Afro-Caribbean Women in the US Academy

Abstract

Caribbean immigrants have long arrived on the shores of the United States. Prior to 1834, a limited number of enslaved Africans were shifted from plantation estates in the Caribbean to meet growing needs for a slave population in the United States (Parris in Journal of Caribbean Studies 2:1–13, 1981). Other Caribbean immigrants arrived in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century to escape the political instability of their countries. Such was the case of Haitian immigrants after the revolution (Pierre-Louis in Haitian immigrants in New York City: Transnationalism and home town associations. University Press of Florida, Gainesville, 2006; Schiller et al. in Caribbean life in New York City: Sociocultural dimensions. Center for Migration Studies of New York, New York, pp. 167–189, 1992). Since post emancipation, Caribbean migrants went in different waves, in search of more prosperous economic and social opportunities in the United States (Alfred in Adult Education Quarterly 53(4):242–260, 2003; Smith, Lalonde, & Johnson in Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology 10(2):107–122, 2004; Sutton & Chaney in Caribbean life in New York City: Sociocultural dimensions. Center for Migration Studies of New York, New York, 1992; Waters in International Migration Review, 28(4): 795–820, 1994). On arrival, most of these immigrants settled within inner-city neighbourhoods and ethnic networks throughout and beyond New York, Miami, Boston, Washington, DC, Massachusetts, Philadelphia, Chicago, New Orleans, and Minnesota (Bryce-Laporte in Journal of Black Studies 3(1):29–55, 1972; Foner in Island in the city: West Indian migration to New York. University of California Press, Berkley, CA, 2001; US Census Bureau in The American community-Blacks: 2004, 2004; Hall & Carter in Journal of Black Psychology, 32(2):155–175, 2006).