Resilient forms of tradition in the African Diaspora in Lisbon: Kola San Jon and the right to the city

The contemporary urban sphere presents us with challenges of different (dis)orders and is itself one of the main issues to be addressed nowadays. This article deals with the public use of city space in neoliberal times and the modalities and consequences of its appropriation for social life, according to Lefebvre. The essay focuses on the Bairro Cova da Moura and the inscription, in 2013, of the Cape Verdean Kola San Jon in the National Inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage. The analysis is based on ethnographic research undertaken between 2011 and 2018 and deals with Kola San Jon both as a cultural practice that actualises social processes and as a strategical identity device that reclaims the visibility of the community. We focus on the yearly festival at Cova da Moura and the schedule of activities outside the neighbourhood, considering the struggle for the valorisation of the place in Lisbon Metropolitan Area, as well as the process of recognising Kola as heritage in Portugal. The reflection around a practice committed to strategies of action that generate forms of resistance and identity-based assertion, takes us to the question of the right to the city, both in relation to a place that capitalism pushes to the margins as well as a playful event capable of the generating citizens centralities. Kola San Jon calls to the fore the notion that we currently inhabit, with increasing intensity, webs in which tangled trajectories cross each other, in ways that are more important than frontiers.