Migration:
The ocean, particularly the Atlantic, is omnipresent in literature on migration, voluntary and otherwise, to the Caribbean. As Benítez-Rojo so eloquently puts it, “The Atlantic is today the Atlantic (the navel of capitalism) because Europe, in its mercantilist laboratory, conceived of the project of inseminating the Caribbean womb with the blood of Africa; the Atlantic is today the Atlantic . . . because it is the painfully delivered child of the Caribbean, whose vagina was stretched between continental clamps. (Tinsley, p. 196, 2008)” In Queer Atlantic, Black Atlantic, Tinsley introduces an intersectional analysis of the Middle Passage in reimagining the restrictive European perspective of the slave trade to animate a rich African identity outside of colonial violence and violation to envision intimacy and rebellion as sites of slaves’ agency. The Caribbean is characterized by these narrational nuances and the subsequent consequence of societies constructed on enslavement and racial oppression.
The forced dislocation of individuals to the Caribbean “may be direct and coercive or diffused and subtle, such as lack of opportunities for social or economic advancement … Exile/diaspora [and by generalization: migration] is an important area of postcolonial studies, as colonialism resulted in a voluntary or a forced movement of the colonizer and the colonized alike. (In Ray et at, p. 144, 2016)” As a result of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, African descendants accounted for ⅓ to ½ of Cuba’s population (Helg, 2005). While Europeans accepted Africans as labor, they despised the effect interracial mixing had on skin color in Cuba. In fact, white Cubans viewed the whitening of the country as linked to the progress and prosperity of Cuba (De la Fuente, 1998). “As anywhere else in the North Atlantic world, an appropriate racial composition was perceived as a precondition for progress and modernity… At a more concrete level, blacks and blackness were attacked through a program of state-encouraged immigration that sought to dilute them in a torrent of white blood. (De la Fuente, p. 6, 1998)” This ideology encouraged immigration of light skinned individuals from the North to the Caribbean and South as a whole which maintained a white majority population.
Chinese and Indian immigrants to the Caribbean, commonly known as Coolies, primarily recruited as workers post emancipation account for a significant percentage of the migrant population with three million chinese workers being recruited between 1800 and 1925. Many of these migrants did not arrive directly from China and instead abandoned the Panama Railroad company that was characterized by cruel conditions and treatment. American forces in Jamaica preferred Chinese labor, describing them as intelligent, industrious, persevering, and reliable (Helg, 2005). Chinese communities and social networks emerged as Chinese labor became commonplace in the Caribbean. These communities were mostly racially homogenous but began to integrate into wider Jamaican culture as Jamaican-born generations turned away from their Chinese identity and adopted Jamaican identities (Helg, 2005).
The Caribbean is characterized by migration en masse which resulted in complex and intersectional dynamics of race, gender, class, politics, privilege and disadvantage. This process is by no means complete, as global migration patterns introduce unique cultures into Caribbean society and diverse cultures vie for recognition, representation, and equality. Extensive and colliding waves of migration characterize the Caribbean as disparate people linked by national post-colonial identities.
References
De la Fuente, A. (1998). Race, national discourse, and politics in Cuba. Latin American Perspectives, 25(3), 43-69. https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582x9802500303
Helg, A. (2005). Race and Politics in Cuba. In Contemporary Caribbean cultures and societies in a global context (pp. 183-202). University of North Carolina Press.
In Ray, S., In Schwarz, H., In Villacañas, B. J. L., In Moreiras, A., & In Shemak, A. A. (2016). The encyclopedia of postcolonial studies. Tinsley, O. N. (2008). Black Atlantic, queer Atlantic: Queer imaginings of the middle passage. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 14(2-3), 191-215. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2007-030