This study contributes to an anthropology of AIDS by focusing on the interrelations between sex, survival, and the quest for social legitimacy on the streets of one of the most impoverished urban neighborhoods of Tanzania. The author follows the daily lives of a group of divorced, separated, widowed, or unmarried women. Such women have not only received much attention amongst researchers and public health officials as being at high risk for AIDS, but they are forced to negotiate a high level of social stigma and popular speculation regarding their HIV status. The author demonstrates how the women construct a shared identity in the midst of tremendous social and economic pressures and how that identity is intimately tied to their sexual practices and personal assessments of risk for AIDS. AIDS is Our Shadow compels us to reexamine our assumptions regarding AIDS in Africa, and highlights how little we know about the everyday lives and personal struggles of those individuals and groups who are most vulnerable to the disease.