The Experience of Return Migration: Caribbean Perspectives (review)

This collection of articles originated from a paper session dealing with return migration to the Caribbean at the meetings of the Association of American Geographers in New Orleans in 2003. After the meeting, the organizers decided that they had sufficient material to form the core of a book, then they augmented the papers from the conference with other unpublished articles by inviting "a further group of active scholars . . . to report on their research in the field" (p. xi.)

The publisher's website provides the principal rationale for this collection's appearance: "There has been very little work published on return migration that focuses on the Caribbean." The editors elaborate the point, citing "the relative lack of research, until recently, on the multi-faceted processes of return migration and on the selectivity and diversity of return migrants, their changing character, their experiences, and societal interactions," and they quote a colleague who proclaims that "return migration is the great unwritten chapter in the history of migration" (p. 2.) Yet it is simply not convincing to assert that the topic of Caribbean return migration is somehow novel or new or neglected. Among the innumerable articles, books, reports, theses, seminar papers, conference proceedings, and the like dealing with Caribbean migration, many discuss—in great detail—issues of return migration.

The book's fourteen essays deal with subject matter from St. Lucia, Barbados, Grenada, Trinidad and Tobago, Puerto Rico, the French Caribbean, Jamaica, and Canada, with general essays also touching on Caribbean migrants' circumstances in the United States and Britain. With some exceptions, the book's subject matter is heavily weighted toward the English-speaking Caribbean .A typical observation when reviewing such a collection— that the volume in its entirety suffers from unevenness—is perhaps less appropriate here than it usually is because two of the editors (Conway and Potter) are the authors or coauthors of seven of the collection's fourteen entries.

The Experience of Return Migration needs better organization and some consolidation, and one wonders if the publisher ever arranged for copyediting. There is little in the way of an introductory discussion to tell how the articles supposedly hang together. Every chapter has its own list of references, so that citations of the best known articles on Caribbean return migration (by Mary Chamberlain, George Gmelch, Elizabeth Thomas-Hope, and others) appear over and over again; certainly a single consolidated bibliography would have streamlined the volume. Nor are typos, misspellings, and grammatical mistakes uncommon. On pages 11-12, in the introductory essay by the three editors, a two paragraph discussion about remittances sent home by migrants abroad (beginning "Thus, it has been claimed . . .") is repeated— with a very few word and phrase insertions—in Potter's article about St. Lucia and Barbados on pages 28-29 ("Thus, it has been argued . . ."). It is the kind of cut-and-paste padding that calls for threatening red ink commentary in the margins of undergraduate term papers.

Despite its flaws, the collection contains several worthwhile articles, notably about young and middle-aged returnees to the Caribbean. The book's best essays provide vivid first-hand information derived from personal interviews that are summarized in lengthy quotations or vignettes. Marina Lee-Cunin relates the experiences of five young Trinidadians who have reentered their "home" society after lengthy sojourns in the United Kingdom; among other observations, she is struck by their rediscoveries of an insular racism in Trinidad that was not nearly so evident abroad. Gina M. Pérez discusses the tribulations, especially for young women returning from the United States, in an agricultural town in northwestern Puerto Rico; her well written essay focuses on individual adaptations that returnees make to satisfy older skeptics who have stayed behind and who consider younger people "scapegoats for larger political-economic problems" (p. 199.) Stephanie Condon describes the circulation of French West Indians between the Caribbean and metropolitan France, telling...