THE CONTEXT OF CARIBBEAN MIGRATION

Abstract

Caribbean life in New York City is the product of the continuous circular movements of people, cash, material goods, culture and lifestyles, and ideas to and from New York City and the islands and mainland territories of the English-and Spanish-speaking Caribbean and, in recent times, the island of Haiti.As other immigrant groups, the first Caribbean migrants preserved strong familial and cultural links to their homelands; unlike them, these links have not been severed over time, but continue to be reenforced by the geographical closeness between the Caribbean and New York City.Cheap airfares facilitate frequent comings and goings of island peoples and goods to an extent never dreamed of by immigrants of earlier times.On Sundays and holidays, international telephone circuits are clogged with the relatively inexpensive direct-dial service to and from Area Code 809.That particular "space" in New York City where each Caribbean group first established its center becomes like a distant province of the homeland, part of the same social and, in some cases (where migrants are encouraged to vote in their home country elections), political system.Even if they prosper and move away from the original enclave, migrants return to encounter the foods, music, newspapers, and latest gossip of the homeland.Thus, an inventory of business and other concerns in Chapinerito, the area in Queens where Colombians settled in the years after World War I1 (named for a middle-class barrio, Chapinero, in BogotA), reveals travel agents who offer round-trip excursion fares to Colombia at holiday times; real estate agencies with Colombian representatives who sell houses both in Jackson Heights and in Colombia; booksellers who vend Colombian newspapers and magazines; the headquarters of the many regional sports clubs.Chapinerito is the place to eat Colombian food or to buy the ingredients from the small ethnic grocery stores in the neighborhood.There is even a bakery specializing in Colombian pastries (Chaney, 1983).Most Caribbean migrants do not appear to leave their homelands definitively, even though they may never return except for visits.Their insertion in New York City retains a provisional quality.Migration scholars talk of the "myth" or "ideology" of return as a strong feature of the Caribbean migrant 2050411x, 1989, 1, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.

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