This essay observes how race adds value to market exchanges at a
fisheries facility in Lisbon, Portugal. I examine scenarios that primarily
involved interactions between Portuguese men who sold fish and Cape
Verdean immigrant women who purchased it. The scenarios show how race is
crystallized in interaction and how differently raced actors co-utilize
race to accomplish different ends. When vendors initiated difference
recognition for the purpose of promoting a sale, the value of race in that
moment was not independent of how Cape Verdean women chose to ratify it. I
show how racial knowledge could be mediated through its commodity status,
as Cape Verdean women's responses codetermined the political contents
of Portuguese men's racial ascriptions. Importantly, the argument is
not that subjects independently engaged in the reproduction of their
privileged or marginal social status. Rather, the dialectic condition of
interaction involved paired forms of engagement that produced difference.
An examination of this context helps illuminate when and how race
recognition, in public, is identified as neutral or politically
charged.