Several Afro-Caribbeans that I spoke to reported using their
Caribbean ethnic networks to help them to
adapt to life in Atlanta, after choosing on their own to move there. Jennifer,
a Jamaican transplant in her late forties who had three children and was
married to a West Indian man, came to Atlanta from the Boston area, after she
and her husband had visited the city and fell in love with it. While her
husband was finishing graduate school in Massachusetts, she moved to Atlanta
with her sons in 1999. When I asked her how she figured out where to live in Atlanta,
she said that her brother-in-law lived in Stone Mountain (an eastern suburb of
Atlanta with a high concentration of Afro-Caribbeans) and she and her sons had
to live with him, since her husband didn’t migrate with them. By staying at her
brother-in-law’s house, she was able to get to know the Atlanta area and
research the best place for her family to live and for her sons (who were
school-age at the time) to attend school. She eventually moved to Lawrenceville
(located in the mostly white northern suburbs of Atlanta), after learning from
her research that it had one of the best school systems in the Atlanta area. For
Afro-Caribbean migrants, like Jennifer, having Caribbean networks in Atlanta
prior to their move helped ease their transition to their new life in the
southern city by providing them with places to stay, helping them find jobs,
providing transportation in the car-dependent city, giving them information
about the city, and giving them the space and time to learn about and adjust to
their new environment.
Interestingly, I found that Caribbean networks were not only
social networks that Afro-Caribbean migrants were using in their migration to
Atlanta. They were also using race-based (or black) social networks. Several
migrants that I interviewed reported being a member of a Black Greek Letter
Organization (BGLO) and using their black sorority/fraternity network to move
to and settle in Atlanta. There are historically nine Black Greek Letter
Organizations (BGLOs): Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority,
Delta Sigma Theta sorority, Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, Omega Psi Phi
fraternity, Phi Beta Sigma fraternity, Zeta Phi Beta sorority, Sigma Gamma Rho
sorority, and Iota Phi Theta fraternity. These BGLOs, founded between 1906 and 1963
in response to exclusionary policies of white Greek organizations, have
established chapters throughout the US—especially on the campuses of the
historically black colleges and universities in the South—and the world and
have been a significant part of the collegiate and post-collegiate life of many
black Americans for over a century. For
Afro-Caribbean migrants who have membership in these black fraternities and
sororities, they were able to access this extensive black social network and
receive help from either a “frat brother” or “sorority sister” of their local
chapter (in the city that they left) who had connections in Atlanta, or from
members of an Atlanta chapter. [1]
Dwight, a thirty-five year old Kittian migrant who moved from New York with his
wife in 2007, and who was a member of Omega Phi Psi Fraternity, described how
one of his frat brothers (who was also his Guyanese wife’s cousin) had moved to
Atlanta from New York in 1997 and helped him use the fraternity network in
Atlanta to find a job. He stated, “In terms of job hunting, [my frat brother]
was instrumental for me…once I got down, he put the word out with the
fraternity that I was looking for a job. My first job when we got down here was
working with a frat brother who was a main partner at a firm down here.”
Similarly, Alana, a transplant of Barbadian descent in her mid-thirties,
received help from her sorority sister in finding a place to live, when she
first moved to Atlanta in 1995. After graduating college in North Carolina, she
received a job offer in Atlanta and didn’t have time to look for housing before
she moved there. When I asked her how she found housing, she told me that her
sorority sister put her in contact with her fiancé who was living in Atlanta
and he told her about an apartment complex near his home which happened to be
across from her new job. She picked her apartment sight unseen based on the
recommendation.
As I discussed in the preceding chapters, people have both a
racial and ethnic identity, which are fluid and interchangeable based on the
situation (Bashi 2007, 2013). Afro-Caribbeans are both black and Caribbean. Atlanta-bound
Afro-Caribbean migrants’ use of black social networks, like those of black sororities
and fraternities, does not prevent them from also accessing Caribbean networks.
In their move to Atlanta, Afro-Caribbean migrants with access to both Caribbean
social networks and black social networks (e.g. black fraternity/sorority networks)
are able to use either networks to get their goals accomplished. In the case of
Dwight, he used his Caribbean family network to find a place to live and his
black fraternity network to find a job in Atlanta.
[1] Notable
members of BGLOs are civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. (Alpha Phi
Alpha), First Lady Michelle Obama (honorary member of Alpha Kappa Alpha), and
comedian-actor Bill Cosby (Omega Psi Phi), to name a few.
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