ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the relations between Lisbon's 'foreign immigrants' and 'social' organisations on the basis of a fieldwork carried out in several neighbourhoods of Portugal's capital during the late 1990s. After the arrival of hundreds of thousands of retornados in the mid-1970s, it was during the 1980s that 'foreign immigrants' mainly from Lusophone African countries and Brazil landed in Portugal in significant numbers. In the late 1980s a significant number of Brazilian capitalists emigrated to Portugal because the political and economic crisis in Brazil and because Portugal was experiencing an economic boom after joining the European Community. Portuguese capitalists can be characterised by a unity in diversity. In any case, both Associação Industrial Portuguesa (AIP) and Confederação da Indústria Portuguesa (CIP) have regular contacts and direct line with the Portuguese government. In the early 1970s the key points of Portuguese working class-resistance to the dictatorship were concentrated in the Lisbon metropolitan area.
