Caribbean–North American Migration in the Modern Era
Melanie Shell- Weiss
For residents of the Caribbean migration is a way of life that dates back many centuries. From European settlement to the forced inmigration of African slaves and recruitment of indentured laborers, the nineteenth- century popu-lation of the region was almost entirely the result of migration. The legacy of empire—or empires—created a shared culture, language, and history, ulti-mately shaping realms in which people could move easily to maximize their educational and economic resources. Yet in the early decades of the twentieth century it was modern policymakers, heavily influenced by northern eugeni-cism, who responded to the economic crises gripping the region by impos-ing a range of restrictions geared to curtail these international movements (see chapter 3). These measures could not close the doors to migration within the Western Hemisphere. But they did reshape the contours of this move-ment, shifting the gendered dynamics of Caribbean–North American conti-nental migration and creating new classes of permanent migrants and guest workers.
The Early Twentieth Century, 1891–1930
By the beginning of the twentieth century the number of Caribbean migrants to North America increased dramatically. Between 1820 and 1910 fewer than 250,000 migrants had arrived from the Caribbean (compared to two to four million or more migrants from individual European nations).1 In the first three decades of the twentieth century, however, close to that number ar-rived each decade.2 Where in the post- Emancipation era most of the Carib-bean migrants to North America were skilled craftspeople or well- educated
Independence and Interdependence175 professionals, a large number of working- class men and women moved dur-ing the early twentieth century.3 Drawn by the hope of industrial wage work, as well as an abundance of jobs in agriculture and domestic service, more and more men and women began leaving the islands bound for destinations in the United States. Florida remained the most popular destination to 1905, attract-ing especially large numbers of Bahamians and Cubans. New York was second, followed closely by Massachusetts, drawing migrants from across the Carib-bean islands. After 1905 New York—and New York City in particular—replaced all other locales as the most popular destination.4
The high concentration of Caribbean migrants in some North American cities and neighborhoods had a significant impact on the political and social fabric of the receiving regions. Although Louisiana was not one of the lead-ing centers for Caribbean migrants, cities like New Orleans boasted a large number of Caribbean residents, many of whom could trace their roots in the city back several generations. This was the case for Homère Plessy, a Haitian American who in 1892 became one of the most prominent figures in Ameri-can civil rights history when he refused to sit in a blacks- only car on the East Louisiana Railroad. A member of the “Comité des Citoyens,” a political group made up of a large number of Haitians as well as African Americans, Plessy intended his action to become part of a test case challenging the rigid white- black racial dichotomy enforced through segregation ordinances across the U.S. South.5 The case, which was heard before the Supreme Court in 1896, be-came a landmark in U.S. history, formalizing federal support for “separate but equal” facilities for black and white Americans as well as the “one- drop rule”
for delineating racial difference.
In Florida Cuban immigrants challenged prevailing southern norms and had an important influence on international politics. Social clubs, modeled on those to which many Cubans belonged at home, provided cradle- to- grave healthcare, death benefits, and opportunities for recreation, dances, and other activities. Many also had a specifically political aim. As the push by Cubans to end Spain’s rule over the island mounted through the late nineteenth cen-tury, Ybor City and Tampa became a critical base of revolutionary activities. In 1895 the Cuban independence leader José Martí is said to have given the order for junta leaders living in the United States to invade the island by smuggling a message into Tampa that had been rolled into a cigar. Women like Paulina Pedroso, an Afro- Cuban who had moved to Ybor City from Tampa along with her husband, Ruperto, in the late 1880s, hosted Martí on his visits to Florida;
she and her husband were credited with saving him from several would- be assassins.6 When the United States went to war with Spain in 1898, again the Cuban American community of Tampa and Ybor City was a critical center of
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support, as well as the major embarkation point for the American military throughout the war.
In Harlem, Caribbean migrants became a critical force in local, national and international politics, art, and culture.7 Artists and writers like the Jamaican- born Claude McKay and the Guyanese immigrant Eric Waldrond were among the best- known figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Caribbean immigrants lobbied their local congressmen and political representatives to challenge proposed legislation in 1915 that would have barred people of Afri-can descent from immigrating and joining AmeriAfri-can civil rights organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.8 In other cases Caribbean migrants brought their political organizations with them:
the Universal Negro Improvement Association, founded by Marcus Garvey in Jamaica in 1914, had its headquarters moved to Harlem when Garvey himself moved there in 1916. By 1920 the organization had more than eleven hundred local chapters in more than forty countries.9
The way Caribbean migrants found their way to Harlem mirrored the ex-perience of most newcomers over this period, whether they were leaving the agricultural south for the industrial north or crossing international borders from Europe and elsewhere in the world.10 Most newcomers relied on family members to aid their passage and find places to live and work. Thus the first points of contact for these newcomers were often centered on fellow country-men and wocountry-men. But race, and racism, also played a formative role in shaping the movement of these immigrants, their settlement, and the types of politi-cal, social, and cultural ties they built. Because of limits both official and un-official on where black people could live, Afro- Caribbeans and African Ameri-cans often lived in close proximity in American cities. In a neighborhood like Harlem, Afro- Caribbeans were particularly able to shine. West Indians in-vented the tradition of speaking to crowds on streetcorners as a means of expressing radical political ideas and messages of racial uplift that were not necessarily welcome in more traditional venues.11 The wide array of national origins, languages, and cultures represented by these immigrants showcased the diversity of the African diaspora in microcosm. This diversity was wel-comed in Harlem to a greater extent than in most other places. As one Afro- Caribbean immigrant described it to the black sociologist Ira De A. Reid in the 1930s, in Harlem Caribbean blacks did “not suffer much from the American race prejudice.”12 By the same token, Afro- Caribbeans benefited from the ex-tensive infrastructure built up by African Americans in earlier periods.
Some African Americans resented the preferential treatment that might be afforded to Caribbean blacks by Anglo Americans. The African American writer James Weldon Johnson once described boarding a streetcar in New York
Independence and Interdependence177 with an Afro- Cuban friend. At first the conductor ordered the two men to move to a segregated car. Then he heard them speaking Spanish. “[H]is attitude changed,” Johnson wrote. “[H]e punched our tickets and gave them back and treated us just as he did the other passengers in the car.”13 These tensions, as well as differences in status between African Americans and Afro- Caribbeans, have generated a great deal of scholarly debate and inquiry. Together with the resources, political aims, and struggles shared by native and foreign- born blacks, Harlem developed into a special place—one variously described by contemporaries as a “seething melting pot of conflicting nationalities and languages,” a “homegrown ethnic amalgam,” and a “diversified and complex population.”14
As in earlier periods, foreign relations also influenced patterns of migra-tion from the Caribbean to North America.15 The U.S. military occupamigra-tion of Haiti, which began in 1915 and continued until 1934, inspired renewed waves of emigration from the island. Many of the emigrants settled in Harlem, al-though some continued north to French- speaking Canadian cities like Mon-treal. U.S. investment and the federal employment of many West Indian con-tract laborers and guest workers during construction of the Panama Canal also shaped patterns of migration between the Caribbean islands, to Central America, and inside and outside U.S. borders. The acquisition of Puerto Rico as a U.S. territory in the wake of the Spanish American War and the purchase of the islands of St. Thomas and St. John by the United States from Denmark in 1917 further expanded the borders of the “nation- state” to encompass a greater number of Caribbean residents of many cultural backgrounds and languages.
Social tensions at home, strengthening segregation, and political repres-sion within the United States also pushed other members of the African dias-pora abroad. African American soldiers who had been stationed in Europe during the First World War returned to Paris in the immediate postwar period.
They were joined by a host of prominent black intellectuals, artists, and activ-ists who found greater opportunities for people of African descent and greater socioeconomic mobility there than at home. As the African American poet Countee Cullen recalled of his own time in Paris in the 1920s, “[I] found across a continent of foam / What was denied my hungry heart at home.”16 Although other African American émigrés had a more mixed experience—finding re-strictions abroad every bit as demeaning as those afforded black Americans at home if they were mistaken for black French colonial subjects rather than recognized as Americans—Paris remained a favored home for African Ameri-cans throughout the Harlem Renaissance.17
For that reason, and because of the city’s place as a cultural, intellectual, and political hub for leaders from across the Atlantic world, W. E. B. Du Bois