ABSTRACT
If America has created a sense of nation what to say of migrant labor, populations often race or color marked and at the bottom of the work-ladder? What sense of migration, and its causes, most appropriately holds for the Afro-America fi rst of Middle Passage slavery, and as post-bellum Dixie re-imposed Jim Crow in its wake, the northwards Great Migration? More than a million black southerners would head for Harlem, Chicago or Canada, a “wave of black people running from want and violence” as Toni Morrison calls it in her novel Jazz (1992).4 Has not chicanismo, whatever its own historic claims to the southwest
and west, and in common with the Caribbean of Puerto Rico, Cuba and other Latin American populations seeking the dream of la abundancia, often enough been thought a “border” culture welcome only as manual labor? Luis Omar Salinas’s “Ode to Mexican Experience,” with its allusions to the poet’s own “Aztec mind” and to “roving gladiators” and “those lost in the wreckage,” gives a pointer to the fuller human nuance.5
