West Indian Migration to New York

Islands in the City This page intentionally left blank Islands in the City West Indian Migration to New York

EDITED BY Nancy Foner

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles London University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd. London, England

Islands in the city : West Indian migration to New York / edited by Nancy Foner. p. cm. Based on a conference entitled West Indian migration to New York : historical, contemporary, and transnational perspectives, which was held at the Research Institute for the Study of Man in April 1999. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-520-22573-2 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 0-520-22850-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. West Indian Americans—New York (State)—New York—Social conditions—Congresses. 2. West Indian Americans—New York (State)—New York—Race identity—Congresses. 3. Blacks— New York (State)—New York––Social conditions—Congresses. 4. Blacks—Race identity—New York (State)—New York—Congresses. 5. Immigrants—New York (State)—New York—Social conditions—Congresses. 6. New York (N.Y.)—Social conditions—Congresses. 7. New York (N.Y.)—Race relations—Congresses. 8. New York (N.Y.)—Emigration and immigration— Congresses. 9. West Indies—Emigration and immigration—Congresses. I. Foner, Nancy, 1945- F128.9.W54 I85 2001 305.896Ј97290747—dc21 00-046711

Printed in the United States of America 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 10987654321

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1984 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper). CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS / vii

Introduction. West Indian Migration to New York: An Overview Nancy Foner / 1

PART I • GENDER, WORK, AND RESIDENCE / 23

1. Early-Twentieth-Century Caribbean Women: Migration and Social Networks in New York City Irma Watkins-Owens / 25 2. Where New York’s West Indians Work Suzanne Model / 52 3. West Indians and the Residential Landscape of New York Kyle D. Crowder and Lucky M. Tedrow / 81

PART II • TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES / 115

4. Transnational Social Relations and the Politics of National Identity: An Eastern Caribbean Case Study Linda Basch / 117 5. New York as a Locality in a Global Family Network Karen Fog Olwig / 142 vi CONTENTS

PART III • RACE, ETHNICITY, AND THE SECOND GENERATION / 161

6. “Black Like Who?” Afro-Caribbean Immigrants, African Americans, and the Politics of Group Identity Reuel Rogers / 163 7. Growing Up West Indian and African American: Gender and Class Differences in the Second Generation Mary C. Waters / 193 8. Experiencing Success: Structuring the Perception of Opportunities for West Indians Vilna F. Bashi Bobb and Averil Y. Clarke / 216 9. Tweaking a Monolith: The West Indian Immigrant Encounter with “Blackness” Milton Vickerman / 237 Conclusion. Invisible No More? West Indian Americans in the Social Scientiﬁc Imagination Philip Kasinitz / 257

REFERENCES / 277

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS / 297

INDEX / 301 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This volume has its origins in a two-day conference, “West Indian Migration to New York: Historical, Contemporary, and Transnational Perspectives,” held at the Research Institute for the Study of Man in April 1999. The conference was made possible by support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthro- pological Research and the Research Institute for the Study of Man. I owe a very special debt to Lambros Comitas, director of the Research In- stitute for the Study of Man. The phrase “without him this book would never have been written” may be a cliché, but in this case it is really true. He sug- gested that I organize the conference in the ﬁrst place and provided advice and assistance with great generosity and good humor. Many thanks, as well, to Lewis Burgess, also associated with the Research Institute for the Study of Man, for his help with the many details involved in arranging the conference. At the conference, Roy S. Bryce-Laporte, Don Robotham, Roger Sanjek, and Constance Sutton made valuable contributions to the discussion and of- fered comments on early drafts of the papers, many of which have been in- corporated in this volume. Other participants at the conference included Rachel Buff, Randal Hepner and Tricia Redeker Hepner, Winston James, and Philip Scher; their papers provided insights that I, and many of the authors, have found extremely useful. My thanks to Philip Kasinitz, not only for his formal comments at the conference—which were the basis for his concluding chapter—but also for serving as a much-valued sounding board during the preparation of the book. And, of course, my appreciation to all of the authors in the volume for their responsiveness and commitment to the project and for the quality of their contributions. A special thanks to Naomi Schneider, executive editor at the University of California Press, for her support of the project and for shepherding the

vii viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS manuscript through the publication process so quickly and efficiently. Also, thanks to Ellie Hickerson and Kristina Kite for answering endless questions and helping with details along the way. Finally, I am grateful to Wallace Zane and another, anonymous reader for the University of California Press for providing useful suggestions that have, I believe, made this a better book. INTRODUCTION

West Indian Migration to New York An Overview

Nancy Foner

The past four decades have witnessed a massive West Indian migration to New York. The influx—the largest emigration flow in West Indian history— has had enormous consequences for the lives of individual migrants as well as for the societies they have left behind and the city they have entered. This col- lection of original essays explores the effects of West Indian migration, puts forward analytic frameworks to aid in understanding it, and points to areas for further research. The focus of the book is on migrants from the nations of the former British Caribbean, who share a heritage of British colonialism, Creole culture, and lin- guistic background. The location is New York—the most significant destination, by far, for Caribbean immigrants in the United States. Since 1965 more than half a million West Indians have moved to New York City—about twice the size of the population of the island of Barbados and five times the size of Grenada. If one puts together all the migrants from the Anglophone Caribbean, West In- dians are the largest immigrant group in New York City. More and more, New York’s black population is becoming Caribbeanized. By 1998, according to Cur- rent Population Survey estimates, almost a third of New York City’s black population was foreign born, the vast majority West Indian. Adding the second generation, census estimates suggest that roughly two-fifths of the city’s black residents trace their origins to the West Indies. The dense concentrations of West Indians in certain sections of the city have created neighborhoods with a distinct Caribbean flavor. As Milton Vickerman has recently noted, West Indian New Yorkers are more likely to go to Flatbush Avenue to develop a sense of West Indian ethnicity than to Kingston or Port of Spain.1 In the context of the near record-breaking immigration to the United States, West Indians represent a particularly fascinating case. Because they

1 2 NANCY FONER are, in American racial terms, overwhelmingly black, West Indians bring to the fore the critical role of race in the U.S. immigrant experience. Because many West Indian migrants remain closely tied to their home societies, they highlight the role of transnational processes and practices. And because West Indian migration to New York has a long history, analysis of the city’s West Indian community is able to shed light on what is new about contemporary patterns. In providing a broad view of West Indian migration to New York, the chapters in Islands in the City draw on a variety of theoretical perspectives, empirical data, and methodologies. Sociologists studying West Indian migration have generally focused on immigrant incorporation and issues of identity, historians have often looked at relations between black Americans and West Indians, and anthropologists have been primarily concerned with transnational processes and cultural shifts in the United States. This volume—with authors from the fields of anthropology, history, political science, and sociology—brings together the different approaches. It includes studies of the past as well as the present, analyses of transnational connections as well as modes of immigrant incorporation, comparisons of the first and second generations, and discus- sions of political socialization as well as economic integration. A wide variety of methods are involved, including archival research, participant observation and in-depth interviews, and quantitative analyses of census materials. A central question is how West Indian arrivals have been transforming New York as they settle and form communities in the city. West Indians are also changing, and being changed by, New York’s system of race and ethnic relations. In the contemporary era, what kinds of racial and ethnic identities have emerged among the first generation—and are developing among the second generation? Are members of the second generation assimilating into the African American population? Is the presence of hundreds of thousands of West Indians playing a role in altering American racial conceptions? Also at issue is the question of transnational practices. What kinds of ties do West Indians maintain to their home societies? What consequences do transnational links have for West Indians at home and abroad? And how should we conceptualize the ties between New York West Indians and their compatriots in other receiving societies such as Britain and Canada? As the chapters explore the West Indian migrant experience, they shed new light on a number of broad cultural and social processes. Among them are the na- ture and impact of transnational connections, the dynamics of segmented assim- ilation, the role of gender in migration, patterns of immigrant residential and economic incorporation, and, above all, the effects of race. Black immigrants are a significant component of America’s new immigrants, but they have often been ignored in immigration debates, which typically focus on Asians and Latinos. By highlighting the distinctive experience of West Indian newcomers, the essays in this book bring out the critical role of race in immigrant incorporation. They also INTRODUCTION: WEST INDIAN MIGRATION TO NEW YORK 3 underscore the way “blackness” is being renegotiated in an increasingly multi- ethnic black America. Moreover, because West Indians are closely identified with African Americans, the study of West Indian migration has implications for the way West Indians fare in relation to native-born blacks—and the complex ways that West Indians utilize ethnicity to improve their image and their life chances. In this introductory chapter I set the stage with an overview of contemporary West Indian migration to New York, setting it in the context of past migration and in terms of two issues—race and transnationalism—that are major themes in the volume. The chapters in the first section analyze some basic features of the movement to New York: where West Indians live (Crow- der and Tedrow) and work (Model) and women’s experiences in the migration in the early twentieth century (Watkins-Owens). The second part explores West Indian transnational practices (Basch and Olwig). Although issues of race are in the forefront throughout the book, the chapters in the third section are specifically concerned with race, ethnicity, and identity in the first and second generations (Rogers, Waters, Bashi Bobb and Clarke, and Vickerman). In the concluding chapter, Philip Kasinitz offers a review of the social science lit- erature on West Indian Americans, explaining why they are emerging from “invisibility”—and why parts of their experience were ignored in the past and continue, even in the new body of scholarship, to be overlooked. A few words on terminology. In this chapter, I use “West Indian” to refer to people from the Anglophone Caribbean, including the mainland nations of Guyana and Belize, and, although I have not imposed an editorial straitjacket regarding this usage, many of the contributors have followed the same con- vention. (A few authors use the term somewhat differently—for example, in their analysis of census data Crowder and Tedrow include people from Haiti and the Dutch and French islands under the West Indian rubric.) Several authors use “Afro-Caribbean” or “African Caribbean” to emphasize the role of race.2 Indeed, all of the chapters focus on West Indians of at least partial African descent. Unless otherwise noted, “African Americans”or “black Amer- icans” refer to North Americans of African ancestry, as opposed to “West In- dians” or “Afro-Caribbeans”; “blacks” refers to all non-Hispanic New Yorkers of African descent, including those of Caribbean and North American origin.3 Finally, the term “people of African ancestry,” as Vickerman notes in his chapter, includes African Americans and West Indians as well as immigrants from Africa and elsewhere who can trace their heritage back to Africa.

WEST INDIAN MIGRATION TO NEW YORK, PAST AND PRESENT Emigration has long been a way of life in the West Indies. Its roots go deep— they are traceable to the legacy of slavery, the distorting effects of colonial rule, the centuries-long domination of the islands’ economies by plantation agricul- 4 NANCY FONER

ture, and, in recent years, continued dependence on world powers, lending institutions, and corporations. Scarce resources, overpopulation, high unem- ployment and underemployment, limited opportunities for advancement— these have long spurred West Indians to look abroad for economic security and better job prospects, improved living standards, and ways to get ahead. “Ja- maica,” one man told me when I was doing research in a rural community in the late 1960s, “is a beautiful country, but we can’t see our way to make it through” (see Foner 1973, 1978). In the past few decades, economic crises—along with inflation and unem- ployment—have continued to fuel migration fever. West Indian small-island economies simply cannot deliver the kinds of jobs, lifestyles, and consumption patterns that people at all social levels want. And increasingly they want more, due to such factors as improved communications, the promises of new elites, the expansion of educational opportunities, as well as reports and visits from migrants themselves. A national opinion survey in Jamaica in the late 1970s found that 60 percent of the population would move to the United States if given the chance (Stone 1982: 64).4 The search for a better life has taken West Indians all over the globe—to Central America, other West Indian islands, Britain, Canada, and, of course, the United States. Most who come to this country gravitate to New York. In the first mass West Indian influx, which began around 1900 and peaked in the early 1920s, New York City was the main port of entry. By 1930, more than half of the seventy-two thousand foreign-born blacks from the non-Hispanic Caribbean in the United States counted in the census lived in New York City. Indeed, New York was the only city in the country where a significant proportion of the black population was of Caribbean origin. In 1920 West Indi- ans constituted about a quarter of New York’s black population, and in 1930 nearly a fifth (Kasinitz 1992: 24–25, 41–42). Today no other U.S. city has so many West Indians, or such a high proportion of the national total. By 1998 West Indian immigrants constituted about 8 percent of New York’s population, making them the largest immigrant group in the city. Census Bureau estimates for the late 1990s put the number of Jamaican, Guyanese, Trinidadian, and Barbadian immigrants in New York City—the four largest West Indian groups—at about 435,000.5 Ac- cording to Immigration and Naturalization Service figures, over half of the Jamaicans and Trinidadians and close to three-quarters of the Guyanese who legally entered the United States between 1972 and 1992 settled in the New York urban region, most of them moving to the city itself.6 New York City and its surrounding counties have been a popular destination for a number of reasons. Early in the twentieth century, steamships car- rying bananas and tourists between the Caribbean and New York helped to establish the city as a migration center. Once West Indians set up a beachhead in New York, a process of progressive network building sustained the flow INTRODUCTION: WEST INDIAN MIGRATION TO NEW YORK 5

until restrictive legislation in the 1920s and the depression of the 1930s cut it off.7 Migrants wrote letters encouraging friends and relatives to join them, often sent back funds for the voyage, and were on hand to offer a sense of security and prospects of assistance. Like other immigrants, West Indians created what Charles Tilly (1990: 90) has called “migration machines: sending networks that articulated with particular receiving networks in which new migrants could find jobs, housing, and sociability.” As Irma Watkins-Owens shows in her essay, West Indian women, as well as men, were centers of these “migration machines.” At the beginning of the twentieth century as well as later, women were important figures in initiating and sustaining migration chains. The very presence of an established (though aging) West Indian community drew immigrants to the city once mass migration resumed following changes in U.S. immigration law in 1965. Once again, New York offers employment possibilities for West Indian arrivals. Networks of friends and relatives continue to channel West Indians to the city, serving as financial safety nets for the new arrivals and sources of information about life in New York. By allocating most immigrant visas along family lines, present U.S. immigration law reinforces and formalizes the operation of migration networks. New York is appealing because it is home to vibrant West Indian neighborhoods and institutions. More- over, New York itself has an image that draws newcomers. To many West In- dians, New York is a symbol of North American influence and power and the object, as Bryce-Laporte has written, of their “dream[s], curiosity, sense of achievement, and drive for adventure” (1987: 56). The most obvious common thread in the New York West Indian migrant experience throughout the twentieth century is the existence of racial preju- dice and discrimination, a topic I take up at length later. Several chapters point to other continuities. Irma Watkins-Owens’s portrait of independent West Indian women in early-twentieth-century New York—often migrating on their own, working in low-end personal service jobs, and serving as central figures in informal kinship networks—does not sound all that different from today. Contrary to stereotypes about the West Indian “genius” for business in the early 1900s, Suzanne Model’s analysis of census data shows that West In- dians had low self-employment rates then, just as they do now. Indeed, what self-employment existed in the earlier period, according to Philip Kasinitz (this volume), was largely in the professions, not in the types of small busi- nesses we usually associate with immigrant entrepreneurial activity. But despite continuities, much has also changed. Today’s New York West Indian community is more than ten times the size it was seventy years ago. Whereas West Indian migration shrank to small numbers in the long hiatus between the mid 1920s and the mid 1960s, today’s huge influx has already lasted longer than the earlier wave and is still going strong.8 Barring dracon- ian U.S. legislation, a large flow is likely to continue for years to come. 6 NANCY FONER

Today’s immigrants come from a different Caribbean than their predeces- sors. West Indian societies are no longer British colonies but independent nations, with black- and brown-skinned elites and government leaders. British influence has declined, while American political, economic, and cultural influence has grown. Modern technology—especially television, telephones, and jet travel—and growing tourism allow people in the most remote West Indian vil- lages to have an up-close view of American life before they even get here. New York is also a very different place than it was during the first wave. The city’s black population is much larger and more dispersed, as is the West Indian population. The core of the West Indian community, centered earlier on central Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, has shifted to the Crown Heights, East Flatbush, and Flatbush sections of Brooklyn. Distinct West Indian neighborhoods have also developed in southeastern Queens and the northeast Bronx as well as in neighboring Mount Vernon, just across the city line in Westchester. Large numbers of post-1965 migrants flocked to neighborhoods experiencing an exodus of whites that opened up a substantial stock of decent housing (see Crowder and Tedrow, this volume; Crowder 1999). In the post–civil rights era, West Indians (especially the better educated) have access to a much wider array of jobs in the mainstream economy; higher education, including elite colleges and universities, is more available. The political arena has enlarged for blacks. As Philip Kasinitz (1992) details in Caribbean New York, the first cohort of West Indian immigrants played down their ethnic distinctiveness in the public arena. Entering America at the height of racial segregation—and when they were a much smaller community— West Indian New Yorkers immersed themselves in the broader African Amer- ican community. Few West Indians who rose to political prominence claimed to be Caribbean leaders; indeed, they deliberately muted their West Indian- ness in public life as they appealed to, and were largely supported by, a pre- dominantly native African American electorate.9 Today a new breed of politicians has emerged who represent distinct West Indian interests and have a political base in the city’s large, densely populated West Indian neighborhoods. Dominant political interests have helped this process along; two pre- dominantly West Indian districts in Brooklyn were created through redistrict- ing in the 1990s, and political figures of all stripes actively court West Indian leaders and make use of West Indian symbolism in order to obtain votes. As Linda Basch (this volume) points out, mainstream New York politicians now clamor to strut down Eastern Parkway on Labor Day at the helm of the “West Indian American Day Carnival Parade,” currently the city’s largest ethnic cel- ebration, which draws crowds of one to two million people. Today’s racial/ethnic hierarchy provides a radically new context in which West Indians interact with other New Yorkers. In 1920 the 152,000 black New Yorkers constituted a little under 3 percent of the city’s population, and an even smaller proportion were Asian or Hispanic.10 By 1998 the city was more