This paper explore some aspects of ethnographic fieldwork in Boston, MA (EUA) as part of an ongoing research on the interactions and negotiations seeking to build a “Portuguese Speaking Community’ among the Portuguese, Cape-Verdean and Brazilian Diasporas. The challenge is to provide a fresh perspective on the meanings of ‘Portuguese’ category by taking its interactional and contested nature as it is build in the everyday life. The ethnographic perspective from the bottom of city life wants to break up common compartmentalization within separate fields of study hewing to narrow disciplinary and regional boundaries about ‘immigrant’, ‘ethic’, ‘racial’ or ‘national’ identities. These basic features of the scholarly literature on ethnicity, race and nationhood have led to an unfortunate lack of cross-fertilization among fields that are, in fact, so closely connected. By choosing a multi-ethnic organization as the ethnographic case, simultaneously linguistic based and place-based in a neighborhood with a mix of people from these three ancestries, the aim is to reflect about the dynamics of emerging ethnic identities, within a system of classification and categorization that is based on commonsense knowledge, narratives, routines, public ceremonies, social interactions, festivals, touristic practices, ethnic marketing, and so on. This institution is the case that provides a privileged locus for the integrated and multidimensional analysis of urban ethnicity as a local instrumental process of signification and negotiation embedded in socio-cultural, political and economic practices.

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ethnography