Paper short abstract:

This proposal results from an ethnographic research conducted last year in Boston area on ethnic interactions across Portuguese speaking people and their local level negotiations to construct a community of language. The main purpose is to understand the emerging of a “linguistic community”

Paper long abstract:

The study was conducted on an association that provides social services to populations of Portuguese, Cape Verdean, and Brazilian ancestries in the state of Massachusetts where Portuguese is the second most spoken foreign language. Located in an area that has had a strong presence of Portuguese speaking populations from different countries, this association capitalizes its mediating role to multiple Portuguese speaking communities, as a key player bridging economic and political institutions, and defending "ethno-linguistic consensus" among Portuguese and Cape Verdean Kriolu speakers. Thus, this institution provides a privileged locus for the integrated and multidimensional analysis of urban ethnicity. Hence, this project will focus on the function that the Portuguese language has in the construction of ties of signification and insertion in the society of reception, identifying its institutional role as well as its instrumental and operational potential in the making of an identity that transcends national, ethnic/racial divisions. This study fills a significant lacuna, for whereas other minorities in the US, such as the "Hispanic/Latino minority is bounded by principles of shared Spanish, the Portuguese speaking communities have not defined themselves collectively based on the use of a common language. Despite the Portuguese and Cape Verdean secular history of migration and the recent rise of Brazilian migration to the US, the "invisibility" of the Portuguese speaking communities in the scientific literature on migration is commonly acknowledged. Nevertheless, in the present, there is an emerging tendency to market ethnicity and identity as well as redefine symbolic boundaries around the use of Portuguese in the USA.