Caribbean Migrations: The Legacies of Colonialism

Caribbean Migrations

Critical Caribbean Studies

Series Editors: Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Carter Mathes, and Kathleen López

Editorial Board: Carlos U. Decena, Rutgers University; Alex Dupuy, Wesleyan University; Aisha Khan, New York University; April J. Mayes, Pomona College; Patricia Mohammed, University of West Indies; Martin Munro, Florida State University; F. Nick Nesbitt, Princeton University; Michelle Stephens, Rutgers University; Deborah Thomas, University of Pennsylvania; Lanny Thompson, University of Puerto Rico

Focused particularly in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, although attentive to the context of earlier eras, this series encourages interdisciplinary approaches and methods and is open to scholarship in a variety of areas, including anthropology, cultural studies, diaspora and transnational studies, environmental studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, and sociology. The series pays particular attention to the four main research clusters of Critical Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University, where the coeditors serve as members of the executive board: Caribbean Critical Studies Theory and the Disciplines; Archipelagic Studies and Creolization; Caribbean Aesthetics, Poetics, and Politics; and Caribbean Colonialities.

Giselle Anatol, The Things That Fly in the Night: Female Vampires in Literature of the Circum-Caribbean and African Diaspora

Alaí Reyes-Santos, Our Caribbean Kin: Race and Nation in the Neoliberal Antilles

Milagros Ricourt, The Dominican Racial Imaginary: Surveying the Landscape of Race and Nation in Hispaniola

Katherine A. Zien, Sovereign Acts: Performing Race, Space, and Belonging in Panama and the Canal Zone

Frances R. Botkin, Thieving Three-Fingered Jack: Transatlantic Tales of a Jamaican Outlaw, 1780–2015

Melissa A. Johnson, Becoming Creole: Nature and Race in Belize

Carlos Garrido Castellano, Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art: Space, Politics, and the Public Sphere

Njelle W. Hamilton, Phonographic Memories: Popular Music and the Contemporary Caribbean Novel

Lia T. Bascomb, In Plenty and in Time of Need: Popular Culture and the Remapping of Barbadian Identity

Aliyah Khan, Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean

Rafael Ocasio, Race and Nation in Puerto Rican Folklore: Franz Boas and John Alden Mason in Porto Rico

Ana-Maurine Lara, Streetwalking: LGBTQ Lives and Protest in the Dominican Republic

Anke Birkenmaier, ed., Caribbean Migrations: The Legacies of Colonialism

Caribbean Migrations

The Legacies of Colonialism

Edited by Anke Birkenmaier

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW BRUNSWICK, CAMDEN, AND NEWARK, NEW JERSEY, AND LONDON

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Birkenmaier, Anke, editor. Title: Caribbean migrations : the legacies of colonialism / edited by Anke Birkenmaier. Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, 2020. | Series: Critical caribbean studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020009850 | ISBN 9781978814493 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978814509 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781978814516 (epub) | ISBN 9781978814523 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978814530 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Caribbean Area—Civilization. | Caribbean Area—Intellectual life. | Caribbean Area—Emigration and immigration. | Postcolonialism—Caribbean Area. | West Indians—Migrations. Classification: LCC F2169.C3677 2020 | DDC 972.9—dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009850

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

This collection copyright © 2021 by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

For copyrights to individual pieces, please see first page of each essay.

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Rutgers University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

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Contents

Introduction: An Otherwise Modern Archive on Migration

Anke Birkenmaier

Chapter 1. A Permanent Periphery: Caribbean Migration Flows and the World Economy

Alejandro Portes

Part I

Unincorporated Subjects (Puerto Rico, Guam)

Chapter 2. The Role of State Actors in Puerto Rico’s Long Century of Migration, 1899–2015

Carlos Vargas-Ramos

Chapter 3. May God Take Me to Orlando: The Puerto Rican Exodus to Florida before and after Hurricane Maria

Jorge Duany

Chapter 4. Caribbean Mediascapes: Ruins and Debt in Puerto Rico

Jossianna Arroyo

Chapter 5. Circumscribed Citizenship: Caribbean American Visibility

Vivian Halloran

Chapter 6. From Father to Humanitarian: Charting Intimacies and Discontinuities in Ricky Martin’s Social Media Presence and Writing

Edward Chamberlain

Chapter 7. Terripelagoes: Archipelagic Thinking in Culebra, Puerto Rico, and Guam

Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel

Part II

Technologies of Representation (Cuba, Jamaica)

Chapter 8. The Caribbean in the U.S. Imagination: Travel Writing, Annexation, and Slavery

Daylet Domínguez

Chapter 9. Contemporary Afrocubana Feminisms: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Havana

Devyn Spence Benson

Chapter 10. Going Back to Cuba: How Enclaves of Memory Stimulate Returns and Repatriations

Iraida H. López

Chapter 11. The Floating Generation: Cuban Art in the Post-Soviet Period, 1991–2017

Rafael Rojas

Chapter 12. It Would Make a Rat Puke: Diasporic Thinking in Contemporary Jamaican Art Practices

Jane Bryce

Part III

Languages of the Diaspora (Hispaniola, United States)

Chapter 13. Kreyòl Sung, Kreyòl Understood: Haitian Songwriter BIC (Roosevelt Saillant) Reflects on Language and Poetics

Rebecca Dirksen and Kendy Vérilus

Chapter 14. Migration and Its Discontents: The Dominican Films of Laura Amelia Guzmán and Israel Cárdenas

Anke Birkenmaier

Chapter 15. Transnational Hispaniola: The First Decade in Support of a New Paradigm for Haitian and Dominican Studies

Kiran C. Jayaram and April J. Mayes

Chapter 16. New Points of the Rhizome: Rethinking Caribbean Relation in U.S. Latinx Poetry

Emily A. Maguire

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Notes on Contributors

Index

Introduction

AN OTHERWISE MODERN ARCHIVE ON MIGRATION

Anke Birkenmaier

Valeria Luiselli’s novel Lost Children Archive tells the story of a road trip from New York to the Southwest of the United States in 2014, when the massive arrival of unaccompanied minors from Central America was widely reported in the news. The protagonist goes in search of the children who had gone missing when crossing the border and notes relatively early on in her reflections, No one thinks of those children as consequences of a historical war that goes back decades. Everyone keeps asking: Which war, where? Why are they here? Why did they come to the United States? What will we do with them? No one is asking: Why did they flee their homes?¹ These questions point to a history that lies beneath the reports replayed by the news media, which more often than not speak of crises or waves of migrants coming to the United States without regard for the history of local interventions and economic dependency that has shaped people’s movements in the Americas. Indeed, the trail of people migrating from the south to the north of the Americas leads back in time through a history of wars, from the Spanish and Portuguese (as well as French, English, and Dutch) conquests and colonizations of the Americas, to the Latin American wars of independence of the nineteenth century, to the onset of U.S. imperialism following the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. But there also are individual choices and family and small community decisions at play when it comes to understanding the full picture of people’s movement across the western hemisphere.

South-north migration in the Americas, scholars have argued for a long time, is a result of the continued dependency of Latin American economies on the north even after the end of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires in Latin America. In Aníbal Quijano’s words, the coloniality of power has shaped Latin American societies from their inception, with Creole elites creating new institutional bases to preserve colonial, racialized hierarchies.² The centers of power, that is, may move from the former metropolis to the local elite and from there to twentieth- and twenty-first-century international powerhouses and corporations. What has not changed is the class hierarchy built on the division between the manual labor of members of minorities or migrants and the skilled labor of those who have established themselves as the governing elite.

The link between the coloniality of power and migration has been studied closely by scholars of the Caribbean. Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel has argued that because the region has long been the fragmented frontier of multiple imperial projects, colonial legacies have manifested themselves in the Caribbean in the form of massive migration events from the sixteenth through the twenty-first centuries. This is what she calls the coloniality of diasporas.³ An always already colonial region after the extinction of its indigenous populations, the Caribbean was dominated by plantation economies relying on the transatlantic slave trade and later on imported, indented labor from Asia, and it was bypassed by the industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century.⁴ This lack of a local diversified infrastructure means that for a long time, it has been advantageous for many to leave their countries of origin for work, following legal arrangements with a former or current metropolis encouraging Caribbeans to come, and go back and forth as they are able to. The Caribbean thus paradoxically and from early on came to be an an otherwise modern region (Michel-Rolph Trouillot), a constellation of island nations dependent on foreign investment and international trade and where, because of the constant back-and-forth of their citizens, ideas of national or regional community were conceived differently.⁵ As Jorge Duany notes in his book Blurred Borders, the long-standing exchanges between Caribbean countries and their neighbors have led Caribbean subjects to have bi-focal lives, maintaining affiliation with two or more cultures throughout their lifetimes.⁶

If we take an even broader global view, migration—whether forced by political or natural disasters or unforced and motivated more obviously by personal or economic circumstances—has been a hallmark of a modern age that depended on the global connectedness of economies, from the early days of Portuguese and Spanish colonialism on. It is known to have accelerated and expanded since the nineteenth century, when new transportation means and expanding markets made it possible for workers to move from the country to the city and from one state to another in search of better opportunities and living conditions.⁷ The population movements caused by the two world wars; the decolonization waves that ripped through Africa, parts of Asia, and the Caribbean; and the collapse of communist Eastern Europe, led to more large population shifts from one world region to another, further helped by the explosion of the internet and digital social networks.⁸ For some, such as Marxist scholars Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, these population shifts have been unprecedented in their magnitude and can be seen as a sign of resistance against modern-day capitalism, indicating a refusal of people worldwide to accept exploitative work conditions.⁹ For many labor historians, however, the continued rise in migration is simply part of the acceleration of globalization in the late twentieth century, and they attempt to shift the discussion away from a focus on personal or political crisis moments toward the analysis of transnational economic frameworks and labor conditions. As Vic Satzewich writes, A renewed emphasis on immigrants as workers instead of simply carriers of certain transnational identities and practices can establish a more complete picture of the lives of those who cross national boundaries in search of work, business opportunities, and better lives.¹⁰

Yet the reasons, regulations, and circumstances affecting people’s choices to leave a country are complex and generally driven by both historical or political frameworks and small-scale collective decision processes. To cite sociologist and migration scholar Alejandro Portes in his classic Immigrant America, people migrate for several reasons—not merely to increase their earnings by a certain amount but to solve problems rooted in their own national situations. For immigrants these problems appear as internal ones, but in reality they have been induced by the expansion of a global capitalist system.¹¹ While we might then understand modern-day migration to be an expression of the challenges that increasingly interdependent societies experience, we must also consider that in each individual case, migration responds to a series of factors that are motivated not just by macroeconomics but by historically grown regional power dynamics, such as laws allowing citizens of one country to work in another country, media environments representing opportunities elsewhere and facilitating continued ties with one’s home, linguistic policy, and a general culture of acceptance (or not) toward migrants. As we strive toward a more nuanced understanding of how migration has shaped and continues to shape the modern world, it remains difficult to negotiate among data-driven comparative approaches, approaches coming from history and political philosophy, and analyses of local stories and cultures.

As a region that for better or worse has experienced waves of colonization and decolonization since the sixteenth century—a region that therefore has always depended on travelers and migrants—we believe that the Caribbean holds lessons for those seeking to understand the political, social, and cultural consequences of migration. The authors united here combine micro- and macrolevel analyses and studies of both sending and receiving countries from the Caribbean and the United States. The intention is to give a comprehensive picture of the cultural and political role played by migration in the Caribbean and the United States, allowing for large-scale theoretical analysis just as well as for the interpretation of individual stories represented in literature, music, and the arts. We are all rooted in the interdisciplinary collaboration that characterizes Latin American and Caribbean studies and integrates disciplines such as history, anthropology, sociology, political science, literature, visual studies, media studies, and ethnomusicology. We respect each scholar’s own disciplinary background and goals and therefore do not strictly identify with the postdisciplinary ambition of cultural studies. Rather, scholars contribute to the discussion on Caribbean migrations from their own purview, in a language that is understandable to all of us and to the generally informed reader. Another interdisciplinary dimension of this joint effort is that the scholars included in this volume have deep expertise in different regions: the Hispanophone, Anglophone, or Kreyòl-speaking Caribbean and its diaspora communities. In assembling their chapters here, we hope to offer a pan-Caribbean approach to better understanding migration as both an outgrowth of the modern world system and an individual choice that can produce its own creative forms of collective intervention. To look at migration in such a way—as both a symptom and an expression of free will—can allow us to appreciate emerging notions of cultural identity and political agency while recognizing the multiple challenges and colonial underpinnings migration has always represented to individual nations.

In the spirit of envisioning Latin American studies as a truly decentering enterprise, this project not only transcends borders between nationalities or disciplines; contributors also have taken a special interest in the question of who gets to represent who and have worked with alternative—that is, nonacademic—knowledge producers from the Caribbean such as musicians, artists, filmmakers, and writers.¹² Rebecca Dirksen and Kendy Vérilus’s interview with Haitian songwriter BIC (Roosevelt Saillant), for example, establishes a mindful dialogue with this musician whose song lyrics have impacted Haitian cultural and political life in profound ways. The importance of paying attention to interventions of Caribbean intellectuals and artists who speak from a nonscholarly perspective lies here not so much in strategically listening to locals or insiders. Rather, the authors of this book are concerned with alternative publics that have been reached through such intellectual activists in the Caribbean and beyond. Raphael Dalleo has usefully adapted Michael Warner’s concept of the counter public in this context, studying how Caribbean intellectuals maintain a unique relationship with the state and constitute a counter public that has often complemented and contested officially sanctioned channels of public dialogue in the twentieth century.¹³ Our contributors come to differing conclusions about the effectiveness of scholarly or artistic interventions in the social and political lives of individual countries, yet they agree on the importance of studying such interactions.

Many of the contributors are scholars based in the United States with close ties to the Caribbean. Their essays help constitute that larger-than-national space of the Caribbean, where exile or diaspora communities actively negotiate how they want to be perceived at home and in their host countries, bringing with them economic and cultural remittances.¹⁴ In doing so, they build on a strong tradition of both theoretical and poetic reflection on Édouard Glissant’s concept of Caribbean Relation, as discussed by Emily A. Maguire in chapter 16, to ultimately suggest that as much as colonialism has historically been at the heart of the ongoing social and economic marginalization of Caribbean societies, the back-and-forth of their citizens has also produced transnational intellectual social formations, using Jayaram and Mayes’s phrase in chapter 15, that speak in their own voices and have insights to offer.

It is important to note the moment that brought us together as a group. We all met at a conference organized on September 29–30, 2017, by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Indiana University Bloomington commemorating the one-hundredth anniversary of the Jones–Shafroth Act of 1917 that declared Puerto Ricans citizens of the United States (albeit without voting rights in the United States when residing in Puerto Rico), making possible the great migration waves of the 1940s and 1950s. The idea of the conference was to take Puerto Rico as a case in point for the long-term study of the causes and effects of migration in the Caribbean and North America. Yet the occasion turned out to be more momentous than we could ever have expected or feared, with Hurricane Maria striking on September 20, having been preceded by Hurricane Irma two weeks earlier, and wreaking havoc on Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands. This was a crisis of daunting dimensions, causing a mass exodus of Puerto Ricans, who left behind destroyed houses and a destroyed electrical grid, to the United States. Some conference participants responded to the disaster by presenting talks—which formed the basis of their contributions to this book—that included an analysis of news coverage of the hurricanes and a close look at available numbers on the short- and long-term consequences (Arroyo, Duany). For many of us, the conference was the first meeting where we were able to collectively grieve and reflect on the underlying causes and problems that had compounded the effects of these natural disasters: the long-standing debt crisis of Puerto Rico and the precariousness of infrastructure before the hurricane hit; the fact that as a commonwealth of the United States, Puerto Rican citizens were treated differently than mainland citizens; and the disappointing local government representation and acrimonious discussions about how many really had died as a consequence of the hurricane.¹⁵ Our comparative focus on Puerto Rico as a case study acquired unsuspected urgency.

Puerto Rico, as a cultural nation that politically is part of the United States yet in every other respect belongs to the Caribbean, is an example of the complicated relations between Caribbean island countries and their neighbors to the north.¹⁶ The case of Puerto Rico is, in our view, emblematic of the ambiguous status of Caribbean migrant cultures—richer for their multilingual and multicultural heritage but legally and politically underattended. From the Spanish-American War of 1898, to the Roosevelt Corollary of 1904, to the Monroe Doctrine, the United States has intervened in the Caribbean on a number of occasions (notably, occupying Haiti from 1915 to 1934, Cuba from 1898 to 1902 and from 1906 to 1909, and the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924 and from 1965 to 1966 and intervening in Cuba from 1917 to 1922).¹⁷ Yet it also worked with island governments to create migration policies that would channel the arrival of migrants from Puerto Rico, Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Jamaica to the United States. The Jones–Shafroth Act was one landmark decision. (Later, U.S. legislation encouraging migration from Puerto Rico to the United States is traced carefully by Carlos Vargas-Ramos in chapter 2.) The Immigration Acts of 1924 and 1965, the British West Indies Program (1943), the McCarran–Walter Act (1952), and the Cuban Adjustment Act (1966) encouraged Caribbean citizens to come to the United States, with many immigrants not suffering from quotas or work visa limitations and maintaining a lawful residence, unlike their Mexican and Central American neighbors. The Caribbean presence in the United States has even been recognized since 2006 with a designated Caribbean American Heritage Month, as studied by Vivian Halloran in chapter 5. Still, many Caribbean citizens have had difficulties making their voices heard in the United States even when they are citizens or legal permanent residents.

The chapters of this book are organized into three broader themes following a short programmatic history by Alejandro Portes, A Permanent Periphery: Caribbean Migration Flows and the World Economy, which explains why Caribbean peoples have suffered the consequences of colonialism perhaps more than any other world region, resulting in their migration to those same nations that colonized them. Portes concludes that rather than following earlier migration models, Caribbean diaspora communities have created and maintained a new and complex transnational dynamic that is here to stay. Contributors to part 1, titled Unincorporated Subjects (Puerto Rico, Guam), study the power inequality between island nations and their current or former colonizers and the implications of the ambiguous legal status of Puerto Rican and Guamanian citizens of the United States on notions of modern subjecthood. Part 2, titled Technologies of Representation (Cuba, Jamaica), looks at how artists, activists, and writers of the Caribbean have used changing media technologies to gain visibility, be it through travel accounts of the nineteenth century, art, film, photography, or social media. Looking in particular at island nations such as Cuba and Jamaica, contributors also discuss the precarious recognition of diaspora intellectuals in their homelands. Part 3, Languages of the Diaspora (Hispaniola, United States), foregrounds the most basic form of mediation necessary for migrant subjects: language. This third group of contributions discusses how social fragmentation can be overcome through collaborative efforts and musical or poetic challenges to monolingualism.

We believe that a book like ours is needed given that Caribbean studies has historically suffered from being split into distinct national and imperial contexts and is often approached through the lens of single disciplines such as cultural geography, African and African diaspora studies, history, literature, or sociology.¹⁸ This book sheds light on migration as an expression of the complex and creative ways in which Caribbean people have responded to economic and political marginalization. By studying the experience of migration and nomadism in different local contexts but with attention to how it can mobilize new social dynamics and ways of asserting a collective voice, we hope to contribute to debates on how the legacies of colonialism can be challenged and confronted in small and large ways in the Caribbean and beyond.

Notes

1. Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive: A Novel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018), 51.

2. Aníbal Quijano, Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America, in Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate, ed. Mabel Moraña, Enrique D. Dussel, and Carlos Jáuregui (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 181–225. Decolonialism continues the body of work done by postcolonial scholars of the British and French Empires such as Edward Said but with a focus on Latin America. Important representatives include Walter Mignolo, Arturo Escobar, and Santiago Castro-Gómez.

3. While Martínez-San Miguel focuses her argument on what she calls intra-colonial migration—that is, the legal migration of citizens to their current or former metropolis (e.g., in the case of Puerto Ricans migrating to the United States)—this book expands her line of argument by moving to include the Caribbean subjects who use legally available channels to leave for neighboring countries such as Mexico, the United States, or Canada. Examples of such extracolonial migrants would be Cuban, Dominican, or Haitian migrants. Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Coloniality of Diasporas: Rethinking Intra-colonial Migrations in a Pan-Caribbean Context (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

4. Karla Slocum and Deborah A. Thomas, Rethinking Global and Area Studies: Insights from Caribbeanist Anthropology, American Anthropologist 105, no. 3 (2003): 553–564.

5. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, The Otherwise Modern: Caribbean Lessons from the Savage Slot, in Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies, ed. Bruce M. Knauft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002).

6. Jorge Duany, Blurred Borders: Transnational Migration between the Hispanic Caribbean and the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

7. According to historian Dirk Hoerder, migration has not changed in kind between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the political conditions and reasons for it having remained the same. Hoerder, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 8.

8. The International Organization for Migration, an intergovernmental body, was founded in 1951 to account for the large population shifts in Europe following World War II. It offers today one of the most reliable data portals for worldwide migration numbers. See https://migrationdataportal.org/?i=stock_abs_&t=2019.

9. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 212–213.

10. Vic Satzewich, Transnational Migration: A New Historical Phenomenon?, in Workers across the Americas: The Transnational Turn in Labor History, ed. Leon Fink (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 40.

11. Alejandro Portes, Immigrant America: A Portrait, 4th ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 106.

12. Sonia E. Alvarez, Arturo Arias, and Charles R. Hale, Re-visioning Latin American Studies, Cultural Anthropology 26, no. 2 (2011), 225–46.

13. Cited in Raphael Dalleo, Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere: From the Plantation to the Post-colonial (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011).

14. Juan Flores, The Diaspora Strikes Back: Caribeño Tales of Learning and Turning (London: Routledge, 2008).

15. For a comparison of official U.S. responses to the three hurricanes of the 2017 season—two of them affecting the U.S. mainland and one, Hurricane Maria, affecting Puerto Rico only—see Nicole Einbinder, How the Response to Hurricane Maria Compared to Harvey and Irma, PBS Frontline, May 1, 2018, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/how-the-response-to-hurricane-maria-compared-to-harvey-and-irma/.

16. César J. Ayala and Rafael Bernabe, Puerto Rico in the American Century: A History since 1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

17. See Alan L. McPherson, A Short History of U.S. Interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean (Chichester, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016).

18. Studies such as Regine O. Jackson’s Geographies of the Haitian Diaspora (2011), Carol Boyce Davies’s more essayistic Caribbean Spaces: Escapes from Twilight Zones (2013), Dirk Hoerder and Nora Faires’s coedited Migrants and Migration in Modern North America (2011), and Margarita Cervantes-Rodríguez, Ramón Grosfoguel, and Eric Mielants’s Caribbean Migration to Western Europe and the United States (2009) have inspired our book but are informed by single disciplines.

Chapter 1

A Permanent Periphery

CARIBBEAN MIGRATION FLOWS AND THE WORLD ECONOMY

Alejandro Portes

The position of the Caribbean Basin in the centuries of development of the world capitalist economy has been of permanent relegation to the periphery of the system. Beginning with the discovery of the Americas by the Spanish in the late fifteenth century, the region was thoroughly remolded by the dynamics of the emerging capitalist economy and by the fierce interstate competition for hegemony. This struggle involved European powers but played itself out throughout the world. Because of the feebleness of its territorial and demographic base, the Caribbean was one of the regions least able to resist the predatory ventures of European powers and, hence, most vulnerable to the effects of such initiatives.

The first important consequence of this situation was the full occupation of the entire territory—large and small islands alike—by the Europeans. As the initial discoverers and colonizers, the Spanish had pride of place occupying the largest islands. In due time, however, competitors for European hegemony—the English, the French, and the Dutch—made their appearance, occupying smaller islands and neglected swamplands on the north coast of South America or wrestling settled territories from Spanish control. This is how the remarkable cultural and linguistic diversity of the region in a relatively limited territory came to be.

A second major consequence of the European occupation was the implosion of the autochthonous population. It played no role in the social and cultural reconstruction of the region following its discovery by the Europeans because the latter literally exterminated the defenseless natives through a combination of imported diseases and ruthless exploitation. Pleadings by Bartolomé de las Casas and other Catholic friars in defense of the natives were of no avail, and by the seventeenth century, the tainos, siboneyes, and caribs who had populated these lands were largely a memory of the past. It is at that moment when the two major migration flows that were to shape the demography and political economy of these islands asserted themselves.

The Moments of Migration

The Spaniards who first came to these islands arrived in the role of colonizers, not settlers. Unlike the English and Scottish migrants who came to North America a century later in search of religious freedom, the Spanish had no intention of tilling the land themselves or settling permanently. Aside from soldiers and priests, the early Spanish colonial population was largely made of adventurers in search of rapid wealth to take back to the Peninsula. That explains why the institution of encomienda, designed by the Spanish Crown to civilize the natives, turned into an instrument of relentless exploitation.¹

No other European power followed a different path in their various endeavors in the Caribbean. There were no large colonies of religiously minded Protestants intent on creating a principled new social order under the palm trees. On the contrary, all subsequent European initiatives in the region were guided, like the Spanish, by the goals of competitive political and military hegemony and the exploitation of natural resources.

The Spaniards conquered the region but had difficulty populating it. As an incentive to come to the new lands, the Crown granted land parcels and encomiendas to would-be migrants. These were mostly segundones, the second and third children of well-to-do Spanish families deprived of access to family wealth by the law of primogeniture.² Since only firstborn males could inherit, those who followed had to seek their fortunes elsewhere. The new colonies offered an opportunity, but since the islands had very little gold to mine, the colonists turned to agriculture, initially for subsistence and then for export to Europe. When cane sugar was discovered, the Caribbean colonies found the equivalent of gold.³ So far as the indigenous workforce survived and could be exploited, production for export could proceed, at least in the larger islands. Other lands in the region remained mostly empty.

The natives did not survive for much longer than a century, and hence, a solution had to be urgently found for the lack of arms. Early in the sixteenth century, slave markets could already be found in Havana and Santo Domingo.⁴ The Portuguese pioneered the practice of buying captives from African chieftains for sale in the Americas, a practice vastly extended by the British Empire. Hence the second great migration to the Caribbean was not voluntary but coerced. Slaves populated the Caribbean, providing the workforce that made sugar and subsequently coffee highly profitable ventures. Slavery made possible the triangular trade among Europe, Africa, and the Americas and encouraged other European powers to wrestle islands from Spain to organize sugar plantations for export.⁵

In Saint-Domingue, the western part of Hispaniola ceded to the French by the Spanish Bourbon kings, slaves and coffee were ground together to enrich the colonnes until a massive rebellion by the end of the eighteenth century put an end to the practice.⁶ Be that as it may, over three centuries, slavery and its sequels populated the Caribbean. Black and then mulato workers joined white colonizers to form the demographic core of the region. In Cuba and Puerto Rico, a Spanish policy aimed at whitening the island colonies during the mid-nineteenth century by stimulating migration from the Peninsula led to the tripartite white/mulato/black composition of the Cuban and Puerto Rican population. Elsewhere, descendants from African slaves predominated along with a growing mixed-blood population of mestizos and mulatoes.⁷

The economies built by European conquest and settlement in the Caribbean were entirely subordinate to the whims and wishes of the global powers. It is for that reason that no new major inflow of European immigrants and settlers came to the region. In the second half of the nineteenth century, new waves of Europeans, primarily from the eastern and southern regions of the continent, came to the Americas to man the factories created by the powerful industrial revolution in the United States and the deliberate efforts of the Argentinian and Brazilian governments to populate the empty lands of their respective countries.⁸ To govern is to populate, declared Argentinean president Domingo Faustino Sarmiento as his motto to entice European immigrants to settle the near-empty Pampas.⁹

The Caribbean was entirely bypassed, however. No industrial revolution and no new major economic initiatives took place in it. For the most part, the economies of the region were governed by the familiar trilogy of sugar, coffee, and tobacco, accompanied by a nascent tourism industry. The end of slavery brought attempts to replace black slave labor with indentured Chinese coolie laborers in Cuba and indentured East Indians in the English Caribbean. Intraregional population movements had primarily the same purpose, with Haitians going to cut sugar cane in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and several of the British Islands. All these movements corresponded and reflected the economic peripherality of the entire region.¹⁰ In terms of migration, it mostly stayed put.

Beginning in the twentieth century, and as visitors from the north were discovering the beauty of the region and its mild climate in winter, poor Caribbeans started to search for ways to escape their fate. The main avenue for this purpose was migration to the global centers. Taking advantage of their knowledge of English and their status as British subjects, Jamaicans started migrating in numbers to England and New York, a movement that accelerated in the next decades and eventually extended to New England and Florida.¹¹

Following the takeover of Puerto Rico by the United States and its conversion into a near-colony, recruiters from the north began enticing islanders to migrate. For the most part, islanders went to the Northeast to replace earlier European immigrants in manning factories in New York, New England, and as far west as Illinois. This deliberate recruitment was the historical source of the emergence of large Puerto Rican communities in the American Northeast and Midwest.¹² There were Puerto Rican populations as far as Hawai’i, to which they had been brought to work in the sugar cane industry.

The other major population movements out of the region in the twentieth century originated in Cuba and Hispaniola and had as their source the turbulence created by widespread poverty and lack of opportunities for the majority of the population. The Cuban Revolution of 1959 expelled the upper and middle classes of the country. They were followed, in time, by refugees of more modest origins as the revolutionary project failed to deliver better economic circumstances for most of the population and as the U.S. open-arms policy enticed many Cubans to depart the island.¹³

The Mariel exodus of 1980, during which upward of 120,000 new Cuban refugees arrived in South Florida, marked the end of that benevolent policy. In part, the change of policy was due to the fact that Haitians, escaping harrowing conditions in their own country, claimed the same treatment by U.S. authorities as that granted to Cubans.¹⁴ Fearing accusations of racism, Washington relented and allowed both Cubans and Haitians into the country under the novel legal category of entrants, status pending.¹⁵ The Mariel exodus bifurcated the Cuban enclave, created by the earlier exiles in Miami, into two distinct communities separated by class, origin, and physical space. The Haitian flow created a new Little Haiti quarter in Miami, not half a mile from the Little Havana enclave.¹⁶

The third major Caribbean outflow during the twentieth century, that from the Dominican Republic, also had political origins. These were linked to the decisive intervention by the American government in the mid-1960s to prevent the consolidation of another leftist government in the region following the assassination of dictator Rafael Trujillo. As part of the effort to stabilize the country, the U.S. administration under Lyndon B. Johnson facilitated the departure of thousands of Dominicans, many of whom ended up in New York and in cities along the New York–Boston corridor.¹⁷ This early political outflow was the core for sustained Dominican out-migration to the same region in the following years and to the consolidation of a Dominican enclave in the Washington Heights area of New York.¹⁸

Conclusion

These population outflows, first from the British West Indies and then from the Spanish- and Creole-speaking islands, created the present large Caribbean communities in the United States and Canada. Unlike conventional theories of immigration that portray it as a one-way escape from misery and want, the reality is that these expatriate communities maintain a constant traffic of information, remittances, investments, and travel back to their home countries.¹⁹ This two-way movement has been easier in the case of Puerto Ricans by dint of their being recognized as U.S. citizens, but it is also present in the case of other groups. One of the key signs of the bifurcation of the Cuban community of South Florida is that while pre-1980 exiles refused to return, invest, or contribute in any way to the Castro regime, Mariel and post-Mariel arrivals have made it a practice of sending remittances to their families and communities in Cuba and to travel there on a regular basis.²⁰

The result has been the rise of transnational communities suspended, as it were, between two nation-states: the small and impoverished sending countries and the large and hegemonic northern nations.²¹ Participants in these communities lead double lives, having homes and families at both ends, communicating daily across national borders, and traveling back and forth.²² Transnationalism has had positive consequences for sending nations and communities in the form of alleviation of local poverty by a growing inflow of remittances and transfers of information and technology. Transnational practices have also helped expatriates by facilitating the creation of small enterprises abroad and by lessening the shock of adaptation to a foreign language and culture.²³

Transnational practices have also had negative consequences, such as the depopulation of sending communities and the undermining of local economic activities through the rise of a culture of remittances.²⁴ Be that as it may, the confinement of the Caribbean to a perennial subordinate position in the global economy and the absence of new economic opportunities, save in tourism, practically guarantee the continuation of migrant outflows and, along with them, the expansion and consolidation of transnationalism. In essence, Caribbean peoples have responded to the harsh economic conditions imposed on them by the dominant nations to the north by migrating to them. In the process, they have created a new and complex dynamic across national borders that has become a mark of our time. While frequently resisted by the native populations of the receiving nations, transnationalism is here to stay and will affect decisively the future of the Caribbean as well as the cities and regions where these large expatriate populations settle.

Notes

1. Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, trans. Harriet de Onís (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947). See also Levi Marrero, Cuba: Economía y sociedad (Madrid: Editorial Playor, 1959).

2. Hugh Thomas, Cuba, or The Pursuit of Freedom (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998).

3. Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint.

4. Haroldo Dilla, Cities of the Caribbean (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015).

5. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origin of Our Time (London: Verso, 1994); see also Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint.

6. Sidney N. Mintz, The Caribbean as a Socio-cultural Area, Cahiers d’Histoire Mondiale 9, no. 4 (1966): 912–937. See also Alex Stepick, Pride against Prejudice: Haitians in the United States (Needham Heights, Mass.: Allyn & Bacon, 1998).

7. Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint. See also Wilfredo Lozano, Dominican Republic: Informed Economy, the State, and the Urban Poor, in The Urban Caribbean: Transition to the New Global Economy, ed. Alejandro Portes, Carlos Dore-Cabral, and Patricia Landolt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 153–189.

8. Fernando H. Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependencia y desarrollo en América Latina (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1969); Alejandro Portes and John Walton, Labor, Class and the International System (New York: Academic Press, 1981).

9. Ezequiel Martinez Estrada, X-ray of the Pampa, trans. Alan