdean migrant workers to the metropole throughout the 1960s. While raced information was generally embedded in sales pitches, these ideas came from personal and national memories of past encounters between Portuguese citizens and African colonial subjects. Importantly, references that I make to history are not about linearly situated recollections of the colonial past. History is meant to refer to the possibilities of recognition in the immediate moment.
History was also used by vendors as a mechanism for contesting a racist claim, via the argument that residency in colonial Africa situated Portuguese nationals as fellow Africans who were inherently incapable of racist conduct. Here, geographic authority and political intent could be intertwined, such that racism and knowledge of Africa could not go hand-in-hand. Cape Verdean peixeiras, in contrast, did not refer to the past in the public formulation of racist claims. Instead, they generally justified their claims within contemporary ethics on economic equality, i.e., “everyone's right to work.” The past did emerge within interviews I conducted with individuals, but rarely did I observe it during interactions with vendors, arguably because it could not be used to establish material claims in contemporary Portugal. Thus I treat history as something that is defined by the circumstances in which it is referenced (Trouillot 1995). In immediate praxis, within the context of this market setting, I treat history as part of a practical set of rhetorical strategies that were used by vendors for immediate market and/or face-saving purposes. But this is only a portion of its essence. I also treat history as something that mediates relations among subjects: Cape Verdean responses to colonial history, where peixeiras generally listened to a vendor's commentary on their difference as they inspected the fish and haggled for lower prices, produced a curious tension between vendor and client. And this tension—generated by each party's disparate role in the telling or corroboration of colonial history—marked the fragile distinction between “neutral” and “harmful” raced information.
MARKET PRACTICES AND MARKET ETHICS
Cape Verdean peixeiras represented a particular type of market; they were primarily the buyers of low volumes of fish that drew from the stocks of products that had not already been purchased by restaurateurs or hotel owners and personnel. This is not to say that the quality of the fish they purchased was bad; all fresh fish entered Portugal on ice by 10 p.m. from ships that generally fished off the coasts of the Mediterranean, in addition to North and West Africa. Most licensed business owners (or their agents) purchased in high volumes between the hours of 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. While many peixeiras did arrive by midnight—either to purchase at higher volumes or for transportation-related purposes, as many would get rides from family and friends between these hours—low volume purchases, generally not more than four or five crates per person, enabled those that sold on the street to manage their supply and to maneuver quickly when confronted by police.9
From 7 a.m. to around 12 p.m., Cape Verdean peixeiras sold fish without licenses in densely populated public spaces, within and outside of Lisbon. During the period from about 1990 to 2001, police worked hard to stop their sales. Their objective was to “clean up” the streets, which included disbanding informal market activities. This was one of many moves that state officials enforced to signal Portugal's entry into the EU.
Between 1995 and 1998, Cape Verdean peixeiras' purchases, taken together, peaked at 5% to 7% of the targeted vendors' daily wholesale profits. Individually, vendors generally considered this contribution to be marginal. Docapesca housed vending companies of different sizes, ranging from small-scale family businesses to large-scale fishing corporations that provided fish for major hotels, restaurants, and various local supermarkets. Cape Verdean peixeiras purchased their daily supplies from many of the companies, but they primarily targeted mid-level and small-scale vendors. Peixeiras, then, did support the facility as a whole; they purchased fresh stock that otherwise would not have been sold, generating negative financial consequences for small family businesses. Interestingly, vendors (regardless of size) and peixeiras did not narrate their survival as dependent upon the other; peixeiras had multiple vendors from which to choose, and vendors had multiple clients. In addition, this was a familiar social space; vendors and peixeiras generally interacted with or passed by the same individuals daily. Thus while market transactions were framed on both sides as individual economic choices, these choices were made among participants who often knew each other's faces and strategies. As such, the outcomes of exchanges were also understood to be tied to the moral character of the individual vendor or peixeira in question.
When purchasing fish, peixeiras circled the facility to inspect each vendor's daily supply. Circling involved picking up the fish and inspecting the gills, eye quality, and smell. Prospective clients requested prices per kilo before haggling. If a vendor accepted the client's first offer, the fish was often purchased on the spot. If the vendor was annoyed by the offer, the client generally put the fish down and walked away. In cases where prospective clients perceived that the vendor's quote was not final, the client would generally return a second, third, or even a fourth time to attempt renegotiation. The inspection-haggling routine was then repeated. Once a deal was made, the vendor generally placed a small square of paper with the buyer's first name on the open crate of fish. When a peixeira had completed all of her purchases, she would pay another Cape Verdean woman to collect each of her crates throughout the facility. Clients could purchase the fish either after the verbal agreement was made, or once they were ready to have the fish retrieved. Both scenarios occurred; I never observed a person dishonor her verbal agreement when she had opted to pay for the fish after completing all purchases. What's more, a reciprocal honor system was in place: vendors were not supposed to sell fish that was promised to a client.
The forms of address that were used in these market exchanges had their own ethics and ritual codes. Most vendors were silent and negotiated only when a potential client appeared serious to them. Others tried to sell their fish as clients walked by. Exclamations such as: “Beautiful grouper, let's make a deal!” or “Sardines, just perfect for grilling!” or “Let's negotiate!” were common. Once a potential client stopped and chose to inspect the fish, the vendor could remain silent or initiate a conversation. If the vendor and client were not familiar with one another—for example, when a company had hired new personnel, or if the peixeira herself was new to the scene—the vendor might talk about other fish available for purchase, or begin to discuss the best ways for preparing that particular fish, whether for stews, grilling, oven roasting, etc. In effect, the vendor initiated a conversation that could potentially lead to the identification of something shared between the client and the vendor, such as cooking techniques, or an agreed upon price for the fish being inspected. Conversations on topics such as cooking techniques sometimes led to a discussion about differences between the individuals present. In cases where both client and vendor mutually identified each other as Portuguese, differences between northern and southern cooking techniques often emerged. In cases where the client was Cape Verdean, questions sometimes arose regarding Cape Verdean cuisine. A vendor might ask: “How would you cook this?” or “How do you do it in your country?” or “You would eat this with hot spices, right?” In essence, the very enactment of dissimilarity, when aimed at protecting a potential sale, could be representative of ethical conduct at Docapesca.
If the vendor and the peixeira knew each other, or if they negotiated with one another regularly, conversations were more casual. As a rule, however, no one owed anyone anything—business was understood to be the first priority. In these instances vendor and client—regardless of background—greeted each other by asking about the other's health and family: “Are you well?” or “How is your family?” Here the other party would generally not ask questions about the other's difference, as such information was assumed already to be known. Thus forms of address that solicited information or confirmation about difference were generally between parties that did not engage in empathetic daily conversations with one another.
The act of using familiar or colonial forms of knowledge to express the difference in others was a complicated task. Such interactions required attention to colonial history as well as the immediate commodity importance of the market place. In my treatment of familiarity I rely upon the concept of intimacy to refer both to real connections between differently empowered subject locations (in a socioeconomic and political sense) within a given context (such as this marketplace), and to activities and exchanges governed by ethics that may operate beyond the scope of socially or publicly acceptable norms. While the state played an institutional role in the production of these scenarios at Docapesca—through officially mediating the migratory encounter—the terms through which race information was assessed were unique to the circumstances of the market setting and the broader social histories of its actors. Thus I do not treat intimacy as a totalizing description of such relationships, per se, but rather as a concept that can inform qualities of closeness within the Docapesca night world.
Concerning grammar, “footing” choices (Goffman 1981), or strategic utterances used to initiate, alter, or close a negotiation, could draw from vocabularies that called upon each participant to “deal with” or acknowledge the presence of difference. These might include positional references, such as pronouns that operate deictically (e.g., producing us-them or you-we distinctions) to create degrees of proximity or distance among subjects. In addition, behavioral indices were used to rationalize the behaviors of others. Here, socially assessable expectations and classifications (i.e., “things we know to be racist”) were used to qualify the status or outcome of a sale as either productive or unsuccessful. In view of the effects of these raced choices, Docapesca became a field of familiarity that revealed how people create distinctions between what it means to recognize racial difference, as opposed to racism, and how power is used to produce the conditions through which such distinctions are collectively treated or performed as transparent, consensual, or the norm. The interactions I observed also showed how the expression of familiarity is essential to the very logic that allows for such deciphering in the market context.
The information I report below is broken down into four types of scenarios: (1) on the appropriate use of race as currency; (2) on the inappropriate use of race as currency; (3) on the appropriate use of the claim of racism; and (4) on the inappropriate use of the claim of racism. They were videorecorded or documented between December 1994 and August 1998, non-consecutively. The first scenario, on the appropriate use of race as currency, is an example of a moment where the vendor decided to sell according to the terms of the peixeiras. Here, the recognition of difference was used after the negotiation had taken place. Its value lied in its potential capacity to guarantee future successful sales transactions.
The second scenario, on the inappropriate use of race as currency, is an example of a moment where the recognition of racial difference was used to malign and/or inappropriately engage the client. Such scenarios were interesting because they were not necessarily met with claims of racism. Here, the absence of an audience to ratify the event, in one case, and the introduction of sexual references that were not politicized in the setting, in another, disrupted the rules of the game. For there were no collectively established rules for mediating such instances, and this complicated how audiences might have policed actors into appropriate market exchanges. Significantly, the claim of inappropriate conduct did not “fly” if the suspect was morally unaffected by the claim or politically unmoved by the potential consequences of his actions.
The third scenario, on the appropriate use of the claim of racism, exemplifies the moment when a vendor's disregard for the market rules could be legitimately or collectively interpreted as the willful enactment of racism, particularly if it occurred in the company of both Black and White over-hearers. In such instances, there was some value in claiming racism, e.g., being offered the fish which one had just been denied, in addition to being able to shame the targeted vendor.
The fourth type of scenario, on the inappropriate use of the claim of racism, generally involved new clients, i.e., peixeiras who were new to the scene. In such cases, a vendor's decision to accept a Portuguese person's bid over an African person's could be interpreted as a willful act of racism. However, if the vendor could prove that race was not a motive, the offended party's claim of racism would be invalidated. Importantly, such instances could jeopardize the peixeira's social face, and subsequently any claims of racism that she might make in the near future in this market facility.
The speakers in the dialogues below include four peixeiras with alias names. They were all Cape Verde nationals with resident status in Portugal. Patricia and Bia were both in their early to mid-forties. Patricia emigrated to Portugal in 1971 under the status of colonial subject;10
Cape Verde won independence from Portuguese rule in 1975.
Unfortunately, I do not have these types of details on the lives of the vendors. When I began fieldwork (in late 1994), my intention was to focus exclusively on the peixeiras and their economy. However, in re-examining the data I collected, I consider Portuguese nationals' roles to be essential to my analysis. While the absence of such detail is a shortcoming in this study, I do hope that my findings will offer some insight into the productivity of raced information.
ON THE APPROPRIATE USE OF RACE AS CURRENCY
Early one morning at around 4:30 a.m., I followed Djina and Manuela on their normal stroll through the marketplace. They sold side by side and so always decided together the types of fish each would buy individually. This method prevented them and the others in their group (varying from eleven to twenty people) from purchasing the same kinds of fish and thus entering into competition with each other. For the most part, the “good” fresh fish had been picked over by 5 a.m., so peixeiras arriving around this time (or later) had little to choose from; they generally opted for the alternative, frozen fish. Wholesale frozen fish vendors were oddly positioned at Docapesca in that they were not readily visible. Unlike fresh fish vendors, who were spatially positioned at the center and along the internal walls of the facility, frozen fish companies required large refrigerators and thus were generally positioned within vault-like spaces around the perimeters of Docapesca.
On this particular day, Djina and Manuela entered a large vault with about six other peixeiras already present. Around 4:45 a.m., the vendor in charge of sales was popping in and out of an office space positioned across from the entryway. Some of the peixeiras approached him and requested lower prices, but it was clear that he was not budging; one after the other the peixeiras slowly walked away, discouraged. For the next twenty minutes there was a buzzing discussion in Cape Verdean Kriolu. The peixeiras all agreed that the vendor was in no position to bargain. This particular vendor had about forty crates of exposed, thawing fish, and there was absolutely no way that he would be able to sell them before the beginning of clean-up time at around 6:15 a.m., so they decided to sit him out. As the minutes passed it became clear that the vendor was growing anxious: “So, are you going to buy my fish or what?” Everyone in the room started to pass subtle smiles back and forth, which the vendor noticed. Upon realizing what was happening, he walked over to a large table next to the entryway and sat on it. With a smirk on his face, he crossed his arms tightly, swinging and dangling his legs down from the table. He then exclaimed, “So we'll all wait. I guess we all have all day, right?!” Minutes later Patricia, a veteran and well-respected peixeira, approached him. Standing to his left, in the same direction that he was facing, she extended her right arm to his right shoulder and held it tightly. Embarrassed, he did his best to escape, but to no avail. She then said, “You know we should go out!” after which she leaned forward and to the right to kiss him on the top of his head. Stunned, he jumped up and yelled, “Okay! You win!” Patricia, joyous, spun him around in about two rotations (she was twice his size), as though the vault had momentarily become a dance floor. Within seconds negotiations resumed; it was about 5:30 a.m., and at least ten other women entered the vault to negotiate. By 6:15 a.m. the vendor had sold all but two exposed crates of frozen fish. During this forty-five minute sales period, the conversations ranged from the financial negotiations leading to a sale, to the vendor's familiarity with the peixieras' country of origin. The vendor's conversation with Patricia proceeded as follows (the original Portuguese is given along with my English translation):
Katchupa is considered Cape Verde's national dish. It is a stew composed of meat, various tubers, corn, beans, and kale.
In this interaction, which was typical, Mario attempted to establish familiarity with his clients by inquiring about their backgrounds. He then conveyed his knowledge of “Cape Verdeanness” by referring to essentialized social practices in order to confirm his familiarity with Portugal's Cape Verdean population. Though the references were made after the sale officially began, suggesting that they were deployed to manage the flow of the encounter, Patricia's initiation of familiarity—a joking gesture of intimacy—was seized upon and drawn out by the younger vendor as he moved to facilitate the forward progress of the sale. But the interesting thing was the way that national origin was treated as a source of definitive information. Why was the vendor's national reference to behavior and social practice racially meaningful?
Katchupa and hip dancing were the behavioral cues that Mario used to ground the presence of difference. But these cues do not alone substantiate their identification as racial; and they cannot be considered racial, arguably, if they do not index fixed or essentialized difference. On their own, the terms katchupa and hip dancing can refer to a mode of recognition that does not require difference. What's more, the sale was largely orchestrated on peixeira terms, and Patricia's corroboration of Mario's cues spoke to the elusiveness of race as a negative or positive construct. I interpret katchupa and hip dancing as racialized cues because of the subject location that introduced this information (in a deictic sense), the historical context—the postcolonial present—in which the information was knowable or interpretable, and because of the character of the response to it.
The vendor introduced ethnic data in a way that conflated his familiarity with definitive knowledge. Because Patricia's response to his display facilitated exchanges for the other women as well, I categorize this scenario as an example of the appropriate use of race in this market setting. Significantly, ethnic information was not exchanged between the vendor and the clients. The vendor's background is unmarked—it is at once everywhere and nowhere. There was, however, an important moment in which Patricia did make reference to Mario's unmarked status, and it occurred when she turned to me (not him) to evaluate what she understood to be ironic about his behavior—his work ethic was identified as noteworthy because he was White, though whiteness was never mentioned. Here, whiteness was indirectly invoked through addressing me, a Black person (and the intended recipient of her remark). Assuming that we were the same, racially, referencing otherness did not make sense. In short, the unmarked, unidirectional location from which the behavioral cues originated, and the way in which the target responded to them, racially implicated the cues in question. Specifically, the recognition of difference as a mode of authority was juxtaposed against a logic of ethical exchange associated with market encounters. In this sense, recognition was asserted and received as neutral—regardless of what the actors might have really been thinking—as each party departed satisfied, having accomplished his or her material goals.
ON THE INAPPROPRIATE USE OF RACE AS CURRENCY
Difference recognition could also undermine sales. In such instances the vendor might refer to the difference in a peixeira in order to foil or impede a transaction. Specifically, familiarity with peixeira difference could be used to criticize a peixeira's market ethics. During the late summer of 1997, for instance, I observed an aggressive encounter between two peixeiras and a frozen fish vendor. The Docapesca closing whistle had just gone off—it was nearly 7 a.m. Searching for additional fish, we found ourselves at the back of the facility near a large, walk-in refrigerator. There, the peixeiras began negotiating for frozen fish from a vendor who was preparing to close. Time was running out, and the encounter began badly. First, the vendor would not allow the peixeiras to inspect the fish. The vendor told one peixeira—addressing her in the familiar and non-respectful tu form—that if she were really serious about buying the fish, she would make her purchase and be on her way. Djina stressed that she had a responsibility to her clients and that she was not going to lose money or business over fish she could not sell. The scenario unraveled as follows:
The four of us walked away in silence; we remained silent for the next five or so minutes.
The Angola reference, not unlike the use of Santiago in the previous scenario, invoked a sense of intimate knowing. But here knowledge was expressed for the purpose of racially situating the vendor's authority to halt a sales transaction: the rules had been broken. Throughout the period of silence, Patricia and another peixeira looked straight ahead as they tightly gripped their bucket handles. Djina shook her head, sought eye contact from each of us, and then continued to walk at what seemed to be a fraction of an inch behind us. This group meditation on how to respond to a disruption bridged Docapesca to the broader social world. Perhaps there was nothing to be said. The vendor asserted his authority using a logic that did not cohere with the rules of market culture at Docapesca; he relied upon a type of authority that was tied to the colonial past. Yet, here, the word Angola did something else. Angola, and the vendor's attachment to it, was used to authorize his use of racism, even though the peixeiras were not Angolan. In essence, when the vendor conveyed his personal familiarity with Angola, race and geography were blurred from his own perspective, and the rules for recognizing particularity were likewise broken. Yet the historical terrain from which he drew—in this non-public and physically isolated setting—made a racist charge difficult because there was no audience to ratify the injury. Importantly, this instance speaks to the fragility of antiracist rhetoric and especially the conditions of possibility that need to be in place for such claims to be able to accomplish the political work in question. In addition, this scenario also speaks to the demography of the public that is required to ratify such claims, i.e., the presence of both Blacks and Whites. The silence was about the fact that in that moment the peixeiras operated from the understanding that nothing could be said or proven: they had been “dissed.”
Breaking the race-racism rules at Docapesca was always criticized when over-hearers were present. In fact, the most important element in the above scenario was the fact that there was no audience—Black or White—to determine the status of the rules within the interaction. Generally when a vendor was accused of racism by a peixeira, he would be publicly shamed by the daunting stares he received from both peixeiras and his White colleagues (see below). In such cases, references to Africa were generally used to redeem one's moral status and to save face (cf. Morgan 1996).
In the following scenario an audience was present. However, what took place—an example of the misuse of race—was not about preventing a sale. Here, the vendor used the context of the sale and the types of rhetorical strategies that were identified with it to capture a peixeira's attention: he was romantically interested in her. The conversation took place at about 1:00 a.m.
Here the vendor manipulated the commodity field of sales transactions. Embedding his attraction for her within the discourse of business, Djina questioned the price of the octopus, presumably to determine in advance the fate of the interaction. Was this octopus—which peixeiras seldom purchased because it was costly and spoiled quickly—really affordable? Or, was this simply about a coffee date? And was the expression of the vendor's authority, in this way, a violation of the rules?
Scenarios such as this one were interesting because the public nature of such advances seemed to be judged by broader social standards of non-politicized heterosexual masculinity rather than business ethics that were tied to politicized racial politics. Thus here we have a situation where heterosexed politics—which were approached as if they operated outside of racist practice—could override the market rules for social conduct. In this sense, sex was not politicized within this space and so could slip in and out of raced encounters without publicly disrupting the race-racism rules. Further complications arose: vendors could choose to mask their intentions within the ritual code according to which race recognition was legitimate, i.e., within sales initiations. Attention to this detail is important because it suggests that the underpoliticized location of gender posed odd limitations upon peixeira bargaining power. The fact that gender was not recognized as a potential site of contestation, or something that could call a person's ethics into question, is key. It speaks volumes to the importance of collectivized understanding—whether for or against a political argument—in the production of practices that “ethically” demarcate difference. Tellingly, as Djina and I left the encounter, she rolled her eyes, looked over at me and grinned. Slowly, we strolled away.
ON THE APPROPRIATE USE OF THE CLAIM OF RACISM
On this particular Saturday morning I followed Bia. Shortly after entering the facility she got into a fight with a vendor. Bia shouted at a vendor at the top of her lungs, “Vocês patrícios se defendem! [You countrymen, you protect each other!]” The vendor, stunned by the intensity of her alarm, shouted back, “You're crazy!” Minutes earlier Bia had made a verbal agreement with this vendor for a crate of fish. As a rule, verbal agreements were legitimate sales contracts, and fish was seldom taken immediately following a sale. In most cases, someone else was paid to pick up the fish, as the crates packed with ice were extremely heavy. Once the transaction had been completed, the vendor was supposed to immediately mark the crate as sold. Bia went to another vendor directly across from the one with whom she had made the verbal arrangement. After unsuccessfully haggling with the second vendor, she quickly moved to the next stall, but not without catching wind of what was happening in the stall where she had just purchased fish: two men and a woman, all Portuguese, asked the vendor if they could purchase the crate that Bia had just requested. Here, I'm not sure if the crate was tagged “sold” when they first made their request. However, I did observe the vendor look over at Bia to confirm that she was not aware of what was going on. He then told the three clients that they could have the crate, though I did not hear at what price. He told them that they would have to take the crate immediately, as it had already been tentatively promised to a peixeira, and he looked in Bia's direction. The three buyers also looked over their shoulders for the peixeira in question and then quickly turned back to the vendor. As the woman in the group inspected the fish again before positioning the crate to be lifted by the two men, Bia screamed from a distance at the vendor. The exchange took place at about 2:30 a.m.
The vendor, in an apparent effort to redeem himself in front of the growing crowd, started to roll his eyes and shrug, as did the new owners of the fish. “I guess she was really attached to that crate,” remarked one. “Let's just get out of here and move on,” another commented. The peixeiras in the vicinity were closely monitoring the incident. One mumbled in a strategically forced and elite nasal accent, “You KNOW what you did was wrong.” As the seconds passed, and justice—from Bia's perspective—had not been served, Bia became irate. The vendor addressed Bia in the familiar tu form.
Bia turned her back and walked off. Another peixeira approached her to ask if she was okay. Bia responded loudly, in a forced nasal Portuguese accent, with her back to the vendor, “I just lost some fish because of a RACIST vendor and his RACIST countrymen.” The vendor overheard this; he seemed both embarrassed and disgusted. He looked over at a colleague vendor who was now looking at him oddly, as if to question his move, wondering whether the incident was indeed racist. The vendor grew increasingly angry and embarrassed, and finally decided to defend himself.
The other vendors immediately took a different approach—there was a feeling of intensity in the air. Bia then swaggered off, grinning, as she mumbled in a low voice, “I guess the problem is yours now …” The other peixeiras broke the tension by beginning to chuckle in a hushed though audible fashion. They slowly strolled past the angry vendor whom they boycotted for a respectable thirty minutes or so.
In this scenario, the vendor stressed his Mozambican background in order to defend himself against the racist accusation. How could he be racist, if they were alike? In contrast to how Angola was deployed to assert the frozen fish vendor's racial distance from the peixeiras, Mozambique was used strategically to erase it. Yet, at the same time, Mozambique did operate similarly to the Angola reference in that both instances were based on the idea that the circumstances of the past were somehow relevant to the speakers' claims in the present.
Note also the use of a forced nasal and hence elite Portuguese accent by the peixeira who exclaimed, “You know what you did was wrong!” Here, authority was recognized in a racially meaningful way by mocking a form of Portuguese voicing of a social position that the working-class vendors did not occupy. Specifically, this particular peixeira publicly indexed the role that Portuguese audience members played in the authorization of racist claims, and the elite accent accomplished this in a way that falsely recognized the working-class vendors as prominent authority figures in this setting.
Scenarios such as this one prompted me to question how people come to distinguish between the recognition of race as a neutral act, and the identification of racist practice; for there is much more to this scene than simple conflict over a racist encounter. On the one hand, there is the issue of injustice: the vendor's behavior had to be dealt with in order to clear the air. On the other hand, if racist incidents that occurred in public had their own mechanisms for resolution, in such a way that the offended party (the peixeira) was not left resentful or injured—in the sense of Nietzsche's (1887[2003]) treatment of ressentiment—and in fact experienced vindication, how then does this contour the reading of racism within these public encounters? In the end, the fish was returned to Bia, and the vendor was publicly humiliated in front of the peixeiras and his peers. What's more, the team of three that attempted to purchase Bia's fish hurried to the other side of the facility, presumably to purchase fish in a location where no one would recognize them.
Upon contemplating this scene, we are left with the following question: what are the conditions under which race can be used to “turn the tables,” in a moral sense? Bia experienced some redemption here, and the other peixeiras were also able to cash in on the encounter, as vendors in the vicinity seemed wary of the consequences of being “called out” within the thirty or so minutes that followed. And many other peixeiras chose to purchase the bulk of their fish within the same vicinity that day. While they were not as successful the following day, as the shift was a temporary response to the volatile incident, this scenario highlights the role that the audience plays in the articulation of racial grievances.
ON THE INAPPROPRIATE USE OF THE CLAIM OF RACISM
While the recognition of racial difference could be diverted for other reasons, claims of racism were sometimes interpreted as quick responses to events not fully investigated. Nearly two hours after Djina's octopus scenario, she assumed responsibility for wrongly accusing a vendor of racism. At about 2:45 a.m. on the same day, Djina told the vendor that she was interested in a particular crate of fish, but she was not sure if she wanted to buy it. The vendor, using the formal/respectful third-person form, vôce, told her that the deal was up to her and that he was willing to do his best to meet her price. Djina told him that she still wanted to shop around, but she was interested in his fish.
At about 3:55 a.m. Djina approached the vendor and asked for the fish. The vendor ignored her. Djina, irritated, started searching the ground for the crate she wanted; she realized it was no longer there.
Djina's first response, “That's how you and your countrymen do!” accused the vendor of racism. She deployed a mode of action that could be used to redress a wrongful act. But here the vendor disproved her accusation by letting her know that the fish had been sold to one of her colleagues. Had the fish been sold to someone Portuguese, the outcome may or may not have been different. But it was only through the introduction of someone “like her” that the legitimacy of the vendor's interaction was immediately established. Here, the resolution of the use of race confirmed his moral integrity as a business person. Yet there is more going on in this encounter. While it seems that Djina's claim was in error, it is important to note that hers was not the same face-saving technique as that of vendors: peixeiras were identified as the objects of racism, not its perpetrators. This meant that their apologies were generally between themselves and the individual vendor, instead of to the public.
Peixeira apologies further complicated readings of power and social practice at Docapesca because vendors themselves rarely apologized; to do so would be to admit to uncivilized conduct. By contrast, peixeiras generally offered apologies when they recognized that they had committed an error. But these apologies, importantly, were cultural-political moves that the Cape Verdeans I worked with generally used with one another, whether in Portugal or in Cape Verde; they had to do with a code of ethics concerning admission of error. So how should one read these two practices together? Is this about the convergence of disparate cultural practices within a given setting? Or is this about the politicized terms under which disagreements arise between differently empowered subjects? The answer lies in the tension between the response to both questions, and this tension is why subject-specific rebuttals and forms of address could never solidify, alone, the social location of the speaker in question. It was precisely what happened when exchanges were put into motion, as audiences were selectively pulled in or excluded according to what was historically and politically possible, that allowed a social field of interpretability to emerge from moment to moment.
CONCLUSION
The colonial past was not a resource that peixeiras overtly drew upon at Docapesca. Some vendors, however, did make reference to the colonial past in an effort to add or detract value from a potential sale, or to save face in embarrassing situations. And peixeiras engaged these ploys in their various responses to the vendors. My specific concern has been about how to ethnographically tease out the significance of subject-specific treatments of historical information. It is only microlevel detail of the kind discussed above that can make it possible to perceive when and how race identification and the act of racism operate as distinct ethical gestures in daily interaction.
I have not approached the speakers in these scenarios as independent agents who reproduced their own political locations. Because race is a discourse (Hall 1996, p. 21), I have privileged dynamic interaction over the situations of individual subjects. The aim here has been to show how subjects emerge as real and knowable through practice. Yet, by the same token, in addressing the broader political history that located vendors and peixeiras in hierarchical relation to each other, I noted that historical references such as Mozambique and Angola operated as “truth” sites used by vendors to enact a certain racial subjectivity. These were “truth” sites in that they tied the vendors to dominant nationalist narratives found both within and beyond this market setting; they were omnipresent references that in part defined the experience of “being Portuguese.” Peixeiras, by contrast, could not claim these colonial, historical sites, at least not in a way that could lead to political or material advantages in contemporary EU Portugal. As former subjects of the empire, they were dealing with the postcolonial realities of their locations as foreigners and migrants in Lisbon. Furthermore, because this particular fish market facility had been relocated, the conditions of possibility that had once made these market encounters typical—i.e., limited state interference in unlicensed market activities, stable employment in the fish business for vendors, and stable income for peixeiras—had likewise shifted or dissolved. This suggests, in retrospect, that there was something socially problematic about the encounters I describe above, particularly as Portugal has become increasingly integrated economically into the EU.
One of the primary consequences of integration has been a change in Portugal's relationship with its former colonial subjects, as evidenced in migration-inspired employment trends. Thus, the relocation of Docapesca allowed fewer and fewer Cape Verdean women into the market space, pushing them into the other available economic niche: waged domestic labor. Today, most former pexeiras are now involved in waged “women's” work, where they largely interact with working-poor and middle-class Portuguese women as their co-workers and employers, respectively. Significantly, the terms of sociality in these encounters tend to be more formal than those in the fish market; displays of familiarity and intimacy have not typically arisen in instruction-driven janitorial or housecleaning jobs. Perhaps this is a product of the heterosexed “legacy” in which raced intimacies were historically constructed. The women I worked with lamented the transition to waged work; they generally interpreted these new encounters as “migrant gigs” that involved different types of entanglements with Portuguese citizens. Documented waged work took away labor autonomy from legal residents while at the same time providing access to social security benefits. It also made it easier for women to move back and forth legally between Portugal and Cape Verde; they could now prove that they had “legitimate” work commitments in Portugal. In contrast, non-documented former peixeiras are completely vulnerable to their employers' work ethics.
A complex market setting such as Docapesca, where small-scale vendors needed to sell their products, and where peixeiras relied upon their negotiating skills to lower purchasing costs, calls for close analysis. By observing how vendors' recollections of a mythic colonial past were used to end or push sales transactions, I have addressed the operative value of colonial history as it was deployed and engaged in market transactions. By focusing on participant groups' disparate engagement with the past, as mediated through their different responses to one another, I have suggested that these invocations of history simultaneously indexed familiarity and difference in the articulation of ethical conduct in this market space. Attention to these details helps us to see how, in all its elusiveness, “race” can frame commodification and politics as polarized practices.
