front cover of Between Race and Ethnicity
Between Race and Ethnicity
Cape Verdean American Immigrants, 1860-1965
Marilyn Halter
University of Illinois Press, 1993
Arriving in New England first as crew members of whaling vessels, Afro-Portuguese immigrants from Cape Verde later came as permanent settlers and took work in the cranberry industry, on the docks, and as domestic workers.

Marilyn Halter combines oral history with analyses of ships' records to chart the history and adaptation patterns of the Cape Verdean Americans. Though identifying themselves in ethnic terms, Cape Verdeans found that their African-European ancestry led their new society to view them as a racial group. Halter emphasizes racial and ethnic identity formation to show how Cape Verdeans set themselves apart from the African Americans while attempting to shrug off white society's exclusionary tactics. She also contrasts rural life on the bogs of Cape Cod with New Bedford’s urban community to reveal the ways immigrants established their own social and religious groups as they strove to maintain their Crioulo customs.

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front cover of New Migrants in the Marketplace
New Migrants in the Marketplace
Boston's Ethnic Entrepreneurs
Marilyn Halter
University of Massachusetts Press, 2013
More than fifty years after publication of Oscar Handlin's pioneering work, Boston's Immigrants, this book takes a fresh look at the city's most recent arrivals. Although Massachusetts ranks high in the United States in immigrant arrivals, it has been little studied in the scholarship of either recent migration or ethnic enterprise. This book seeks to redress that oversight.

Using an ethnographic, comparative approach, New Migrants in the Marketplace: Boston's Ethnic Entrepreneurs examines the economic culture and small business activity of a range of new migrant groups in the Greater Boston Area, including Jews from the former Soviet Union, British West Indians, Greeks, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Khmers, and Haitians.

Contributors are Mehdi Bozorgmehr, Claudia Der-Martirosian, Marilyn Halter, Violet Johnson, Peggy Levitt, Ivan Light, Caesar Mavratsas, Georges Sabagh, and Nancy Smith-Hefner. The book includes a photo essay by Steven J. Gold.
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