Caribbean immigration to New York City
[1] This immigration wave has seen large numbers of people from Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Antigua and Barbuda, Guyana, and Trinidad and Tobago, among others, come to New York City in the 20th and 21st centuries.
[3] In the early 1900s, the largest number of Black immigrants were English-speaking Caribbeans (West Indians) who settled in the Northeast, mainly in New York City.
Reimers points out that a substantial number of Caribbean immigrants attended night school and pursued higher education while in America.
Perhaps the most well-known Caribbean emigrant of the 20th century was Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey who came to America and established his organization, Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).
Winston James shows that many West Indians wanted UNIA to move beyond its economic emphasis and to overtly oppose the racism that they faced on a daily basis as Black immigrants.
Radical West Indians, like Hubert Harrison (a Virgin Islander), further wanted to do away with what they believed to be a racist capitalist society, advocating socialism.
[6] New York City has large populations of Caribbean Hispanics, primarily hailing from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, though there exists smaller numbers of Panamanians, Cubans, Hondurans, and Costa Ricans.
From the 1960s onward, after the fall of the Rafael Trujillo military regime, large waves of migration have thoroughly transnationalized the Dominican Republic, metaphorically blurring its frontier with the United States.
Puerto Ricans, due to the forced change of the citizenship status of the island's residents, can technically be said to have come to the City first as immigrants and subsequently as migrants.
[10] Puerto Ricans have historically lived in neighborhoods such as the Lower East Side (also known in the community as Loisaida), Spanish Harlem and Williamsburg, Brooklyn since the 1950s.
[12] West New York and Union City are possibly the only municipalities in the region where Cubans outnumber other Latino ethnicities, such as Dominicans and Mexicans.
