Blurred Borders: Transnational Migration between the Hispanic Caribbean and the United States

CHAPTER TWO: In the Entrails of the Monster: A Historical Overview of Hispanic Caribbean Migration to the United States

In the Entrails of the Monster A Historical Overview of Hispanic Caribbean Migration to the United States At the end of the nineteenth century, few people of Caribbean origin lived in the United States.1 Between 1890 and 1899, the United States admitted 31,480 immigrants from the “West Indies.” More than four-fifths came from Cuba. According to the 1900 census, only 0.3 percent of the foreign-born population of the United States was born in the Caribbean. Between 1900 and 1909, when U.S. immigration first peaked at 8.2 million people, Caribbean migrants merely represented 1.6 percent of the total (Ruggles et al. 2010; U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services 2009). At that time, Miami was a small town with few Cuban residents, while in New York the terms Spanish and Hispanic referred to Spaniards as much as to Latin Americans. No one could then imagine that both cities would be Caribbeanized during the second half of the twentieth century. After World War II Puerto Ricans began to move en masse to the U.S. mainland. In 1959 the Cuban Revolution unleashed the largest refugee flow in the history of the United States. Since 1961 hundreds of thousands of Dominicans have relocated abroad, especially in the United States, Puerto Rico, and Spain. During the 1960s Puerto Rico and Cuba became the secondand third-largest sources of the Hispanic population in the United States, after Mexico. By the mid-1990s the Dominican Republic was among the top five migrant-sending countries to the United States from any region in the world. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the three countries of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean islands have multiple and large-scale diasporic communities. 2 in the entrails of the monster 36 This chapter documents the rapid growth of Hispanic Caribbean migration to the United States since the mid-twentieth century. Then it charts the historical trajectories of the Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Dominican diasporas . In each case, an entangled web of political, economic, and cultural connections led most of the migrants to the United States. Comparing the three migrant flows shows recurring themes as well as important differences among them. Among other factors, legal status, class and regional origins, settlement patterns, and racial composition varied from one group to another and over time. A particular form of transnationalism thus arose in each of the Spanish-speaking countries of the Caribbean islands. The Demography of Hispanic Caribbean Diasporas One of the most impressive differences among Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican migrants is their proportion relative to the sending populations (table 2.1). In 2009 approximately one out of eight Cubans and Dominicans lived in the fifty United States, compared to more than one out of two Puerto Ricans. Furthermore, roughly two-fifths of U.S. Cubans and Dominicans, and nearly two-thirds of Puerto Ricans, were born stateside. Puerto Ricans have become more mobile than Cubans and Dominicans, as measured by their places of birth and residence. As U.S. citizens, all Puerto Ricans can move freely between the island and the fifty United States, as well as the nation ’s overseas territories. This legal status helps explain the higher number table 2.1 Basic Demographic Features of the Hispanic Caribbean Population in the United States, 2009 Feature Cubans Dominicans Puerto Ricans Number of persons claiming ancestry 1,696,141 1,356,361 4,426,738 Percentage of population with this ancestrya 12.9 12.3 52.7 Number of persons born abroad 992,684 777,689 1,552,397b Percentage of group in United States 58.5 57.3 35.1 Number of persons born in United States 703,457 578,672 2,874,341 Percentage of group in United States 41.4 42.7 64.9 Sources: Central Intelligence Agency 2009; U.S. Census Bureau 2010. aIncludes estimated population of sending country in 2009. bIncludes all persons born in Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans born in the United States. in the entrails of the monster 37 of Puerto Ricans abroad than either Cubans or Dominicans, who enter the United States as foreigners. Each diasporic community from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean emerged at a different juncture. The Cuban exodus dates back to the late nineteenthcentury struggles of liberation from Spain, beginning in 1868. In the twentieth century, Cuban migration concentrated in two periods: between 1900 and 1920 and after 1960 (figure 2...