Intersecting Pan-Caribbean Crossings

Migration patterns in the Caribbean have held significant importance for centuries, within the region and, consequently, with the continents that have maintained connections. The region has witnessed the movement of Indigenous people from island to island, entangled with their continental presence. Caribbean crossings were always present and have always been a part of Caribbean history. The arrival of European colonizers that brought forced migration of Africans introduced a perspective that was foreign and would develop itself, harming the region, islands, and continental territories. The formation of borders and national identities altered the nature of these crossings, making them both less fluid and less achievable for many. However, the role of migration can return to being a transformative and generative process, considering the conditions of these movements that bring up issues related to race, gender, and economic standings. This is what comes to the fore in New Crossings: Caribbean Migration Narratives, in which Anthea Morrison studies how anglophone, hispanophone, and francophone Caribbean literary authors untangle these shifts in identity while living their migration processes, and, likewise, Marisel Moreno, in her book Crossing Waters: Undocumented Migration in Hispanophone Caribbean and Latinx Literature and Art, analyzes artworks and literature from the hispanophone Caribbean that pay particular attention to the representation of undocumented migrants who are, generally, people of color. Creating an arc that questions these identity transformations, these two approaches expose visible and invisible migration. Morrison and Moreno attend to how Caribbean crossings—by air and sea—have nurtured cultural knowledge in the United States and cultivated an unending richness to intra-Caribbean cultural relations. Morrison traces migration historiographies through the creative works of five Afro-Caribbean authors with different language backgrounds and explores new possibilities of identity through literature. In contrast, Moreno offers an expanded, interdisciplinary sample of literature and artworks that represent the mobilization of impoverished people of color who put themselves at risk sailing the Caribbean Sea in search of a better life. Both Morrison and Moreno keep alive and honor the undeniable relationship between the Caribbean region and the African continent, highlighting the movement of enslaved people from Africa to the Caribbean archipelagos since the 1500s.

In New Crossings, Morrison discusses both the authors’ migratory experiences and their published writing. She focuses on the “possibility of reintegration of the migrant character and/or writer into the land of origin and the reimagining of home, even in the absence of physical return” (11; italics in original). In this way, she offers an understanding of the double (sometimes triple) life that migrant authors carry. This expanded panorama of experiences exposes struggles, possibilities, fantasies of imagined futures, and how each author perceives their connection to the African continent. Morrison studies work by Edwidge Danticat, Junot Díaz, Caryl Phillips, Maryse Condé, and Curdella Forbes, and their connections with Haiti, the Dominican Republic, St. Kitts, Guadeloupe, and Jamaica, respectively. Each of the first five chapters address one author, while the sixth chapter comprises Morrison’s analysis of the concepts of “home” and “the self,” which are transformed by migration for both islanders and those in diaspora. Morrison examines the work of Danticat, her commitment to Haiti and her “inclusive and sometimes militant Caribbeanness” (29), depicting a hybridity that allows her to foster bicultural experiences. Whereas (according to Morrison) Díaz uses migration to consider questions about race, gender performance, and interpersonal relationships, Phillips writes about migration to consider the definition of home and questions about belonging. Morrison studies Condé’s fiction to explain the dialogue the writer constructs between her lived experience and her books, which “encapsulate[s] a Caribbean reality . . . intra-regional and external migration,” telling “the story of the relentless search of the poorest travelers for a better life” (112). In turn, Morrison argues that Forbes’s writing reveals diasporic communities as “not hermetic entities,” validating the possibilities of being in the island and, simultaneously, in the diaspora space (145). Morrison consolidates that “versions of home” are the result of experiences that happen between the imagined past and how it is recalled in the present (160). This analysis of Caribbean migration narratives reorients concepts of identity that emerged from Caribbean thinkers in the early twentieth century, disputing the tendency to recognize one version of the migration experience, occluding all others. These multiple journeys from the Caribbean region constitute a historiographical corpus, a valuable addition to global perspectives on the topic.

Moreno’s Crossing Waters explores the scant cultural and literary production that represents intra-Caribbean undocumented migration. The corpus of creative works discussed delves into the realities of displacement that exist between the Puerto Rican and Cuban archipelagos, the island of Hispaniola, and the Florida Keys. Her perspective challenges predominant images of the Caribbean as a paradise for tourists (2) and exposes the hardships that lead to undocumented migration by sea. Moreno opens a theoretical dialogue with the field of border studies, as it draws on David Newman’s ideas about the hispanophone Caribbean as a border and Lorgia García-Peña’s notions of the bordering process;¹ this serves as a useful interchange for Moreno’s approach to “the border’s capacity to reflect difference and impose separation” (14). This previous aspect highlights the region’s perceived sense of isolation, this inclination tends to erase “the islander’s agency of movement” (19; italics in original). This, in turn, causes these subjects to be seen and treated as “wasted lives” (8). The Puerto Rican archipelago is exposed as a receptor of a massive flux of unauthorized migration, owing to the colonial relation with the United States. Moreno emphasizes that the main island maintains a separation from the islands of Mona, Culebra, and Vieques. In turn, this separation obscures the role smaller islands serve for migrants, enabling opportunities and improvements to their lives. Coexisting experiences in its borderlands are studied within Hispaniola, including the water crossings from the Dominican Republic by yola to Puerto Rico; and crossings at the Dominican Republic and Haiti land border that configure a space of exception, represented in literary works. Surveying literary works and artworks by the Cuban diaspora and its production—both in and outside Cuba—Moreno underlines connections between contemporary migrations, such as the balsero crisis of 1994, and the Middle Passage. A final reflection returns to the islands, also subject to unauthorized maritime migration, shifting the gaze to the Puerto Rican archipelago in the wake of Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017. The author documents and humanizes unauthorized intra-Caribbean migration, revealing the bordering process: the connection or repulsion leveraged by visual representation of these crossings and their protagonists. Her analyses unveil fissures and succeeds at examining these hispanophone Caribbean cultural objects in their intersection with Blackness, subverting concepts such as mestizaje and hispanismo and their cultural whitewashing rhetoric that has predominated in the region since at least the early part of the twentieth century, centering the existence of Afro-descendant roots in the region.

An important topic in both books is the representation of language in artistic and literary works on migration. In Morrison’s view, authors are constantly negotiating their own tongue as they work through writing in English, combining Spanish and English to give life to their characters and expressions but also to maintain accuracy in their depiction of migrant experiences. Meanwhile, Moreno reflects on this aspect in her analysis of the Dominican Republic and the Haitian border. She exposes how Haitian Creole permeates the Spanish language in Elizabeth Acevedo’s 2016 poem “Regularization Plan for Foreigners, 1922,” which highlights that the bordering process is intertwined with the racialization of the Creole language. These examples expand our frame for thinking through migration, providing a more comprehensive panorama that includes visual perception and sound sensitivity.

Both Morrison’s New Crossings and Moreno’s Crossing Waters explore migratory waves from the Caribbean to other territories. On the one hand, Morrison amplifies the public agency that most of these migrant authors exert––a legacy related to the négritude movement in the 1930s. Echoing their Afro-Caribbean intellectual predecessors, she reveals the particularities and unexplored aspects of Caribbeanness in public writing by the authors she examines. On the other hand, Moreno uses artwork and literature to emphasize that some of these movements have been invisibilized and treated as problematic because undocumented migrants undermine the imposed global North’s gaze over the Caribbean region, by contesting the thought of the Caribbean as people ready to fulfill any leisure, a cleansed spatiality from socioeconomic issues. These two books collect and critique a corpus that expands our knowledge of Pan-Caribbean interrelations, and in turn, of the global relations formed through both South-North and South-South migrations. These stories and historiographies from Afro-Caribbean migrants constitute an indispensable political statement, since most scholarship on the Caribbean often ignores migrant communities. Both authors center migrant subjects as dignified beings by reflecting on their speech, whether authors or undocumented migrants. Read together, New Crossings and Crossing Waters offer a panorama of cultural inquiry about diasporic movements and their repercussions on intellectual history and the violations of human rights of migrants from and in the Caribbean territories. Scholars from the social sciences and the humanities interested in the intersectionality of race, intellectual history, and language in the Caribbean region and its diasporas could benefit from the perspectives that these two books propose. In addition to cultural studies with a focus on ethnicity, scholars dedicated to human rights and border studies will also find these contributions to be helpful and appealing.

Oriana Mejías Martínez is a college instructor and doctoral candidate at City University of New York Graduate Center. Her interests revolve around Latin American and Caribbean visual cultures and literature, specifically the history of popular revolt and social movements, as well as the Afro-Latin American diaspora experience in the global South.

[1] See David Newman, “The Lines That Continue to Separate Us: Borders in Our ‘Borderless’ World,” Progress in Human Geography 30, no. 2 (2006): 143–61, in which Newman explains how the border is the institutionalization of difference and how “the process between inclusion/exclusion are determined” in that place (148); and Lorgia García-Peña, The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), where García-Peña describes the process of bordering as “a continuum of actions that affect human beings,” implying “an actor (who enacts the bordering) and a recipient (they who are bordered)” (6).