Four Journals: One Book
There is a strong kinship between this book, consisting of four journals dealing with Mexico and the Caribbean over the period 1966 to 1978, and my two published field accountsâPost-Colonial Trinidad: An Ethnographic Journal (2010) and Race, Class and the Politics of Decolonization: Jamaica Journals, 1961 and 1968 (2015); they all focus on decolonization, the quest for democracy, and issues of race, colour, class, and culture. Moreover, these three journals overlap with and inform my four monographs on Kingston , Jamaica (1975, 2006), San Fernando , Trinidad (1986), and Oaxaca, Mexico (2000), all of which deal with these same issues in specific urban and rural contexts.
Chapter 2 (of this book) is based on a research visit I made to examine the land reform in Mexico in 1966. This follows on from my doctoral fieldwork in Kingston in 1961, while Jamaica was still a British colony (one year short of independence ), and my postdoctoral project on East Indians in San Fernando, Trinidad, that was carried out in 1964, two years after the independence of Trinidad and Tobago from the UK. The independence of Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago in 1962 fragmented the colonial Federation of the West Indies, leaving each of the remaining colonies to seek new constitutions on their own.
Chapter 3, based on my travels through the arc of islands in the Caribbean from Haiti to Guyana in 1968, is an adjunct to follow-up fieldwork in Kingston that year and captures the beginnings of the Caribbean Black Power movement as a reflection of contemporary events in the US and the radical student movements in Europe. It contains an account of post-colonial Caribbean fragmentation in the case of Anguillaâs separation from St Kitts , and a revisit to Trinidad, which continues many of the conversations and experiences of my 1964 fieldwork.
This journey was followed about 6 months later by an account (also in Chap. 3) of a short visit I made to Cuba in 1969. At this date, the Castro regime had been in power for 10 years, was viewed by the US as a socialist, non-democratic state, and had declared itself communist in late 1961, introducing cold war geopolitics into the Caribbean and Latin America through the Missile Crisis of November 1962. Cubaâs neighbours shared most of these concerns, but all had impoverished populations that responded to Castroâs anti-colonialism and anti-Americanism . And in the case of Mexico, which underwent a revolution against the dictatorship of Porfirio DĂaz in the early twentieth century, there were symbolic and organic links to the Castro revolution. These provided opportunities for state manipulation that bolstered the countryâs own revolutionary and socialist credentials.
Aware that, for the previous decade, Mexico and the Caribbean islands had been under Castroâs eyes as neighbouring societies potentially ripe for communist revolution, I thought that a visit to Cuba following my 1966 and 1968 journeys was essential to my understanding of the Castro revolution at first hand. In April 1969 I attended a conference in Mexico, from which it was feasible to fly to Havana and then travel back to the UK via Madridâthe only non-Soviet airports open to travellers wishing to visit Cuba. My companion on the journey, Bryan Roberts, and I required no visas as British citizens, and we were able to sign up on arrival at the airport in Havana for a bespoke guided visitâunder surveillanceâthat took us to urban and rural Cuba, universities, teacher training colleges, polyclinics, peasant coffee holdings, nationalized sugar estates, industrial sites, and sugar warehouses. We saw a sufficient range of activities and enterprises to be able to make up our own minds on the ground about what we sawâthe crux of what fieldwork can add to any investigation.
A revisit to Jamaica in 1972 followed by a stay in Haiti are recorded in Chap. 4. In Haiti, I visited projects identified for me by Reggie Norton, the then Secretary of Oxfamâs Field Committee for Latin America and the Caribbean, of which I was a member for several years in the 1970s. Visiting these projects enabled me to travel widely in rural Haiti and to get under the skin of the notorious Duvalier regime. I revisited Puerto Rico and went back to Trinidad, where I encountered issues flowing from the Black Power disturbances of 1970, which had severely shaken but not toppled the Williams government. I made another short visit to Trinidad in 1973 to take the politico-racial temperature and collect 1970 census materials for my research project on San Fernando.
Chapter 5, which was preceded by an unrecorded 6-week preliminary visit to Mexico in 1976, provides an account of my 1978 travels as part of a 5-month project on class , eth nicity, and community among the diverse peasantries in the state of Oaxaca. Oaxaca is roughly the same size as Wales but even more mountainous, and visiting the various regions and altitudinal zones from the tierra caliente (warm zone) via the tierra templada (temperate zone) to the tierra frĂa (cold zone) was both difficult and a delight. Following on immediately from my stay in Oaxaca, I travelled from Mexico to Barbuda in the Lesser Antilles via Puerto Rico and Antigua. I had already carried out research on Barbuda in collaboration with David Lowenthal, and our archive-based paper on the myth of slave breeding had been published before my visit.
My 1966 and 1978 Mexican journals were kept under circumstances similar to the 1968 and 1972 Caribbean entries. The events I witnessed were recorded by hand in a notebook on the same day or the day following their occurrence, and they have been transcribed specifically for publication in this book. All the photographs were my own, as was the case for my parallel journals dealing with Trinidad (2010) and Jamaica (2016). With the permission of my wife Gillian and my children Aidan and Veronica , I have also included extracts from my letters to them, which fill in the gaps in my Mexican journals when I was on the move or for some other reason sent a separate record of my encounters and observations. The sections based on my letters are placed in square brackets and bear the recipientâs name; for clarity, they are dated separately from the remainder of the text, though they usually correspond with dates in the journal.
It will be obvious to the reader that the journals that comprise this book, and my two already-published journals on Trinidad (2010) and Jamaica (2016), can be read in conjunction with one another in a variety of ways. Taken together the three journals provide four separate accounts of post-colonial Trinidad in 1964, 1968 , 1972, and 1973 , which straddle independence and the Black Power disturbances of 1970; and three narratives of Jamaica in 1961 and 1968 (a whole book), and 1972, stretching from the end of British colonialism and the neocolonial Bustamante regime to the beginning of the Michael Manley government via the Rodney riots. There are also two descriptions of Mexico in 1966 and 1978 , which depict the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) in its pomp and under left-wing threat and its subsequent repression; and two views of Haiti and Puerto Rico in 1968 and 1972 , which focus, in the case of Haiti on the Duvalier re...