Afro-Caribbean Migrants' Knowledge of the South Before Moving to Atlanta- Pt 2

In his book Crosscurrents: West Indian Immigrants and Race, Milton Vickerman (1999) argues that Afro-Caribbeans tend to distinguish generally between the North and the South in the US, ascribing positive characteristics to the latter and the opposite to the former. He states that they tend to view the South as being more similar to the Caribbean than the North, knowing the South to have warmer weather, what they perceive as a more easygoing climate, a deeper sense of community, and “traditional values.” Vickerman argues that their positive views of the South may have influenced the large concentration of Afro-Caribbeans in Miami and their growing movement away from their traditional concentration in New York to southern cities like Atlanta.

Though I did not ask them about their prior knowledge of New York—a major destination for Caribbean immigrants for over a century--, I suspect that my respondents—including those who had lived in New York and those who had never lived there (or in the US) before moving to Atlanta—would have been able to list comfortably and quickly a number of things about the major US metro, such as its climate, major attractions (e.g., Statue of Liberty and Times Square), and neighborhoods. Previous research has shown that many Afro-Caribbean immigrants arrive in New York with significant knowledge about the city—especially the Caribbean neighborhoods in the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn and the long-running and widely attended West Indian Carnival on Labor Day—through stories from friends and family who previously migrated there (Kasinitz 1992). Anthropologist Karen Fog Olwig (2001) found that New York was a central location in some Jamaican family networks and served as place for family members living in the Caribbean, Canada, the US, and elsewhere to meet and get to know each other. Migrants are critical in generating and spreading information about a destination by telling stories of their experiences to family and friends and by providing them with the opportunity and incentive to visit and learn about the place firsthand. Because Afro-Caribbean’s migration to, and settlement in, Atlanta is new, and their community there is relatively small (in comparison to the million-plus Afro-Caribbeans in the traditional destination of New York), the information about the southern city is not likely to be as great or as widely known within the Caribbean diaspora as information about destinations that have older and larger Caribbean communities. As I discussed in the preceding chapter, the majority of the Afro-Caribbean migrants in this study were among the first of their family or friends to move to Atlanta and thus didn’t have the availability of an established Caribbean network already there to help them learn about the city or to facilitate their migration process.

For those migrants that arrived in the 1990s, the media played a critical role in generating and perpetuating—especially leading up to the 1996 Summer Olympics—positive and attractive images of Atlanta that counterbalanced the negative images (or lack of images) that many of my respondents said they heard of the city prior to moving there. Several scholars have pointed to the Summer Olympics as a turning point for Atlanta, in terms of economic, structural, and demographic growth, and also as the catalyst for its emergence into an international city. The opportunities that developed in the city for the Olympics greatly attracted Afro-Caribbeans and many migrants from around the US and the world to Atlanta.

Though many of the Afro-Caribbean migrants in this study said they “didn’t know much” about Atlanta before they moved there, they are directly contributing to the information about Atlanta within their own Caribbean social network. A small number of migrants that I spoke to reported knowing a lot about Atlanta before moving there. Those migrants obtained their pre-migration information about Atlanta and the opportunities that it offered through their network connections in city and from visiting the city, sparking their interest in moving there. One such migrant was Dwight, whose story was discussed in Chapter 1. He had visited Atlanta to attend fraternity functions a couple times prior to moving there from New York with his wife in 2007. He also had two network connections in Atlanta—his fraternity brothers, and his wife’s cousin Anthony who moved to the city in 1994 from New York (and who also happened to be his fraternity brother)—that greatly assisted him and his wife with the migration process by providing information about Atlanta, suggesting where in the city he should live, and helping him find a job. Knowing people there prior to moving to Atlanta allowed him to arrive already holding a wealth of knowledge about the city. So, when I asked him what he knew about Atlanta before he moved, he quickly listed a number of things about the southern city; comparing it to New York, he told me that he liked that Atlanta had a slower pace, a lower cost of living, a more open and friendly environment, and a larger selection of large, affordable homes. In contrast, when I asked Dwight’s wife’s cousin Anthony the same question, he replied: “I didn’t know much about Atlanta. It was around the time of the 1996 Olympics and I knew it was an up-and-coming city and that many opportunities were starting to surface.” Dwight and Anthony’s stories demonstrate the important role networks play in helping the migration process and helping new Afro-Caribbeans transition to their new lives in Atlanta, but it also reveals that Afro-Caribbeans were moving to Atlanta regardless of whether they knew a little or a lot about the region.