"Luis 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 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 area of Lisbon, this study provides an analysis of these two disparate groups and illustrates 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 that struggle with a racialized social order imposed and maintained for decades and, in some cases, centuries."--BOOK JACKET.