The Making of African America
Page 23
Not all of the new arrivals intended to settle permanently. Some newcomers were reluctant immigrants, forced from their country by events beyond their control. Also among the new arrivals were thousands of visitors, including students eager for an American education and entrepreneurs equally desirous to make a few dollars. Such sojourners had been many among the black men and women moving from south to north during the third passage, but the forces of late-twentieth-century globalization changed the nature of migration by linking distant places more closely than ever before. The availability and speed of transportation and communication had shrunk the distance between the United States and even the most distant immigrant homelands. Cell phones and the Internet permitted immigrants to keep in touch with family and friends. Jet planes allowed men and women to shuttle back and forth. Whereas migrants once depended upon rumors to learn about the society to which they might be shipped and upon chance encounters to recover information about the societies they had left, late-twentieth-century migrants could maintain continual contact between the two worlds simply by putting a cell phone to their ear. Migrants returned to their countries of origin for the death of a loved one, the marriage of friends, or just a brief respite. During the 1990s, some 90 percent of African immigrants visited their native land at least once after entering the United States and more than half visited home at least once every three years. Like sojourners from the South earlier in the twentieth century, they often sent their children home for summer vacations and hosted visiting relatives and friends, many of whom joined the ranks of the immigrants. Many men and women became comfortable in their old homelands and their new homes, literally transnational.11
Others made a choice. They had no intention of remaining in the United States. Political refugees just waited for a change of regime to return to their homelands. Vendors who plied their wares on the streets of nearly every major American city stayed just long enough to earn a small nest egg and then return home. Other sojourners found advantages in maintaining multiple residences and formalized these arrangements with dual citizenship.
Inevitably, however, some of these short-term migrations lasted longer than originally planned. While sojourners remained determined to return home, life intervened. They married, had children, and embraced an American way of life. Many discovered they earned much more than they could in their native lands. Some found the stability of the United States preferable to the social disorder of their nativity. Return trips became less frequent and remittances to their homeland grew smaller. The possibilities of return dwindled, and in time they settled permanently. Speaking of Haitian refugees, an investigator writing at the beginning of the twenty-first century noted that many migrants “who saw themselves as sojourners or ‘birds of passage,’ who came to work in the United States to save money to return home, are now buying retirement homes in Florida.” While not all sojourners purchased vacation homes, many were transformed into permanent residents.12
Whatever the mode or motives for migrating, black newcomers were an extraordinarily diverse group. As with the earlier passages—forced and free—adults composed the vast majority of black immigrants. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, some 70 percent of Africans and nearly 60 percent of Caribbean migrants were between the ages of twenty-five and fifty. But among these immigrants, the sexual balance of the new arrivals differed sharply. While men made up the greater proportion of migrants from Africa, with a sex ratio—or number of men per 100 women—of 140, women composed the bulk of migrants from the Caribbean, with a sex ratio of 85.13
Ethnic, linguistic, religious, and economic distinctions compounded the difference between Caribbean and African migrants, as well as among them. Caribbean peoples derived from places as different as mainland Belize and Guyana to island nations big and small. They spoke English and French, Spanish and Dutch, as well as a variety of creole tongues. Coming from a continent almost three times the size of the United States, African migrants were even more diverse: Ghanaians and Nigerians from the west coast of Africa, Rwandans and Ugandans from central Africa, and Ethiopians and Somalis from Africa’s Horn. Moreover, such national designations masked an even larger diversity. Nigerians were Hausas, Igbos, and Yorubas, just as Ghanaians were Akan, Ewe, and Fante. Among the various ethnic lineages were Americo-Liberians and Sierra Leonean Creoles, whose forebears had been transported and transported themselves across the Atlantic several times during the last three hundred years. Africans, like their Caribbean counterparts, were also multilingual, not only speaking the languages of the old colonial metropoles but also numerous indigenous tongues, from Amharic in east Africa to Ga in the Niger Valley. Their religious differences included various brands of Christianity practiced by the Caribbean émigrés as well as Islam and Coptic Orthodoxy in Africa.14
The immigrants’ social standing was as diverse as the cultural baggage they carried. Following new criteria for admission to the United States, educated professionals—some of whom carried multiple degrees—numbered many among the new immigrants. Schooled in the British educational system, Jamaicans, Barbadians, Ghanaians, Nigerians, and other migrants from Anglophone Africa and the Caribbean enjoyed a high degree of English-language literacy. Indeed, among immigrants entering the United States at the end of the twentieth century, African arrivals stood at the apex in terms of educational attainment. In 1990, nearly nine of ten African immigrants held a high school diploma and more than half had graduated from college. Many had achieved a considerable measure of economic success, often as part of the global economy, like the petroleum engineers who moved between Lagos and Houston. Rather than being driven by acts of desperation to escape political repression or drought-born famines, these well-placed men and women arrived with knowledge, money, and connections. They desired only to transfer their credentials to the United States to obtain better jobs and higher pay as doctors, lawyers, engineers, and accountants.15
Not all were so fortunate. Refugees generally fled with little more than the clothes on their backs, traumatized by the nightmarish events that had driven them from their homes and the months, sometimes years, spent in refugee encampments. For example, Haitians came from the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Unlike their well-placed counterparts, many had no facility with English and faced linguistic isolation. Seeking to escape the endemic poverty that characterized the economies of their homelands and carrying no marketable skills, these displaced men and women found themselves consigned to work that Americans shunned. Most labored as domestics, gardeners, hospital orderlies, taxi drivers, and casual laborers.16
Yet, taken as a whole, the new arrivals did remarkably well. Working long hours, often at several jobs, they began to accumulate capital. Drawing upon long-standing entrepreneurial traditions and sometimes bankrolled by credit associations that reached back to their countries of origin, they took their places at flea markets and on street corners, selling a variety of “native crafts”—ebony carvings, colorful textiles, jewelry—mixed with faux Rolexes, all of which may have been manufactured in Korea or Taiwan. Some opened small groceries, restaurants, and taverns, supplying their countrymen with familiar food and drink. As a result, although they faced much the same kind of racial discrimination as American-born blacks, immigrants enjoyed higher median incomes and lower rates of poverty. Even after remitting portions of their income to support families back home, their standard of living was a cut above that of nonimmigrant black families.17
Immigrants of African descent initially spread across the American landscape. While many new arrivals had clear destinations, others had little knowledge of American geography. Viewing the United States from Lagos or Brazil, Memphis looked much like Minneapolis, and newcomers settled in every corner of the United States. The American government contributed to the dispersion by shipping refugees to some unlikely destinations. Sudanese refugees were sent to Fargo, North Dakota, while Somalis were settled in Lewiston, Maine.18
But like earlier immigrants, newcomers did n
ot always remain at their initial point of debarkation. For many, arrival in the United States was just another stop in a long migratory trail. Refugees from Sierra Leone and Liberia had earlier found shelter in Ghana, and Sudanese spent time in camps in Kenya. Others had been funneled through Europe and Australasia before they reached the United States. The long experience of Caribbean peoples in inter-island movement continued on the mainland in a different form.19
Over time, however, the newly arrived gravitated to the great American metropoles. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, when migrants equaled about 5 percent of the African American population, they generally composed more than 10 percent of black people in the largest American cities. In many cities and suburbs, the count was much higher. Immigrants numbered better than 15 percent of the black population of the Washington metropolitan area and more than one-third of the population of New York, where black immigrants and their children compose a near majority—and a projected majority—of the city’s black population.20
The unsettled geography of immigrant life soon fixed into a recognizable matrix whose coordinates were city and nationality. Proximity made Miami and other Gulf ports the natural destination for migrants from the Caribbean, where Afro-Caribbeans composed more than one-third of the population. Black Cubans settled in Little Havana as a part of the larger Cuban migration, and an analogous Little Haiti—where a main street was renamed Boulevard Toussaint L’Ouverture—soon emerged. New York and Florida, which had become a center for Caribbean life earlier in the twentieth century, continued to draw more than their share of migrants from Jamaica, Barbados, and other islands.21 Their Haitian populations became the largest in the nation. Africans also crowded into New York, finding niches in various areas of the great metropolis. Ghanaians and Nigerians settled in the borough of Queens, Liberians in Staten Island, and Dominicans in the north end of Manhattan. Likewise, Ethiopians gravitated to the Washington metropolitan area, where their numbers reached some 75,000 at the end of the twentieth century.22
Like soon attracted like, and not by mere happenstance, as the familiar migrant chains connected newcomers to places where their earlier arriving countrymen had settled. Those first arrivals provided their kin, friends, and compatriots who followed with information, cash, temporary quarters, and even employment, as well as a host of other services that helped to integrate newcomers into the United States—and brought in yet other families to sponsor and continue the chain. Much as Cleveland had become Alabama North early in the twentieth century, so Providence, Rhode Island, became Liberia East, Flatbush-Canarsie in Brooklyn became Jamaica North, and a few blocks of Harlem became Little Senegal. Similar national concentrations could be found in other cities, as with the Sudanese in Minneapolis or the Brazilians in Boston.23
An infrastructure of community life soon emerged, much as it had in past migrations. Dotting immigrant neighborhoods were churches, schools, and fraternal and benevolent societies bound by familial ties and reinforced by networks that reached back to “hometown associations” in the various countries of origin. Celebrating rites of passage—the birth of a child, naming godparents, weddings, funerals—along with sporting events, theatrical performances, and lectures, these networks became important links in the chain that immigrants traveled. They often functioned as surrogate kin, providing guidance for the newly arrived, rallying points for the established, and places of political mobilization for all. They helped newcomers find employment and financed small enterprises. The restaurants and bars, along with a host of small shops that these associations helped fund, sold food and drink prepared in the familiar way; some braided hair according to custom and prepared burials that followed traditional funerary practice.24
The men and women who stood behind the counters of these small enterprises found advantage in maintaining the old ways in the new world. Ethnic solidarity proved to be good business, and some articulated a fierce nationalism. But ethnic entrepreneurs also found benefit in easing the path of new arrivals by acting as a bridge between their homelands and their new homes, serving as agents of Americanization. Most found no contradiction between the two roles.25
Community formation became the occasion for men and women to clarify the multiple identities they carried to the United States, or at least to sort them out. Mary C. Waters, a Harvard sociologist who studies late-twentieth-century West Indian immigrants, tells of a clerk of Barbadian origin who distinguished herself from an African American by asserting her Caribbean heritage, only to be reprimanded by her Jamaican superior that she was not Caribbean but rather West Indian, meaning Anglophone Caribbean. Yet, upon further investigation, Waters discovered that a mere 3 percent of the Jamaicans living in New York described themselves as West Indian, while some 80 percent continued to call themselves Jamaicans. Waters concluded that “it appears the identity adopted by the first generation is in part a learned response to American categories and ways of defining people.” Indeed, another immigrant told Waters that before she “came here I used to be Jamaican. But now I am West Indian.”26
As Waters’s interview suggests, the process by which immigrants reinvent themselves amid the fourth great migration does not differ substantially from that of earlier arrivals, forced or free. Just as Igbos and Hausas became Africans in the eighteenth century, so those same ethnic groups made themselves into Nigerians at the end ofthe twentieth. The nation-state—although new—often had a more powerful pull on the west side of the Atlantic than on the east, if only because the American government recognizes nationality and not ethnicity. A sense of how the migratory process has sharpened national allegiances can be garnered by the calendar of some of the fetes celebrated in Chicago. There, on April 20 Cameroonians mark their nation’s independence day; soon after, the DuSable Museum of African American History hosts the Nigerian Festival, which is followed in late July by the Liberian Independence Day Parade, the celebrations of Angolan and Ghanaian independence (November II and March 6), and finally by Jamhuri Day (December 12), when Kenyans mark the British withdrawal from their native land.27
Nationality, however, does not always trump ethnicity. Yorubas—who came from all parts of the Atlantic world—found that they had more in common with each other than they did with their putative countrymen. They established distinctive neighborhood enclaves, along with associations that reflected the transnational character of African ethnicity, as with the Egbe Omo Yoruba (National Association of Yoruba Descendants in North America) which drew its membership not only from west Africa but also from the Caribbean and portions of South America. Similar transnational, rather than national, entities emerged among Ewes from Benin, Ghana, and Togo, as well as the Jollas from Gambia and Senegal. Moreover, if Yorubas, Jollas, Ewes, and others reestablished their transnational ethnicity on the west side of the Atlantic, they were joined by others to create new forms of solidarity, like the African National Union, an association that claimed to speak for all Africans in the United States. The process whereby Igbos and Angolans, Mandes and Mandinkas had joined to establish African churches, schools, and burial societies at the end of the eighteenth century was repeated two hundred years later. In much the same way, the diverse peoples of the Caribbean not only celebrate Dominican or Jamaican independence but also march in local Caribbean parades.28
Such connections suggest that rather than become African Americans, immigrants of African descent manufactured new nationalities distinctive from that of native black Americans. Angolans, Kenyans, and Somalis became Africans, and Barbadians, Jamaicans, and Trinidadians became Caribbeans—not necessarily African Americans—as a result of their experience on the mainland.
Whether understood in transnational, national, or ethnic terms, the ability to create new ties or maintain old ones complicated the process of identity formation. Old allegiances have perhaps been strongest among political refugees, awaiting regime change before returning home. But attachments to the homeland affected nearly all newcomers, creating a farrago of multiple identit
ies while birthing yet a new one.
As African and Afro-Caribbean people—along with the scattering of black people from other parts of the globe—forged new selves, they also discovered a common experience as immigrants of African descent in the United States. In centuries past, Africans and African Americans, Virginians and Mississippians, and Southerners and Northerners had little choice but to find common ground. Differences between Africans and creoles had disappeared quickly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, just as slaves from the seaboard had been silently incorporated into the plantations of the interior in the nineteenth century and just as Northerners and Southerners eventually had joined together in the cities of the North in the twentieth century. The often intense conflict that accompanied the confrontation of distinctive cultures rarely lasted more than a generation, as African American society achieved remarkable unity. Africans became African Americans in mainland North America, slaves from the seaboard became Southerners in the black belt, and black Southerners became urbanites in the cities of the North. The places they created in eighteenth-century Virginia, nineteenth-century Alabama, or twentieth-century Chicago were the products of the intermixture of natives and newcomers.
The unity of past centuries proved more elusive for black men and women journeying in the fourth great migration. To be sure, from the time of their arrival in the United States—and, for some, even before—immigrants of African descent confronted the realities of American racism—a reality made visible by the global reach of American culture, tourism, and military interventions. Primed to expect the worst, black immigrants nonetheless were outraged at the harassment, denigration, and physical abuse many experienced. Primal moments—like the death of Amadou Diallo, a west African student and street merchant, at the hands of the New York City police—starkly revealed the dangers all black people, regardless of origins, faced in the United States.29