This article aims at analyzing some of the identity and aesthetic resources employed by Cape Verdean immigrants in the region of Lisbon, Portugal, as part of the strategy of adaptation to the new context. The concept of expressive manifestations, aesthetic manifestations which possess some identity nature, serves as support to the empirical object construction and analysis, associated with the presupposition that traditions are invented (Hobsbawn), communities are imagined (Anderson) and aesthetic manifestations only have meaning in the social frame from which they emerge (Duvignaud). The analysed data were collected among Cape Verdean immigrants or their descendents who live in the Alto da Cova da Moura district and the approach was qualitative, not intending to be exhaustive. The research concludes that the observed immigrants, when they re-invent their traditions, create original expressive manifestations and find in the performance world a context with some level of democracy in which the ethnic stereotypes are somewhat made sublime.
Cape verdeans; expressive manifestations; identity resources; immigrants