Abstract
The Caribbean region’s cultural and spatial borders mirror its underlying identities: shifting, fluid and constantly changing. The Caribbean migration experience provides a dynamic platform for renewed understandings of boundaries as shaped by transnational reticular territories. This chapter explores the extent to which states must integrate their diasporas as part of their economic and diplomatic policy, given the huge impact of exiled communities on their homelands’ growth and international outreach. Haiti and its diaspora are the most illustrative textbook case, when it comes to such contemporary dynamics. Such a differentiated spatial system acting as a network should encourage us to review our analytical categories and representations of borders and identities; Haitian identities are constantly being reshaped both in and out of the country.
This article is an updated and revised version of French text “La diaspora haïtienne: Vers l’émergence d’un territoire de la dispersion?” published in 2011 in Le défi haïtien: Économie, dynamique sociopolitique et migration (The Haitian challenge: Economy, socio-political dynamics and migration) (dir. Carlo Célius) Paris: L’Harmattan.
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Notes
- 1.
These official statistics widely underestimate the actual scale of migration flows towards both nations. An estimated 300,000 Haitians were living in New York by the end of the 1970s (Stepick 1998).
- 2.
Sources: US Census American Community Survey 2011–2014; Statistiques Canada Enquête Ménages 2011; INSEE RGP 2010.
- 3.
These statistics consistently underestimate the actual volume of Haitian migration. For instance, according to Haitian associations, mainland France alone is thought to be home to at least 70,000 individuals.
- 4.
About 50–78% of Haitian migrants residing in the Caribbean and at least 18% of them in the United States are thought to be forced into clandestinity (source: Minority Rights Groups International 2003; U.S. Department of Homeland Security 2003).
- 5.
Which does not prevent xenophobic tendencies from affecting Haitian communities, as seen in Guadeloupe over the past few years.
- 6.
Source: US Immigration Services.
- 7.
Female Haitian vendors who conduct informal business on a transnational basis.
- 8.
Over the past thirty years, konpa music has contributed to turning this theme into an identity construction tool for individuals.
- 9.
Haitians living in the Bahamas and the ones who landed in Florida in the 1970–1980s come from the same North-Northeast locations in Haiti.
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Audebert, C. (2020). Caribbean Migration Spaces and Transnational Networks: The Case of the Haitian Diaspora. In: Moïse, M., Réno, F. (eds) Border Transgression and Reconfiguration of Caribbean Spaces. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45939-0_4
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