Caribbean Migrations

The Legacies of Colonialism

Anke Birkenmaier

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781978814516
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

With mass migration changing the configuration of societies worldwide, we can look to the Caribbean to reflect on the long-standing, entangled relations between countries and areas as uneven in size and influence as the United States, Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica. More so than other world regions, the Caribbean has been characterized as an always already colonial region. It has long been a key area for empires warring over influence spheres in the new world, and where migration waves from Africa, Europe, and Asia accompanied every political transformation over the last five centuries. In Caribbean Migrations, an interdisciplinary group of humanities and social science scholars study migration from a long-term perspective, analyzing the Caribbean's "unincorporated subjects" from a legal, historical, and cultural standpoint, and exploring how despite often fractured public spheres, Caribbean intellectuals, artists, filmmakers, and writers have been resourceful at showcasing migration as the hallmark of our modern age.

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 commun...