Shifting Location and Negotiating Place: Women in Caribbean Intra-Regional Migration

• Author: Elizabeth Thomas-Hope
• Profession: Professor
• Pages: 324-345

324 CSME: Genesis and Prognosis

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23 Elizabeth Thomas-Hope

SHIFTING LOCATION AND

NEGOTIATING PLACE: WOMEN IN

CARIBBEAN INTRA-REGIONAL

MIGRATION

Introduction

Migration is not simply the movement of people between places. It

involves also the relocation of individuals in relation to the social space that

they occupy. Within that space their identities are fashioned and their

livelihoods are developed. In the Caribbean, migration opportunities were

first sought in the early period of post-slavery society of the nineteenth century.

The ability to move away not only from the plantation, but from the country

of birth and later to return, was a fundamental dimension of the identity of a

person as free agent, rather than, as during the preceding system of slavery,

merely as a victim of events.

By the end of the nineteenth century, migration had become an

endorsement of freedom and a right of passage. The element of freedom was

of major significance. It is still an ongoing aspect of the motivation to

migrate. Through the freedom from many societal constraints in people’s

personal lives that it permitted, migration gradually became integral to the

strategy for altering one’s place in the society and negotiating avenues to the

achievement of personal goals. It facilitated mobility and enhancement of

status in the otherwise racially and socially restrictive plantation system.

Migration thereby contributed in fundamental ways to the cultural

construction and the ideology of personhood that emerged in the aftermath

of slavery.

For the upper classes the situation was different. They moved, usually in

nuclear family units when their social or economic interests seemed better

served elsewhere. Indeed, for each social class, migration was characterized

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Shifting Location and Negotiating Place

by different patterns, different purposes and different meaning. Social

structures and institutions, such as the family, evolved through the decades

following Emancipation to accommodate the movements that included both

men and women from all social classes. At the level of the household, where

personal identities were moulded, roles learned and relations most intensely

played out, gender was central to all aspects of socialization. These gendered

identities, roles and relationships that condition the propensity for migration

in the first place, also adapted to the demands of the household as members

departed or returned. The evolving constructions of manhood and womanhood

were inevitably shaped within the imperatives of a societal system that itself

perpetuated migration and was, in all its institutional complexities, part of

the ever changing pattern of population movement.

This interactive, two-way, relationship between migration and gender

in the period immediately following the Emancipation of slaves, continued

in later periods. From the middle of the twentieth century, migration patterns

became even more complex. Faster and relatively cheaper transport

facilitated the active nature of Caribbean migration networks. There was

the emerging preponderance of transnational households and families, with

high levels of circulation and return. Accordingly, migration continued to

have new implications for Caribbean societies.

People, as active agents, have continued to the present time to use

migration opportunities to facilitate the achievement of various goals in

their lives. Some of these goals relate to their careers, whether principally

in education or in work; others relate to coping with their socially ascribed

responsibilities, especially the responsibility or sense of having the ultimate

responsibility for their children; and still others relate to coping with their

relationships, roles and overall livelihoods.

There are few studies that have been conducted specifically on the role

of gender in the propensity for, and selectivity in, Caribbean migration; or

on the role of gender in the nature of the migration experience. Fewer still

have been concerned with the other side of the process, namely, the

implications of migration for gender relations. Among the empirical studies

that have been conducted, that by Mortley (2002) demonstrated ways in

which women in St. Lucia made decisions to migrate (in that case to the

USA) based primarily on their own domestic circumstances and their

relationships with their spouses.

For all the purposes for which migration is used as the mechanism for

coping, the external factors (such as immigration legislation at the destination,