Paper Short Abstract:

This paper examines the role of individual vigilance in the formation of class. Focusing on the social and transatlantic mobility of migrants moving between the Azores and California , I show how being alert about one’s sensed social position contributes to the formation of class .

Paper Abstract:

Over centuries, the Azores, a Portuguese archipelago in the North Atlantic Ocean, have been left behind by its residents in pursuit of better livelihoods elsewhere. The resulting transatlantic ties, comprising both outmigration and return migration in significant numbers, have produced a dynamic economic setting that foments projects of distinction and watchful self-positioning amidst conflicts between returnees and permanent residents. I suggest that vigilance plays a decisive role in controlling one’s collective image and in consolidating or enhancing one’s (sensed) class location..

While an emergent class of highly mobile emigrants who move between the US and the Azores regularly is neither static nor circumscribed, the migrants’ comparatively coherent interests, material wealth, and life histories nonetheless impact on local dynamics of inequality. In a socioeconomic situation of outmigration and return, monetary aspiration and criminal deportation, one’s self-consciousness and sense of distinction from others are matters of concern. In this paper, I am interested in everyday instances of personal and intersubjective watchfulness in order to analyse how forms of vigilance relationally underwrite the formation of a social class of wealthy emigrants.