Laboring in the Shadow of Empire : Race, Gender, and Care Work in Portugal

Laboring in the Shadow of Empire: Race, Gender, and Care Work in Portugal examines the everyday lives of an African-descendant care service workforce that labors in an ostensibly “anti-racial” Europe and against the backdrop of the Portuguese colonial empire. While much of the literature on global care work has focused on Asian and Latine migrant care workers, there is comparatively less research that explicitly examines African care workers and their migration histories to Europe. Sociologist Celeste Vaughan Curington focuses on Portugal—a European setting with comparatively liberal policies around family settlement and naturalization for migrants. In this setting, rapid urbanization in the late twentieth century, along with a national push to reconcile work and family, has shaped the growth of paid home care and cleaning service industries. Many researchers focus on informal work settings, where immigrant rights are restricted and many workers are undocumented or without permanent residence status. Curington instead examines workers who have accessed citizenship or permanent residence status and also explores African women’s experiences laboring in care and service industries in the formal market, revealing how deeply colonial and intersectional logics of a racialized and international division of reproductive labor in Portugal render these women “hyper-invisible” and “hyper-visible” as “appropriate” workers in Lisbon. Laboring in the Shadow of Race, Gender and Care Work in Portugalexamines the everyday lives ofan African descendant care service workforce that labors in an ostensibly anti-racial Europe and against the backdrop of the Portuguese colonial empire.While much of the literature on global care work has focused on Asian and Latine migrant care workers, there is comparatively less research that explicitly examines African care workers and their migration histories to Europe. Sociologist Celeste V. Curington focuses on Portugala European setting with comparatively liberal policies around family settlement and naturalization for migrants. In this setting, rapid urbanization in the late twentieth century, along with a national push to reconcile work and family, have shaped the growth of paid home care and cleaning service industries. Many researchers focus on informal work settings where immigrant rights are restricted, and many workers are undocumented or without permanent residence status. Curington instead examined workers who have accessed citizenship or permanent residence status and also explores African womens experiences laboring in care and service industries in the formal market,revealing how deeply colonial and intersectional logics of a racialized and international division of reproductive labor in Portugal render these women hyper-invisible and hyper-visible as appropriate workers in Lisbon. Cover Title Page Copyright Page Contents Introduction 1 The Making of a Gendered and Racialized Care Sector in Portugal 2 Converging Differences: Stories of Migration 3 Confronting Everyday Gendered Racism in Portugal 4 Negotiating and Challenging Gendered Racism in Home Care 5 Negotiating and Challenging Gendered Racism in Cleaning Work 6 Spaces and Places of Joyful Belonging 7 Laboring beyond the Shadow of Empire Methodological Appendix Suggested Readings Glossary Acknowledgments Notes References Index About the Author