ABSTRACT
Emerging from current discourse on international population movement in today’s new era of globalization has been the identifi cation of transnational migration, where the people involved interact in multilocal transnational networks of communication, movement, exchange of knowledge, skill acquisition, business entrepreneurialism and social and cultural hybridity. Caribbean transnational migrants live between two worlds; their new migrant communities in the metropolitan NorthNorth America and Europe-and their home communities in the Caribbean (Conway & Potter 2007). Far from being an homogeneous category of failed migrants, who are returning because they could not make successful transitions abroad, Caribbean transnational return migrants are demographically selective, socioeconomically diverse, highly varied in their risk-taking and risk-averse propensities, and they possess differing stocks of human and social capital. Their transnational experiences and multilocal social networks provide social support systems of immersion and acculturation that help prepare them for transnational livelihoods and behaviours (including return migration(s)). Consequently, contemporary transnational migrants have divergent attitudes, contrasting and varied images of their island homelands, and constitute a global potpourri
of metropolitan and local hybrid backgrounds. Their experiences, adaptations, and behaviours back home are lived as individuals, within, or beyond, nuclear and/or extended family groupings, with color-class distinctions, race-class divisions, and insider-outsider contestations contextualizing their adaptation experiences on return. Their experiences are rarely commonly shared, so as to mobilize and provide a solidarity movement to initiate societal change in accordance with Bovenkerk’s (1974, 1981) wishful thinking that such a lack of solidarity among Surinamese returnees contributed to their inability to act as agents of societal change. As erstwhile invisible minorities, though more often than not distinguished by accents, dress codes, manners of speaking, eating, walking, driving, schooling and the like, returning young or youthful transnational migrants both fi t in, and don’t fi t.
