Vinícius Venancio de Sousa

Over the course of the last decades, a growing number of women who are mothers from Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, and Nigeria migrated to Cape Verde, a lusophone archipelagic country in West Africa. Praia, the Cape Verdean capital, is home to half the foreigners who make landfall in the archipelago. The reasons why this country becomes a destination for these women are manifold: the search for better living conditions, the chance to rejoin their families, escape from oppressive family situations, a path to Europe or America, etc. Inserted for the most part in the field of informal labor and the care economy, these women face many new challenges in this new context. I build the present proposal aiming to answer the question: what are the processes of integration and the conflicts that arise from the mobilities, the sociability networks and the construction of modes of belonging of this populational contingent in Cape Verde? Here, I take the categories such as gender, race, generation, and nationality, to investigate how these women constitute and think of themselves not only through the dichotomy of man-woman, but through their labor and mobility relations and, above all, their relations with each other.