ABSTRACT
The Chinese community in Trinidad owes its origin to four distinct moments of migration. The first was as early as 1806, when a single experimental colony of 200 men were brought to the island, recruited mainly from Macao and the island of Penang in Malaya rather than from the mainland proper. This experimentdesigned to replicate the successful immigration to Penang or Prince of Wales Island-was a failure and was not repeated. The second stage took place in the 1850s and 1860s, and this migration lay in the well-known circumstances of nineteenth-century global migration. Accustomed to migrating in large numbers to the countries of Southeast Asia, both before and after the arrival of Europe in the East, the Chinese found themselves propelled by the changing circumstances of the nineteenth-century global economy into a wider global orbit. This widening of the orbit of overseas Chinese settlement included not just the white majority societies like the US, Canada, and Australia but also several non-white majority societies in Latin America and the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific. The young colony of Trinidad was one, but not the only one, of these Caribbean societies. They also went to British Guyana, to Jamaica, and to Dutch Surinam. The intake in Trinidad was 2,645 or around 13 percent out of a Caribbean total of just over 20,000.1
The third stage came at the end of the nineteenth century and lasted roughly until the end of World War II (1890s to 1940s). There were two distinct streams in this period. The first was made up of mainly county, district, and family compatriots of the earlier migrants. They came as itinerant merchants and peddlers, not as workers, notably during the period when immigration to the United States had all but ceased after the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. Many more Chinese in this period were also simultaneously going to other Caribbean islands, as well as to Panama in Central America, and Mexico. While these new migrants were arriving from China proper, several hundreds were arriving in Trinidad from other colonies in the Caribbean region, in particular British Guyana on the South American mainland. This sub-migration started with mainlanders who had originally migrated to Guyana as indentured sugar workers and were relocating throughout the region at the end of their term of indenture in
search of more hospitable mobility opportunities elsewhere.2 Over time, this group came to include not only the relocating former indentured workers but a sizable number of Guyana-born children of the original worker migrants, many of them with technical and professional skills. Their spontaneous arrival into Trinidad extended well in the 1950s and 1960s, up to Trinidad’s Independence in 1962, when immigration regulations became a little more stringent.
