West Indian Americans

• 1. Introduction

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  West Indian Americans are a community whose roots in North America stretch back further than the United States itself. In 1613, a man named Juan Rodriguez sailed from Santo Domingo and settled in what was then called New Amsterdam, becoming the first non-indigenous person to put down roots on that island. His arrival predates almost every chapter of American history that most people learn.

  Today, about 13 million people in the United States, roughly 4 percent of the total population, claim Caribbean ancestry. They come from dozens of islands and territories, speak English, Spanish, French, Dutch, and creole tongues, and trace their deeper ancestry to Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. The questions worth asking about this community are not just who they are or where they came from, but how they got here, what they built, and why the Caribbean has sent more of its people abroad than any other region in the world since the abolition of slavery in 1834.

• 2. Slavery and Early Arrival

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  The first West Indians to reach what would become the United States did not choose to come. Enslaved Africans were brought from the Caribbean to South Carolina in the 17th century, and they rank among the earliest people of African origin to arrive in the British colonies of North America. Many had been born in Africa and passed through the Caribbean before being transported again to the mainland.

  Barbadian slaves in particular came to make up a meaningful share of the Black population in Virginia, concentrated in the tidewater region along the Chesapeake Bay. As the 18th century progressed, the British colonies of the Southeast deepened their commercial ties with the Caribbean, and the number of enslaved Africans purchased from those islands grew accordingly.

  New York had its own entanglement with this trade. Enslaved Africans from the Caribbean were more numerous there than in any other northeastern settlement. After the New York Slave Revolt of 1712, white colonists blamed the uprising on those recently arrived from the Caribbean, and imports from that region fell sharply. Between 1715 and 1741, most enslaved people in New York still traced their origins to the West Antilles, principally Jamaica, Barbados, and Antigua. The revolt of 1741 ended that pattern almost entirely, and subsequent enslaved Africans were brought directly from Africa rather than through the Caribbean.

  Haiti's influence on the American mainland arrived through a different path. A migration wave tied to the Haitian Revolution, running from the late 1700s through 1850, reshaped the population around New Orleans. About half the people in that metropolitan area are estimated to have at least distant partial Haitian ancestry. That presence helped shape Louisiana Voodoo and the Louisiana Creole language, and the Revolution itself had a geopolitical consequence of enormous scale: France's decision to sell the Louisiana territory to the United States traces directly back to the upheaval those events caused.

• 3. From Craftsmen to Congressmen

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  After the Civil War ended in 1865 and slavery was formally abolished, migration from the West Indies to the United States began to take on a voluntary character. Poverty, hurricanes, droughts, and floods pushed people northward. The West Indian population in the United States rose from roughly 4,000 in 1850 to more than 20,000 by 1900, and by 1930 it had climbed to nearly 100,000.

  The 19th century Caribbean migration was strikingly varied in occupation. Craftsmen, scholars, teachers, preachers, doctors, inventors, clergy, comedians, politicians, poets, songwriters, and activists all made their way north. The Barbadian Joseph Sandiford Atwell became the first Black man after the Civil War to be ordained in the Episcopal Church. The Bahamian Bert Williams built a career as one of the era's most prominent comedians. Robert Brown Elliott, born in the Caribbean, served as a U.S. Congressman and as Attorney General of South Carolina. The brothers James Weldon Johnson and John Rosamond Johnson, both of Caribbean descent, left deep marks on American letters and music.

  From the end of the 19th century through around 1905, most West Indian arrivals settled in South Florida, New York, and Massachusetts. New York then pulled ahead as the dominant destination and held that position for decades, drawing Caribbean immigrants at a pace and volume that would eventually reshape entire neighborhoods.

• 4. The W2 Workers and Postwar Migration

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  When the Second World War ended, American companies launched a large-scale recruitment effort in the Caribbean. Thousands of Caribbean workers were hired under a program that labeled them W2 workers, and the companies that employed them were spread across 1,500 municipalities in 36 U.S. states. Most of those workers ended up in rural areas, especially in Florida, where sugar cane cultivation was the primary industry.

  The conditions those workers encountered were frequently grim. Many companies offered what the source describes as depressing working and economic conditions. Workers responded with revolts and, in some cases, fled their assigned employers entirely to search for better situations elsewhere, even where labor strikes were formally prohibited.

  The broader shift in Caribbean emigration patterns after 1965 had structural roots. As the Caribbean turned away from agriculture and toward tourism and urban economies, farmers and agricultural workers lost their livelihoods and looked outward. Proximity to the United States, English fluency in many islands, and the Civil Rights legislation of that era all contributed to a disproportionate movement toward America. The number of Caribbean immigrants to the United States jumped from roughly 193,922 in 1960 to 2 million in 2009, a transformation driven in part by what economists have described as the influx of capital-intensive and labor-intensive foreign investment into Caribbean economies.

• 5. Where Caribbean Americans Settled

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  Florida and New York have long competed for the title of primary Caribbean American destination. As of 2016, Florida led with 549,722 foreign-born West Indian residents, followed by New York with 490,826. By that same year, 18 percent of Florida's entire population, about 3,750,000 people, reported Caribbean ancestry.

  The distribution is not random. Miami, New York City, Boston, and Orlando carry the highest percentages of non-Hispanic West Indian Americans and are the only major cities where Black people of Caribbean origin outnumber those of multigenerational American origin. Kings County in New York, which is Brooklyn, held 305,950 non-Latino Caribbean Americans as of 2016, representing 11.6 percent of the borough. Broward County in Florida held 277,646, or 14.5 percent of its population.

  Within those broad regions, the two largest groups have settled in distinctive patterns. Haitians have tended to cluster in areas with large overall Caribbean populations. Jamaicans have spread more widely, appearing in cities with smaller Caribbean communities as well as large ones. Caribbean populations in Florida and New England are diverse but lean Haitian, while those in the New York-Philadelphia-Washington corridor are diverse but lean Jamaican.

  At the national level, the 2016 census counted Puerto Ricans as the largest single Caribbean American ancestry group with 5,588,664 people, followed by Cubans at 2,315,863 and Dominicans at 2,081,419. Jamaicans numbered 1,132,460 and Haitians 1,049,779.

• 6. Culture, Carnival, and Music

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  Close to 50 Caribbean carnivals take place throughout North America each year, a figure that reflects how durably the Caribbean experience has lodged itself in American life. Those festivals are one visible marker of a cultural contribution that runs much deeper.

  Caribbean people brought an extraordinarily wide range of musical forms to the United States: bachata, calypso, compas, cumbia, dancehall, merengue, reggae, reggaeton, salsa, ska, soca, zouk, and more. Caribbean Americans also played a formative role in the development of Hip Hop music and culture in New York City. Beyond music, first- and second-generation Caribbean figures have maintained a prominent presence in U.S. labor organizing and grassroots politics for many decades.

  National Caribbean American Heritage Month is celebrated each June. The observance traces to a unanimous vote in the House of Representatives on the 27th of June, 2005, under H. Con. Res. 71, sponsored by Congresswoman Barbara Lee. The Senate adopted the resolution on the 14th of February, 2006, introduced by Senator Chuck Schumer of New York. On the 5th of June, 2006, President George W. Bush issued a formal proclamation establishing June as National Caribbean American Heritage Month, recognizing the contributions of both naturalized citizens and those who are U.S. citizens by birth. The Institute of Caribbean Studies, based in Washington D.C. and founded by Dr. Claire Nelson in 1993, was the lead organization behind the campaign that produced that designation.