West Indian Migrants Research Articles

Britain and the repression of Black Power in the 1960s and ‘70s

This article details the extensive security regimes deployed against Black Power in the Caribbean that were operated by regional governments and the (neo)colonial British state. These regimes of securitisation targeted radical Black political groups and actors whose Black Power ideology placed them in an antagonistic relation to independent West Indian states and Britain. The author argues that the British state’s involvement in the suppression of Black Power in the Caribbean is inseparable from the domestic repression of the British Black Power movement. But also, shared opposition to British (neo)imperialism and the personal ties of West Indian migrants to Britain connected Black Power resistance on both sides of the Atlantic. By drawing on British Foreign & Commonwealth Office, Ministry of Defence and Cabinet Office files, as well as political newspapers and publications produced at the time, the author traces the British state’s involvement in the transnational repression of Black Power in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Why Black Homeowners are More Likely to be Caribbean American than African American in New York: A Theory of How Early West Indian Migrants Broke Racial Cartels in Housing

Abstract Why are the Black brownstone owners and landlords in Harlem and Brooklyn disproportionately West Indian? For students of housing discrimination, Black West Indian Americans have long presented a quandary. West Indian Americans generally own and rent higher quality housing than African Americans. These advantages began long ago. For example, when racial covenants, that is, restrictions barring certain racial and ethnic groups from owning real property were rife in New York, many West Indians were still able to buy into tony neighborhoods despite the pervasiveness of institutionalized residential segregation. Eschewing more traditional explanations in the civil rights literature, I apply the literature in which racial segregation in real property ownership is conceived as a racialized monopoly in which racial cartels appropriate anti-competitive techniques to monopolize access to real property. Maintaining a racial cartel is dependent on White owners uniformly refusing to sell. Importantly, West Indian realtors were experts at finding defectors, namely Whites willing to break norms of racial exclusivity and sell, in exchange for their ability to extract a premium. West Indian brokers could act in confidence because they had cash-rich clients and were often buying property in trust (de facto if not de jure) for fellow West Indians. In so doing, West Indian brokers in New York were simply replicating techniques that had been utilized by their land-brokering ancestors. I discuss the history that “previews” this period in New York, albeit in a different context: in the British West Indian islands from which the migrants originated. There are repeated instances of Blacks “busting” White monopolies in landownership, throughout the West Indian colonies in contravention of racial norms in the British colonies of who was allowed to own land and where. Upon arrival in New York, West Indians encountered another racial monopoly in real property ownership, namely Northern racial segregation. They essentially transferred the same techniques that they had utilized in the West Indies to break into White neighborhoods in New York.

The Most Caribbean of Stories

The Most Caribbean of Stories Maya Doig-Acuña (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Two men harvest bananas at a United Fruit Company plantation, Tiquisate, Guatemala, 1945. Photograph from Frank Scherschel/The LIFE Picture Collection, Getty Images. [End Page 12] i was in college when I first learned that my great-grandmother, Lydia Andrews, who my father and his siblings and cousins called Ganny, was born on the United Fruit Plantation in Puerto Limón, Costa Rica. Before Papi shared this fact with me, I knew Ganny only in small glimpses of family memory that seemed to contract the world in which she existed, such that she existed only in ours—that is, she belonged specifically to my family, and not to history. We had briefly shared this world—between 1994, when I was born, and 1998, when she died—though we never met, because she lived in Panama and I in Brooklyn. But I had seen photos of her: mostly sepia-toned images of a dark-skinned, white-haired woman with glasses, a nose like my father's, and a graceful neck that made her the center of each picture. There was one photo in vivid color taken just a few years before her passing, in Coronado, Panama. She sat on a chair surrounded by our family, wearing a red dress patterned with white flowers, her hands folded on her lap. When Ganny died, my grandmother went to Panama for the funeral, and on her return to New York, brought me back a purple stuffed beaver named Benny that she said Ganny had gotten for me. And though it wasn't possible—though Ganny and I no longer occupied the same world—I believed her, and treasured the beaver like an intimate conversation between me and my great-grandmother. As I've gotten older, however, the new details I learn of Ganny's life seem to place her, and our family, into larger orbits of history. Ganny was born in 1900 on a wide swath of US territory, a banana plantation, on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. Its proprietor, the United Fruit Company, had been officially founded just a year earlier in 1899, through a company merger [End Page 13] Click for larger view View full resolution A mule-drawn cart hauls bananas on the United Fruit Company plantation near La Lima, Honduras, August 31, 1954. Though tractors were common on the plantation, mules were still used in some areas. Photograph from Associated Press. in Boston. United Fruit owned massive expanses of land stretching across several countries in Central America and the Caribbean, and Ganny's parents had migrated to one of them from St. Lucia as part of a wave of West Indians gone to work for, as Gabriel García Márquez called it, the Banana Company. Ganny's father was a carpenter whose labor was likely tied to the Church, and particularly to a white St. Lucian priest who ministered to the West Indian migrants. Ganny's father, we believe, followed the priest from island to isthmus to island—St. Lucia to Puerto Limón to Bocas del Toro, Panama. Our family doesn't know for sure; what record we have of these migrations lived in Ganny's memory, not on paper.1 But plantation gets stuck on my tongue. What did a Central American plantation owned and operated by white men from the United States look, sound, and feel like? Because Ganny was born but not raised on United Fruit, I wonder about the conditions of birth there; about [End Page 14] Click for larger view View full resolution ID photo of Ganny, aged eighteen, from her time as a laundry worker in the Panama Canal Zone, 1918. midwives, or about the possibility of friends come to help with the baby. The photos I've seen of the plantations from company archives do not tell me much about these conditions. They mostly document labor, though with little attention to laborers: dense rows of banana trees abundant with fruit, wholly cleared dirt pathways dividing those rows, thatched-roof buildings that mark "engineers' quarters" or "overseer's quarters." Even when workers are present...

Dialogic Diaspora Formation and Colonial Critique: A Close Reading of the Train Scene in George Lamming’s <i>The Emigrants</i>

When George Lamming says that “most West Indians of [his] generation were born in England,” he refers to the process of diasporic identity formation that took place as West Indian migrants relocated to Britain and bonded as a community through oral culture, particularly “the kind of banter which goes between islander and islander,” discovering their commonalities and privileging them over individual island identities, what I term dialogic diaspora formation. This paper presents a close reading of the train scene in Lamming’s The Emigrants as a transitional poem and illustration of dialogic diaspora formation. Characters in The Emigrants start this diaspora building on-ship in the first half of the novel and their community formation is reflected in the narrative technique that Lamming uses: a collective and ambiguous sense of narrator and narration, which, elsewhere, he calls “the collective human substance.” The train scene/poem is a moment of transition in the novel, positioned as it is between the port and the city and between sections of prose narrative. In the scene/poem, collective narration morphs into the competing and overlapping first-person voices as the emigrants connect as a diasporic community over their recognition of British brands and over a disappointing tea service. Both the recognition and the disappointment reveal the depth of imperial cultural hegemony, allow the emigrants to bond by critiquing the concept of the “mother country” as a land of milk and honey, and display Lamming’s great wit and ability to critique the colonial experience.

Why Black Homeowners are More Likely to Be Caribbean-American than African-American in New York: A Theory of How Early West Indian Migrants Broke Racial Cartels in Housing

Why are the black brownstone owners in Harlem and Brooklyn disproportionately West Indian? The landlords, West Indian-American? The tenants African-American? These are tough questions. For students of housing discrimination, West Indian Americans have long presented a quandary. If it is reasonable to assume that racial exclusions are being consistently applied to persons who are dark-skinned, one would expect to find that housing discrimination has had similar effects on West Indian-Americans and African-Americans. Yet this is not the case: West Indian-Americans generally own and rent higher quality housing than African-Americans. Moreover, these advantages began long ago. For example, when racial covenants, that is, restrictions barring racial and ethnic groups from owning real property in particular neighborhoods were rife in New York, they were not consistently applied against West Indians, who were sometimes able to buy into tony neighborhoods. While it is true that such covenants were also inconsistently applied against other ethnic and religious groups such as Jewish New Yorkers, West-Indians still stand out. Since West Indians are overwhelmingly dark-skinned persons of African descent they typically did not have the option of passing that may have been available to other groups. Eschewing more traditional explanations in the civil rights literature, I apply the literature in which racial segregation in real property ownership is conceived as a racial monopoly in which racial cartels appropriate anti-competitive techniques to monopolize access to real property. Maintaining a racial cartel is dependent on white owners maintaining a united front, that is, they must uniformly refuse to sell. Importantly, realtors play a gate keeping role in real estate and West Indians dominated the realtor sector. As realtors, they were expert at finding defectors, namely, whites willing to break norms of racial exclusivity, in exchange for their ability to extract a premium for selling to blacks early. Brokers then proceeded to buy significant numbers of titles, which were then off-loaded to fellow West Indians. West Indian brokers could act in confidence because they had cash-rich clients and were often buying in trust (de facto if not de jure) for fellow West Indians. In so doing, West Indian brokers in New York were simply replicating techniques that had been utilized by their land-brokering ancestors. I discuss the history that previews this period in New York, albeit in a different context: in the British West Indian islands from the migrants originated. There are repeated instances of blacks busting white monopolies in land-ownership, throughout the West Indian colonies in contravention of racial norms in the British colonies of who was allowed to own land where. Upon arrival in New York, West Indians encountered another racial monopoly in real property ownership, namely Northern racial segregation. They essentially appropriated the same techniques that they had utilized in the West Indies to break into white neighborhoods in New York.

Making Race in the Courtroom: The Legal Construction of Three Races in Early New Orleans by Kenneth R. Aslakson

Reviewed by: Making Race in the Courtroom: The Legal Construction of Three Races in Early New Orleans by Kenneth R. Aslakson Michael Schoeppner Making Race in the Courtroom: The Legal Construction of Three Races in Early New Orleans. By Kenneth R. Aslakson. (New York and London: New York University Press, 2014. Pp. xii, 249. $49.00, ISBN 978-0-8147-2431-6.) In Making Race in the Courtroom: The Legal Construction of Three Races in Early New Orleans, Kenneth R. Aslakson investigates the records of the short-lived New Orleans City Court to illustrate how Louisiana, unlike every other southern slave state, created a three-race legal system. While historians have long debated why free people of color in New Orleans enjoyed formal rights and privileges denied to others elsewhere in the American South, Aslakson moves beyond this debate to focus on “how free people of color acting within institutions of power” exploited the Crescent City’s economic and demographic realities to help “[create] a new legio-racial category: people of color” (p. 7). Because of Louisiana’s particular colonial history, the large number of West Indian migrants during and after the Haitian Revolution, and the state’s increasing dedication to “preserving and expanding racially based slavery,” free people of color were able to use the New Orleans legal system to preserve their property and better safeguard their own freedom (p. 14). Before delving into the New Orleans City Court’s records, Making Race in the Courtroom situates New Orleans and its legal system within a broad Atlantic history during the Age of Revolution. As residents of a colonial outpost, New Orleans’s free people of color came to occupy an essential middle stratum in colonial society, one poised between ostensibly “black” slaves and European “whites.” Following the Louisiana Purchase, preexisting French civil law customs ran up against English common-law structures and the culture of the United States. While this collision often created friction, the increasingly hybridized system united legal and political leaders in championing patriarchy, whiteness, and most important, property rights. As city elites strove to create a stable legal order during the tumultuous transition into American hands, free people of color found opportunities in the city court to leverage the law in their favor. Aslakson has uncovered well over two hundred instances where free people of color were litigants in this legal forum, with the vast majority being property cases and freedom suits. From his analysis of this evidence, Aslakson draws two primary conclusions. First, “Neither judges nor juries in the New Orleans City Court appear to have discriminated against men or women of color when deciding cases,” even ruling for the petitioner in an astonishing 60 percent of freedom-suit cases (p. 135). Second, free people of color, through their legal activities and economic standing, assisted in the inscription into law of a third racial category, “person of color,” that existed between white and black and offered greater legal protection against kidnapping and unlawful enslavement for the city’s large mixed-race population. [End Page 410] Making Race in the Courtroom is well written and tightly argued, and it contains much for historians of southern race law. However, it curiously avoids significant engagement with recent historiography regarding southern free people of color and simply assumes that they “enjoyed more privileges and rights in Louisiana than anywhere else in the antebellum South” (p. 183). Recent studies such as Melvin Patrick Ely’s Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War (New York, 2004) and Kirt von Daacke’s Freedom Has a Face: Race, Identity, and Community in Jefferson’s Virginia (Charlottesville, 2012) suggest qualification of this assumption. Michael Schoeppner University of Maine at Farmington Copyright © 2016 The Southern Historical Association

The multicultural First World War: Memories of the West Indian contribution in contemporary Britain

The experiences of West Indian soldiers in the First World War have received renewed attention during the centenary commemorations. By exploring how the West Indian contribution is imagined in the media and creative arts, this paper problematizes the historical memory linking military service to citizenship in multicultural Britain. During the conflict, West Indian participation was used to suggest that the British Empire stood united in the face of German aggression. Through the 1920s and 1930s, the contribution of West Indian volunteers was recalled to support many political campaigns, including West Indian self-government and pan-African campaigns opposed to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. Although West Indian soldiers were often excluded from combat roles, these movements relied on the rhetoric of masculine military sacrifice. Post-independence, West Indian nation states recalled imperial military service to affirm national identity. For the descendants of West Indian migrants in Britain, First World War military service may serve to underpin claims to equal citizenship. Government agencies and funding organizations have also turned to the West Indian war memory to increase community cohesion. The paper concludes that memories of belonging predicated on past military service are problematic. Non-combatant service may be overlooked and troubling histories avoided.

Dying to better themselves: West Indians and the building of the Panama Canal

Olive Senior, Dying to Better Themselves: West Indians and the Building of the Panama Canal. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2014. 440 pp.over a century ago, my great-uncle Charles Ledgister left Mountainside, Jamaica, for Panama to seek his fortune working on the canal. Unlike the many who died in the quest to better themselves that Olive Senior chronicles, or the Colon men who returned - with or without brass chains and pocket watches - he settled there and his descendants are still there. Reading Senior's account, I can only wonder if it was great-uncle Charles who was the Jamaican worker who had the chutzpah to chat freely with Theodore Roosevelt when the US president visited the canal (198).Senior tells us the story of the West Indians who went to Panama to work on the two canal projects - De Lesseps's abortive French plan in the 1880s and Theodore Roosevelt's successful American enterprise in the early years of the twentieth century - their different fates, and their relationships with their homelands and the great powers that dominated their lives. The vast majority of the West Indian migrants to Panama, Senior points out, were people like my great-uncle from the countryside (340) with little or no experience of the modern world. They were thrust into a wholly new world.What Senior says is that the West Indians who went to Panama shaped that country - Without them, modern Panama would not exist (xvii) - but also shaped the cultures and identities of their homelands. The experience of Panama was to be crucial for the definition of the modern Anglophone Caribbean in a wide variety of ways. Panama-born West Indians back in the West Indies proper included George Headley, born in Colon, who is, as Senior judiciously states, widely regarded as one of the greatest cricketers of all time (274), and Dudley Thompson, whose middle initial she incorrectly gives as H rather than J (his middle name was Joseph), whose distinguished career in law, politics, and diplomacy she briefly mentions.To get to the Headleys and Thompsons - and Thompson's father, a schoolteacher in Panama, moved back to Jamaica in order to have his children grow up in a place where they could live in dignity without constant exposure to American-style racism - we have to consider the facts of life during the construction and operation of the great canal. This involved not only the massive operation with its concomitant wastage of human life, which Senior describes in careful detail, but the imposition, once Theodore Roosevelt established the Canal Zone and the work of building the American canal began, of the Jim Crow system under another name: that is, the classification of people into the categories of Gold (white American) and Silver (non-white, non-American) according to the currency in which they were paid. Gold employees and their families were treated with consideration and humanity. Silver employees - and black West Indians were Silver - had far less.Senior makes clear that the Gold and Silver system discriminated between white Americans on the one hand, and non-Americans on the other, but placed black West Indians at the bottom of the heap. Even when they were doing the same work, black West Indians faced invidious discrimination: More than nine thousand skilled West Indians were employed in 1914, classified as 'artisans' while Americans doing the same work were classified as 'skilled mechanics', reflected in their respective pay (185). …

Black Caribbean Labor Radicalism in Panama, 1914-1921

While the role of Caribbean immigrants in the “New Negro” movement in the United States is now well established, the concurrent militancy of black Caribbean workers in Panama is much less understood. The present article examines the rise and fall of Afro-Antillano militancy in both the U.S.-controlled Canal Zone and the Republic of Panama from 1914–1921. The presence of black people in the Panamanian isthmus went back centuries; West Indian migrants were especially discriminated against because they were English-speaking and Protestant. The Canal Zone authorities instituted Jim Crow style segregation (under the “Gold” and “Silver” system) to divide the work force, leaving black Caribbean workers paid less, discriminated against, and oppressed. In the face of this, these workers were not so passive or pro-British as they are often depicted. Instead, there was an outpouring of labor militancy in this period, including two massive strikes. However, the defeat of these strikes undercut the development of a united-working-class movement in Panama, caused many black Caribbean migrants to leave Panama, and made many of those remaining wary of labor radicalism. The Universal Negro Improvement Association of Marcus Garvey—the most prominent black Caribbean organization in Panama at the time—had originally sympathized with the labor militancy, but in the wake of working-class defeats, became increasingly anti-labor.

The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, Vol. XI: The Caribbean Diaspora, 1910–1920 (review)

Reviewed by: The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, Vol. XI: The Caribbean Diaspora, 1910–1920 Glenn A. Chambers The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, Vol. XI: The Caribbean Diaspora, 1910–1920. Edited by Robert A. Hill. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011. 1128 pp. $120 (cloth). Since the publication of the first volume of this collection more than two decades ago, Robert A. Hill’s Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers has served as an indispensable source to understanding the impact and spread of the ideals of Marcus Garvey and his organization throughout the African diaspora. The letters, writings, and speeches in this current volume delve intricately into the West Indian side of the Garvey phenomenon that to this point has been neglected in the scholarship on the movement. By beginning the volume in 1910 (prior to the founding of the movement in 1914) Hill situates Garvey and his organization within the context of early twentieth-century West Indian history in which the impact of British [End Page 737] colonial neglect manifested itself in a variety of ways. Issues such as color and class prejudices, elite monopolization of land ownership, a declining sugar industry and its low wages, and the lack of educational opportunities for large segments of the population created circumstances in which emigration to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Central and South America, and the Spanish Caribbean were the only viable options for improving the political, economic, and cultural realities of the masses of West Indians. As one document in the volume from a Grenadian contributor to the UNIA paper The Negro World stated in 1919, “the system of government, the hardships being endured by the working class, the lack of general move for uplift and advances of the masses along economic lines, the want of unity . . . made me leave” (p. 367). This mass movement and the West Indian diaspora it created, served as the largest and most dedicated membership in the UNIA. Much has been written about Garvey’s impact in the United States and Africa; however, this volume demonstrates that Garvey’s most lasting political and cultural legacy was in the British West Indies. The sources in the volume reveal that while Garvey and the UNIA were appealing to West Indians abroad because of a shared Caribbean heritage, the fact that the organization was based in the United States and beyond the reach of British suppression made it an incubator for anticolonial and independence movements in the Caribbean. Several figures instrumental in the Caribbean fight for independence in the twentieth century honed their protest and organizational skills while members of the UNIA. Hill notes that the movement was sponsored largely by West Indian migrants “emancipated” in Central America and Cuba, as well as veterans of World War I who fought in the British West Indian regiments and felt entitled to better treatment from the British government upon completion of their service. The Central American and Cuban chapters comprised West Indians working in the sugar and banana industries in Cuba and Central America, as well as workers in the Panama Canal Zone, and were some of the most active and vocal chapters. When many of these migrants were repatriated to their home countries, they utilized the skills learned within the UNIA abroad to challenge their governments at home to improve political, economic, and social conditions. The foundations of trade unionism in the Caribbean and the worker solidarity and nationalism it promoted are apparent in several of the documents in this volume. The documents in the volume related to the UNIA chapters in Central America suggest that one of the major accomplishments of the organization was its ability to quell insularity within the West Indian [End Page 738] migrant communities. In a document from a Panamanian newspaper, a report on a speech given by Miss Henrietta Vinton Davis, a UNIA organizer emphasizes her desire for West Indians in Panama to “put away what she considered a great impediment in the way of unity, that insularity which she found existed among West Indians” (p. 493). The idea of unity among West Indians is further emphasized in the...

Image matters: archive, photography, and the African diaspora in Europe

In Image Matters , Tina M. Campt traces the emergence of a black European subject by examining how specific black European communities used family photography to create forms of identification and community. At the heart of Campt's study are two photographic archives, one composed primarily of snapshots of black German families taken between 1900 and 1945, and the other assembled from studio portraits of West Indian migrants to Birmingham, England, taken between 1948 and 1960. Campt shows how these photographs conveyed profound aspirations to forms of national and cultural belonging. In the process, she engages a host of contemporary issues, including the recoverability of non-stereotypical life stories of black people, especially in Europe, and their impact on our understanding of difference within diaspora; the relevance and theoretical approachability of domestic, vernacular photography; and the relationship between affect and photography. Campt places special emphasis on the tactile and sonic registers of family photographs, and she uses them to read the complexity of in visual signs and to highlight the inseparability of gender and sexuality from any analysis of race and class. Image Matters is an extraordinary reflection on what vernacular photography enabled black Europeans to say about themselves and their communities.

Gender and Migration: West Indians in Comparative Perspective

This article explores gender issues in West Indian migration by taking a comparative -cross-national -perspective. The focus is on the three major West Indian migration movements of the mid- and late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries -to the United States Britain and Canada. A comparative approach has a number of benefits for the study of West Indian migration. It not only points to similarities and contrasts in gender-related patterns among West Indian migrants in the United States Britain and Canada but also forces us to try to account for them. It brings out in an especially dramatic way the role of the context of reception and the receiving countrys immigration policies in shaping male-female differences in West Indian migration flows as well as immigrant adaptation. The comparative analysis of the three migrations in this article explores the reasons for and patterns of West Indian migration as they relate to gender including the practice of leaving children behind in the Caribbean as well as aspects of the labour market incorporation of West Indian men and women when they have arrived and settled in the migrant destination. More specifically the comparisons raise some intriguing questions. Why for example did West Indian women comprise a greater proportion of the migrations to the United States and Canada than to Britain? Why were West Indian women more likely to work in caregiving jobs in private homes in the United States and Canada than in Britain? And have the dynamics of transnational motherhood differed in the North American and British contexts?

Belonging in Britain: black older people's experiences of a sheltered housing scheme in London

My research, entitled ‘The negotiation of belonging among long‐term West Indian migrants residing in a sheltered housing scheme in Brixton, London’, examined the intricacies of identity and placement. The Supporting People Framework governs this BME supported housing scheme within the Council's equalities ethos. My research sample of 26 women and men aged between 60 and 86 were working‐class migrants who had moved to England in the 1950s and 1960s. Influenced by Gramsci's (1990) ideas about the involvement of ordinary people in social change, and Bhabha's (1994) idea of placement, I investigated how the elders, assisted by others who acted on their behalf, negotiated their place in British society as recipients of support services, and engaged in consultation and user involvement processes. Both conflicting and supportive service provision arose. This created shifting boundaries in relation to belonging that emerged between the elders, their place of birth, their formative culture and their on‐going engagement with new experiences, other groups and the state.

Allies, Constituents or Myopic Investors: Marcus Garvey and Black Americans

Marcus Garvey's ideology had special meaning to West Indian migrants because it helped their economic adjustment in the United States. Despite the relocation of the Universal Negro Improvement Association to New York City, Garvey continued to speak predominantly to West Indians at home and abroad, since he shared their colonial mentality and understood their migrant ideology – the search for economic gain abroad in order to multiply options back home. Garvey scholars have argued that black Americans benefited from Garvey rhetoric as much as West Indian migrants, but tensions between the two communities suggest that black Americans did not think so. Garveyism served to accentuate economic rivalries as black Americans suspected that migrants wanted to transfer their material success back home – indeed, Garvey openly encouraged as much.

Rescued from their Invisibility: The Afro-Puerto Ricans of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century San Mateo de Cangrejos, Puerto Rico

The black “root” has been systematically “uprooted” from the main “trunk” of the Puerto Rican nation.Jorge DuanyScholars who study Puerto Rico's past have struggled with the question of how to define the island’s national identity. Is the essence of Puerto Rican identity rooted in Spain, does it have its origins in Africa, in the legacy of the native Tainos, or is it a product of two or all three of these? This polemical question has yet to be resolved and remains a subject of much debate. The island's black past is often overlooked, and what has been written tends to focus on the enslaved labor force and its ties to the nineteenth-century plantation economy. Few works are specifically devoted to the study of the island's seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Afro-Puerto Rican population. Recent scholarship has begun to address this oversight. For example, the efforts of fugitive slaves and free black West Indian migrants making their way to Puerto Rico have been well documented. Yet, little is known about the number or identity of these runaways. How many slaves made their way to freedom in Puerto Rico, who were they, and where did they come from? Perhaps more importantly, what about their new lives on the island? How were they able to create a sense of belonging, both as individuals and as part of a community within the island's existing population and society? What follows strives to answer these questions by taking a closer look first at the number and identity of these fugitives, and second at how new arrivals were assimilated into their new surroundings through marriage and family formation while their integration was facilitated by participation in the local economy. Through their religious and civic activity Afro-Puerto Ricans were able to create a niche for themselves in San Juan and eventually a community of their own in Cangrejos. In doing so, they helped shape the island's national identity.

“Mad Dogs and Transnational Migrants?” Bajan-Brit Second-Generation Migrants and Accusations of Madness

Second-generation British-Barbadians (“Bajan-Brits”) returning to the land of their parents are frequently accused by indigenous Barbadian nationals of being mad. Narratives of the migrants reflect four major sets of factors: (1) madness as perceived behavioral and cultural differences; (2) explanations that relate to the historical-clinical circumstances surrounding the incidence of mental ill health among first-generation West Indian migrants to the United Kingdom; (3) madness as a pathology of alienation that is attendant on living in Barbados; and (4) madness as “othering,”“outing,” and “fixity.” British second-generation “returning nationals” to the Caribbean, living as they do in the plural world of the land of their parents' birth, after having been raised in the colonial “Mother Country,” exhibit hybridity and in-betweenness. Accusations of madness serve to fix the position of these young migrants outside the mainstream of indigenous Barbadian society. Our analysis invokes recent postcolonial writings dealing with “strange encounters” to theorize that the madness accusation serves to “other” the young Bajan-Brit migrants in a strongly postcolonial context.

Longitudinal Study of Socio-economic Differences in Mortality Among South Asian and West Indian Migrants

Aim. To examine socio-economic differences in mortality of South Asian and West Indian migrants. Design. ONS Longitudinal Study, a 1% sample of the population of England and Wales. Participants. First generation South Asian and West Indian migrants present at the 1971 and 1981 censuses, aged under 65 years in 1981, were classified by occupational class, access to cars, housing, and a deprivation score. Outcome measures. Relative risks of mortality, 1981-1997. Results. There was considerable upward social mobility but most people remained socially stable, mainly relatively disadvantaged compared to all other study members. High levels of owner occupied housing among South Asians at both censuses were an exception. Socio-economic differentials in mortality were significant with car access in 1981 (relative risk 1.32, 95% confidence interval 1.03-1.70), and housing (rented vs owner occupied relative risk 1.50, 95% confidence interval 1.08-2.08) among South Asians and, among West Indians with car access in 1981 (relative risk 1.43, 95% confidence interval 1.05-1.94). Mortality was not significantly associated with socioeconomic circumstances in 1971. Conclusion. The disparity between those who remained advantaged or who moved up, and those who remained persistently disadvantaged, would have been a factor underlying the stronger differentials by later socio-economic circumstances. As these migrants age an increase in health inequalities could be expected.

Cancer Incidence Among First Generation Scottish, Irish, West Indian and South Asian Migrants Living in England and Wales

Objectives. To examine the incidence of cancers among persons born in Scotland, Northern Ireland, the Irish Republic, Caribbean Commonwealth and Indian subcontinent and living in England and Wales. Methods. Longitudinal Study of 1% of population of England and Wales followed from 1971 to 1989. Standardised incidence ratios (SIRs) were derived for commonly occurring cancers and all cancers using the age-sex-specific rates for all females and all males in the Longitudinal Study. Results. The incidence of all malignant neoplasms among West Indians (females SIR = 67, male SIR = 70) and Indians (female SIR = 32, male SIR = 52) was low. Among South Asians, this pattern was consistent for Hindus, Sikhs and Moslems. Scottish females showed raised incidence of lung cancer (SIR = 149) and those from the Irish Republic of oral cavity and pharynx (SIR = 321), oesophageal (SIR = 219) and liver (SIR = 373) cancers. Among Northern Irish females, incidence of lung cancer (SIR = 193) was raised. West Indian and South Asian females showed low incidence of breast cancer (SIR = 55 and 45, respectively). High incidence of laryngeal (SIR = 229) and renal (SIR = 203) cancers was observed for Scottish males and of oral cancer (SIR = 259) for males from the Irish Republic. At ages 15-64, raised incidence of prostate cancer (SIR = 129) and of leukaemia (SIR = 252) was also observed for men from the Irish Republic. Northern Irish males showed raised incidence of stomach cancer (SIR = 200). Conclusion. This study describes patterns of cancer incidence among migrant groups, most of which reflect environmental influences. This has challenging implications for sensitive targeting of primary interventions. It is important not to be complacent about lower risks of main cancers among West Indians and South Asians. In all Longitudinal Study members, breast cancer was the most common malignancy among females and lung cancer among males. This was also true for all migrant groups with the exception of Northern Irish women for whom lung cancer was the most common.

West Indian Identity in the Diaspora

When West Indians 1 move abroad, they begin to see themselves and others in new ways. Nowhere is this more evident than in the emergence of new racial and ethnic identities. As West Indians travel abroad in search of economic opportunities and resources, all too often they find themselves living in societies in which blackness is more devalued than it was at home, and they face significant barriers because of their race. Being black and being West Indian take on new meanings in the immigrant situation and form the basis for new alliances as well as new divisions with people of other racial and ethnic groups they come into contact with away from home. Just what kinds of ethnic and racial identities-and racial and ethnic relations-develop among West Indian migrants depends on the particular context into which they move. This may, at first glance, seem obvious. After all, English-speaking West Indians have migrated in significant numbers, over the years, to a variety of different places, including other Caribbean islands, Central America, the United States, and Britain. One would expect West Indians who move to the United States, for example, to have a different sense of racial consciousness from West Indians in Britain. But there is much that is not obvious. Although we may expect to find contrasts between West Indians who go to different destinations, we certainly cannot always predict what the differences will be. Nor are the structural features of the receiving society that shape West Indian identity always immediately apparent. Indeed, it is only through careful cross-national comparisons that we can begin to understand the complex, sometimes subtle, and often surprising ways in

Searching for the Causes of Schizophrenia: The Role of Migrant Studies

There have been consistent reports in the literature of increased rates of hospital admissions for schizophrenia among Afro-Caribbean (West Indian) migrants to England. Recent evidence for even higher rates in the British-born second generation is reviewed, together with the methodological limitations of such studies. It is concluded that there is probably an epidemic of schizophrenia and related psychoses in this group of migrants although further prospective and longitudinal studies are required. The findings point to the potentially important role of migrant studies in determining environmental risk factors for schizophrenia.