ABSTRACT
Migration, both historically and contemporarily, is an important part of Caribbean livelihood strategies and social aspirations and is critical to the very existence and future of the region and its peoples.1 To some scholars, the Caribbean itself is constituted through migration and diaspora formation and is home to one of the most transnationally connected and migratory peoples in the world.2 While some of the migration relates to the movements of peoples from Europe, Africa, India, China, and the Middle East into the region, and from the region outward to Western Europe and North America, the Caribbean also has a long history of migration within the region and to Central and South America that is often overlooked but which is central to this study. Contemporary regional migrations follow a long history of interregional movement of Caribbean peoples. These include displacements due to political revolutions (for example, that which sent Haitians to other Caribbean countries); the movement of wage laborers from small islands in the region to sugar plantations in Guyana and Trinidad and Cuba after the emancipation of slavery; and early-twentieth-century labor migrations for the construction of the Panama Canal, banana and sugar industries in Central America, and oil-refining industries in Curaçao and Aruba. Since the 1980s, economic destablization and political crises have resulted in mass migrations between neighboring or nearby countries.3 Migration further afield-to Europe and North America-has followed colonial ties, ranging from movements for higher education in the colonial mother countries to labor migrations and family reunifications. International
migration has also been conditioned by political upheavals in Caribbean countries as well as specific immigration policies of the receiving countries, which are dictated by these countries’ needs for labor but are simultaneously influenced by racist ideologies about migrants from the global South. The interregional and international migrations have resulted in large diasporas of Caribbean peoples who reside in countries other than their birth places yet who maintain strong links with their home communities through family ties, work, trading of goods, and financial remittances.
