Caribbean Migration

Globalized Identities

Mary Chamberlain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134707669
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This anthology represents important and original directions in the study of Caribbean migration. It takes a comparative perspective on the Caribbean people's migratory experiences to North America, Europe, and within the Caribbean. Using a multi-disciplinary approach, the book discusses:
* the causes of migration
* the experiences of migrants
* the historical, cultural and political processes
* issues of gender and imperialism
* the methodology of migration studies, including oral history.

Part I
Rethinking diaspora

1
Cultural diaspora
The Caribbean case

Robin Cohen

Migration scholars—normally a rather conservative breed of sociologists, historians demographers and geographers—have recently been bemused to find their subject matter assailed by a bevy of postmodernists, novelists and scholars of cultural studies. A reconstitution of the notion of diaspora has been a central concern of these space invaders. For example, the editor of the US journal Diaspora, Khacha Tölölyan, a professor of English at Wesleyan University, announced its birth (1991:3) with the following statement:

The conviction underpinning this manifesto disguised as a ‘Preface’ is that Diaspora must pursue, in texts literary and visual, canonical and vernacular, indeed in all cultural productions and throughout history, the traces of struggles over and contradictions within ideas and practices of collective identity, of homeland and nation. Diaspora is concerned with the way in which nations, real yet imagined communities, are fabulated, brought into being, made and unmade, in culture and politics, both on the land people call their own and in exile.

For postmodernists the collective identity of homeland and nation is a vibrant and constantly changing set of cultural interactions that fundamentally question the very ideas of ‘home’ and ‘host’. It is demonstrable, for example, that unidirectional—‘migration to’ or ‘return from’—forms of movement are being replaced by asynchronous, transversal flows that involve visiting, studying, seasonal work, tourism and sojourning, rather than whole-family migration, permanent settlement and the adoption of exclusive citizenships. These changing patterns have important sociological consequences. As Vertovec puts it:

Aesthetic styles, identifications and affinities, dispositions and behaviours, musical genres, linguistic patterns, moralities, religious practices and other cultural phenomena are more globalized, cosmopolitan and creolized or ‘hybrid’ than ever before. This is especially the case among youth of transnational communities, whose initial socialization has taken place within the crosscurrents of more than one cultural field, and whose ongoing forms of cultural expression and identity are often self-consciously selected, syncretized and elaborated from more than one cultural heritage.

(Vertovec 1996, private correspondence)

One way of conceptualizing the social and cultural outcomes described is to loosen the historical meanings of the notion of ‘diaspora’ to encompass the construction of these new identities and subjectivities. Suppose we adopt the expression ‘cultural diaspora’ to encompass the lineaments of many migration experiences in the late modern world. Can cultures can be thought of as having lost their territorial moorings, to have become in effect ‘travelling cultures’? Can migrants of African descent from the Caribbean be considered as one of the paradigmatic cases of a cultural diaspora? Do we need more than postcolonial theory to demonstrate that, in practice, a cultural diaspora has emerged? Do we need instead to explore the common experiences, intellectual and political visions and religious movements that cement Afro-Caribbean cultural and migratory experiences? Is the notion of a ‘black Atlantic’ adequate to our purposes?

THE CARIBBEAN: MIGRATION AND DIASPORA

I turn now to my case study, the consideration of whether the Caribbean peoples abroad constitute a ‘new’, ‘postcolonial’, ‘hybrid’ cultural diaspora. The first and most evident problem in seeing Caribbean peoples as any kind of diaspora is that they are not native to the area. As is well known, the autochtonous peoples of the Caribbean, the Caribs and Arawaks, failed to survive the glories of Western civilization—nearly all died from conquest, overwork and disease. Virtually everybody in the Caribbean came from somewhere else—the African slaves from West Africa, the white settlers, planters and administrators from Europe, and the indentured workers who arrived after the collapse of slavery, from India. This may in and of itself disqualify any consideration given to the idea of a Caribbean diaspora. Settler and immigrant societies are normally conceived of as points of arrival, not departure, sites of a renewed collectivity, not of dissolution, emigration and dispersion.

Second, the peoples of the Caribbean may be thought of as parts of other diasporas— notably the African victim diaspora, the Indian labour diaspora and the European imperial diasporas.¹ Again, surely it would be expected that, if they are free to migrate, a significant proportion of any diasporic community should wish to return to their real or putative homeland. Yet, while some of European descent have returned ‘home’ to Europe, Caribbean people of Indian and African origin have in recent years been notably disinterested in returning either to India or Africa.

Despite these considerable conceptual obstacles, Hall (1990:222–37) none the less is convinced that a distinctive Caribbean diasporic identity can be discerned. Caribbean identity, he argues, cannot be rendered simply as a transposition of an African identity to the New World because the rupture of slavery and the admixture of other peoples built into a Caribbean identity a sense of hybridity, diversity and difference. Hall poses the question, ‘What makes African-Caribbean people already people of a diaspora?’ and answers as follows:

Diaspora does not refer us to those scattered tribes whose identity can only be secured in relation to some sacred homeland to which they must at all costs return, even if it means pushing other people into the sea. This is the old, the imperializing, the hegemonizing form of ‘ethnicity’. We have seen the fate of the people of Palestine at the hands of this backward conception of diaspora (and the complicity of the West with it). The diaspora experience as I intend it here is defined not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of identity which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference.

(Hall 1990:235)

In this excerpt Hall is essentially concerned with the diasporic identity that Caribbean peoples created within the geographical bounds of the Caribbean itself. A much more challenging field of enquiry is the degree to which they affirmed, reproduced and created a diasporic identity in the places to which they subsequently moved. Before discussing the nature of this Caribbean diaspora abroad, it is necessary to provide a quick brushstroke picture of their migration history over the last century or so.

I have just mentioned that Indo-Caribbeans did not go back to India, nor Afro- Caribbeans to Africa. Strictly speaking, this was not always true. At the end of the period of indenture about a quarter of the Indo-Caribbeans returned to India. In the African case, the British colonialists recruited a few dozen Afro-Caribbean train drivers for Nigeria, the French appointed an Antillean governor, Felix Eboué, in the Cameroons and a remarkable young psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon, who was later to become one of the most prominent of all developing world intellectuals, was assigned to the colonial medical service in Algeria. Some voluntary migration, including Garveyite and Rastafarian (see below) settlements, also occurred.

However, these were mere drops in the ocean of Caribbean people who decided to migrate to Panama, the USA and Europe. When Ferdinand de Lesseps, the famous Suez Canal maker, floated a new Panama Canal Company to link the Pacific Ocean to the Caribbean Sea, the Bourse went crazy with the prospects of great profits. In fact, the venture proved a long-drawn-out financial failure. The canal and railway works were dogged by mismanagement and the workers suffered greatly from malaria, snakebite, swamp fever, industrial accidents and bad treatment. The hands for this operation were drawn from many countries, but predominantly from Jamaica.

The Afro-Caribbean minority located in the strip of slums surrounding the Panama Canal Company area is descended from these workers. They have remained largely poor and underprivileged in the Panamanian context, with the key positions of authority and influence being occupied by Hispanics. Other small enclaves in Central America are drawn from Caribbean peoples brought there to establish banana plantations, or to undertake public works. Honduras and some small enclaves in Nicaragua and Guatemala are inhabited by descendants of archipelago Afro-Caribbeans, often still fiercely resisting the abandonment of the English language, which they value as part of their diasporic identity.

Afro-Caribbeans in the USA

The bulk of migrants, however, went to the USA, perhaps a million from the Anglophone Caribbean alone. They went in so many capacities that it would be impossible in this chapter to describe fully the Caribbean social structure in the USA.² Temporary contract workers cut cane in Florida; Cuban exiles went to Miami, Haitians often arrived as illegals or boat people; while many middle-class professional people from the Anglophone Caribbean occupied important roles in medicine, in teaching and in retail services. One of the oft-remarked on, but imperfectly researched, characteristics of the English-speaking Caribbean peoples in the USA is their extraordinary success and prominence, not only in the wider black community, but in American society more generally. Within some parts of the black community, Caribbean people are sometimes referred to, in a not entirely friendly way, as ‘Jewmaicans’. The Caribbean community monopolizes the laundries, travel agents and hairdressing shops in several New York districts. Moreover, Caribbean people have played a prominent role in political activity— the Garveyite movement, the civil rights struggles and the Black Power Movement being the most notable.

Afro-Caribbeans in the UK

In contrast to the USA, the fortunes of Caribbean migrants in Europe have been less happy. The possible explanations for this relative lack of success are complex: different groups may have gone to Europe, only largely unskilled positions were on offer there, and some migration (notably to the UK and the Netherlands) was ‘panic’ migration— with the networks of friends, relations and openings in business and education not fully prefigured or prepared. A number of scholars, as well as Caribbean migrants themselves, insist that the high levels of racial discrimination and disadvantage they experienced seriously jeopardized their chances of success (Solomos 1989; Gilroy 1987).

The bulk of Caribbean migration to the UK occurred in the 1950s, and came to a rapid halt in the early 1960s with the implementation of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act forbidding further unregulated migration. With the exception of ‘the rush to beat the ban’, the movement of migrants to the UK closely shadowed the ebbs and flows of the job vacancies (Peach 1968). Despite finding unskilled jobs, the early experiences of Caribbean people in the UK were often negative ones. They felt that their wartime loyalty had been unacknowledged and that they were treated as an unwelcome problem rather than as valued citizens of the Empire coming to help the motherland. Besides this psychic shock of rejection, at a more practical level occupational mobility was limited, educational successes were meagre and the second generation showed high rates of crime and unemployment.

It is important, however, not be too mired in the negative images that both racists and anti-racists need for their respective political causes. British girls of Afro-Caribbean origin outperform both black and white British boys in school examinations. As in the USA, there is a disproportionately high representation of black athletes and sports persons in the boxing ring, in track and field events, and in cricket and football.³ Afro- Caribbeans are also well represented in broadcasting and in literary and artistic pursuits, especially the performing arts. Even though this is a somewhat backhanded compliment, the 1996 British Crime Survey, based on a sample of 10,000 people, showed that in the age group 16–29, whereas 43 per cent of whites claimed to have taken drugs, the figure for their Afro-Caribbean peer group was substantially lower, at 34 per cent (cited in the Guardian, 4 May 1996:5).

Perhaps a more significant finding is that the latest census, 1991, shows that the level of ghettoization is low and has been falling since 1961. Using a sophisticated index of segregation, Peach (1995) shows that the levels of Caribbean segregation in London are about half those of African Americans in New York. Moreover, only 3 per cent of the Afro-Caribbean population lived in ‘enumeration districts’ (the smallest census unit covering 700 people) in which they formed 30 per cent of the population or more. Taken together, these positive indicators may signify a first stage in a wider and deeper thrust to social mobility—in the third, if not the second, generation.

Caribbean peoples in the Netherlands

The Netherlands received about half as many Caribbean immigrants as the UK— approximately 250,000 compared with Britain’s 500,000. The numbers, however, are much more significant when they are considered as a proportion of both the Dutch population and of the Caribbean source populations. Caribbean migrants arrived from all over the Dutch Antilles, but predominantly from the former Dutch colony of Surinam. So large was the departure that the population of Surinam was depleted by about half. In that many people were persuaded to leave because of the prospect of an independence with diminished Dutch support, the Surinamese in the Netherlands can be seen to fit into the category of ‘panic migrants’ mentioned earlier.

The Surinamese in the Netherlands divide, roughly equally, into two ethnic sections— Afro-Surinamese and Indo-Surinamese. The housing situation for many Surinamese is surprisingly favourable—their arrival in Amsterdam conveniently coincided with the abandonment of a ‘white elephant’ set of luxury apartments the local Dutch did not wish to inhabit. A comparative study of Caribbean peoples in Britain and the Netherlands (Cross and Entzinger 1988) yielded many similarities. In a more recent study, Cross (1995:72) maintains that exclusion on the grounds of culture, way of life or newness of incorporation is less salient than the class exclusion that arises from the collapse of blue-collar industries. In this respect, the cutting of welfare benefits in the UK in conformity with the ideology of neo-liberalism contrasts with the greater endurance of welfare provisions in the Netherlands. The circumstances of Caribbean peoples in the Netherlands may improve relatively given their more benign public provision.

Antilleans in France

Caribbean migration to France arises in an apparently different form from the cases just considered. The major source areas are the DOM (départements d’outre-mer) territories of Martinique and Guadeloupe. Because of the juridical status of the DOM as organic parts of France, migration to the continent is officially considered as internal migration— simply as if one French citizen were to move from one département to another. The numbers involved are thought to be about 200,000; and the urban centres, particularly Paris, are the main destinations.

Of course it is important not to confuse appearance with substance. Again, we notice a high predominance of unskilled, manual and public-sector jobs being held by people from the French Antilles, particularly in the 1970s. However, a significant white-collar salariat (for example in the banks and post office) has been rec...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FIGURES AND TABLES
• CONTRIBUTORS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: RETHINKING DIASPORA
• PART II: MIGRATION NARRATIVES
• PART III: ETHNICITY AND IDENTITY
• PART IV: FAMILY AND IDENTITY
• PART V: CARIBBEAN MIGRATION CULTURES
• PART VI: GENDER, SOCIALISATION AND SURVIVAL IN CARIBBEAN COMMUNITIES