Black Athenians: Making and Resisting Racialized Symbolic Boundaries in the Greek Street Market

Abstract

In this article, I show how groups and individuals maintain racialized symbolic boundaries at the micro-level of personal interactions. Using data collected during an ethnographic study in Athens, Greece, where I worked as a fruit vendor in a street market, I detail how local Greek vendors and immigrant workers use language, gesture, olfaction, along with their interpretations of faith and sexuality to reproduce patterns of social distance that allow for racialized stigma and discrimination. I apply the framework of symbolic interactionism and draw from literature on symbolic boundaries to explore how immigrant street market workers experience and resist racialization throughout the interaction order. I show that racialization underlies perceptions of the immigrant “other,” especially in the case of Greece where race is often ignored as a crucial factor.