Jamaican Hands Across the Atlantic tells the fascinating story of Jamaicans in the diaspora - their pains and pleasures. Over the next two weeks, authors, Elaine Bauer and Paul Thompson have been tracking their story. Leading up to the Jamaica Diaspora Conference June 15-16, we present excerpts of their treatise over the next two weeks.

THERE HAVE been two main phases in migration patterns since the 1940s, the period of living memory on which we focus in this book.

Firstly, at least up until the 1970s, migrants tended to come from rural artisan or small farm families. They had the resources to leave and existing family connections in the host country. Education also become an important factor.

Secondly, the main destination for the first postwar decades was Britain, but from the 1970s it switched to North America.

Migrants to Britain came above all in the 1950s and 1960s. With the increasing restrictiveness of British immigration policy and the converse opening up of the United States and Canada to West Indian migrants, North America became, and has remained the main destination. However, some migrants tried life in both continents.

In the past, while both women and men did migrate, it was easier for men to find opportunities. But with the declining demand for unskilled labour, women now find it easier to get initial work.

The wave of migration to Britain was initiated by World War II, with the active recruitment, mainly of men but also of women, from the West Indian colonies in support of the war effort. While most servicemen and women returned after the war ended in 1945, some remained, and because there were many more black men than women, they often marry white women - among them our interviewee Rufus Rawlings.

EARLY POST-WAR EXPERIENCE

The early post-war experience of West Indian migrants in London is vividly conveyed by Sam Selvon's novel The Lonely Londoners. But, the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948, packed with keen immigrants, proved a symbolic watershed. The scene shifted dramatically and the gender imbalance was rectified in the 1950s, when both London Transport and the new National Health hospitals were actively recruiting in the West Indies for both men and women staff. In the next few years, many of those already in Britain also paid for other family members to follow them. By the 1961 census, there were some 200,000 West Indians in England, already an unprecedentedly high figure, half from Jamaica, and more than half in London; and by 1971, numbers had more than doubled to over 500,000.

The hostile political reaction to this influx resulted in the imposition of immigration controls on colonial British subjects, their right of free entry being removed by a series of key new legislation in 1962-71.

As a result, the growth of the West Indian community slowed drastically, with a current total of migrants and their descendants, of approximately 600,000, now sustaining itself more through children born in Britain than from new migrants, while those new migrants who came were usually relatives of those who had already arrived.

Over time, too, the communities shifted from being mainly young migrants to mixed-age, with both children and grandparents present. Typically, they maintained close contact with their kin both in Jamaica and North America. A particularly striking long-term change was that the rate of intermarriage with white partners, after dipping sharply in the 1960s and 70s, has now risen among young black men and women to a very high level. Of those young West Indian men who have partners, half are white. This degree of interracial mixing represents a new radical demographic form of creolization.

Apart from immigration controls, migration to Britain had in any case become less economically attractive as the post-war boom was succeeded by the stop-go decades, and Britain faced the long-term crisis of ceasing to be one of the world's leading manufacturing nations. By this time in Jamaica, people were saying, "England bruck dung" (broke down).

Certainly, deindustrialisation drastically cut demand for manual labour, for which most of the migrants had come, and this created serious Jamaican Hands Across the Atlantic unemployment problems especially for younger men. Nevertheless, those who stayed in Britain mostly fared reasonably well. The less fortunate have benefited from the welfare system, with subsidised council housing and free health services, while there has been significant upward mobility among both migrants and their children, and especially women.

Soon after Britain had begun to impose immigration controls. From the late 1960s, both the United States and Canada opened up immigration, but mainly favouring those with educational qualifications and close relatives of earlier migrants. This is why Jamaican immigration to North America has not been primarily of manual workers, as it had been to Britain, but of migrants with higher aspirations. In the United States Jamaicans have an image as notably ambitious, both in work and education.

HOW MUCH DO WE KNOW?

How much is already known about these transnational families? Most of the information available to us is descriptive rather than statistical. There are absolutely no statistics concerning transnational families as such, since information is invariably drawn from separate national studies. Even the numbers of Jamaican migrants and their descendants living in particular destinations are approximate, especially in the United States with its higher numbers of recent illegal immigrants. Nor in terms of families are there any really satisfactory units of analysis, given that parenting and sexual relationships may often be not only conducted within, but also between different households. The most interesting common finding, which emerges from all the various national figures is that Jamaicans everywhere have for generations tended to marry late if at all, and also that they have a high rate of female-headed households, twice that in the white British or North American populations. But, partly because West Indian migrants, especially women, also have a high rate of employment, this has not led to them being among the poorer immigrant groups in either Britain or the United States.

In terms of ethnographic and descriptive work, by far the richest is on /the family in Jamaica itself, both historical and contemporary. Fortunately there were some notable and relatively sympathetic earlier studies, of which Edith Clarke's My Mother Who Fathered Me, and Raymond Smith's Kinship and Class in the West Indies are outstanding. During the last 15 years - and not by accident, precisely when for the first time divorce, single mothers and stepfamilies have become commonplace rather than exceptional in white American and British families.

STAYING OR LEAVING

In 1967, when Leonard Selkirk left his hill farm village of Five Mile in St. Catherine with his brother and sister to fly to Britain to join his parents, the peak of the post-war migration boom from Jamaica to Britain was already past. Nevertheless, Leonard remembers how the whole village still seemed lit up by migration enthusiasm. Leonard's parents had gone ahead five years earlier, leaving their three children with their grandparents, but always intending that one day they too would follow. By 1967 the children sensed that their time to travel would come soon, feeling 'excitement, but still not knowing what it meant', and pestering their grandmother, 'When are we going to go foreign?'

But it was in June, when Leonard's close cousin Robbie, who lived next door in the same yard, left for Britain, that for the first time Leonard, now an eight-year-old, got a sense of what migration really meant. In the yard, alongside pigs and chickens and cocoa and tobacco, under a big coconut tree there was a big patch of cho cho (a watery vegetable, like cucumber). 'Robbie, he just loved planting, so he planted this cho cho patch, and it grew and grew, it's all over the place.' And when he was leaving -- the truck came to the front, to the gate, and everybody was piling on to the truck, and the last thing Robbie said.... Everybody piled into the truck and we couldn't go. And I remember Aunt Carrie was saying, "No", she was holding us back saying, "No, it's not your turn yet." But we didn't realise the enormity of what was going on, until Robbie said, "Look after my cho cho patch!" Then you realised he wasn't just going up the road! ... When he went, you know, when people are leaving on a big truck ... you know they're not coming back.

Leonard and his siblings followed within three months, in the same truck, full of other cousins who were also travelling and friends. 'It was still exciting because it was an adventure, but then we're also scared.' And as they walked across the tarmac to the big BOAC plane, 'you could see everybody waving, and it's like the whole of Five Mile, it's like the whole of Five Mile was up there! They weren't just shouting for us, but you just felt it was the whole of Five Mile, because you know that two truckloads of people come down. And it was a fun day out for most people'.

For the Selkirk family the switch from hill farming on small plots to wage-earning in British cities, where there were plenty of jobs in factories and public services, certainly made economic sense.

MIGRATION WAVE

The migration wave of the 1950s and 1960s to Britain was probably the most intense in Jamaica's history, but it was just one in a whole succession of migration surges, each initially opened up by work opportunities: earlier to the mines in Venezuela, constructing the Panama Canal, for farm work in Cuba or the American South, and subsequently for jobs in New York and Canada. But these waves of migration, going right back to the creation of Jamaican society in the slavery era, along with the return from abroad of successful migrants, have also built up a migration culture, which in itself pushes young people towards migration. 'Travelling' is widely seen, not just as a way of earning better, but as an important broadening experience, a path to adult maturity.

In fact, it was only a minority of Jamaicans who migrated. What reasons can we find for why some chose to migrate, and some to stay? With such a social push and economic pull, it is easiest to suggest why the migrants left, than why others stayed. In addition, our own interviews were designed to focus on the migrants, so that we have 27 accounts from Jamaicans who never migrated, in contrast to 70 from migrants. Furthermore, a migration that did happen is much more likely to be well remembered than not having chances to migrate, or a decision not to go. Nevertheless, there are some revealing clues in these life stories.

Firstly, looking at the interviews as a whole, there seem to be two important differences between those who left and those who stayed: social resources, and age.

Up until the 1950s, there were more men among the migrants, but in the long run there were as many women as men among both migrants and stayers. And in most families, among the siblings there was typically a mixture of stayers and migrants: in only five families did all the siblings, or all but one, migrate. But there were significant class differences.

For although the interviews show how migrants and nonmigrants both came from a broad spread of social backgrounds, mostly in the countryside, those with little or no land were twice as common among stayers as among migrants. Nearly two-thirds of the migrants came from small farm and artisan families, and large farm and professional families were also over represented among migrants.

Migration required some resources: cash to travel, and to survive on arrival, and it was also helped by networks of kin and friends abroad -- all of which the poorest families were least likely to have. "Most of them [leaving] were self-sufficient," observed Patrick James, who came from rural St. Thomas to England in 1956. "They have big house and all, you see, they sell it to come away ..."

SECOND KEY POINT

Everybody asked, "Why are these men leaving to go to England to work, they have a plantation [some land to grow crops], they have a couple of cows - they wasn't so badly off." No, they weren't poor people from where I'm from.'

There was also a second key point, which distinguished migrants from the overall Jamaican population - their age. For migrants were overwhelmingly either children rejoining their parents, or young adults. Only five migrants first travelled at over the age of 32. So that men or women who did not travel with their parents, nor seized the chance to migrate when young, usually spent the rest of their lives in Jamaica. Of those who stayed in Jamaica, some said they had wanted to travel, but had never had a good contact abroad, or had failed to get a visa. A few still hoped their chance might come. "Yes, if I get an opportunity," said a dressmaker; while two men hold onto lingering hopes of international success in music. "I could make lyrics down the line. Yeah man!" Clive Henry, a tourist guide, sees migration as essential to the realisation of his dream of becoming a landscape gardener:

The dream I have, I don't think I can stay in Jamaica to dream. I figure I have to go somewhere in the U.S. or Canada, to get some of my landscape work done. So I could make some money for doing what I want to do ... Landscape work, like, say you have a nice home, you want to change the flowers, you want to take up the grass, you want to put in some bigger tree ... So I can say, "Well, we need two truckload of soil, or two ton of soil, for your garden, keep it more flourish." So all of those dream there for me. Yeah man.

GOOD ENOUGH WORK ALREADY

Others had felt that they had good enough work already: 'Teaching is my first love'; 'I was doing my minicabbing back home, I was quite comfortable, have a nice home, I didn't want to [migrate].' It is noticeable that when a family had a moderate or large farm, one or two of the brothers typically remained in Jamaica to work it. But those who stayed most commonly expressed some form of commitment to Jamaica or its people as their reason for staying.

GENERAL FORM

This could be in a general form: 'My roots is here', 'I feel at home here', 'I love Jamaica'. 'I travelled a lot [to visit relatives], but I love Jamaica', commented Edley Keat, Kingston bus driver, 'and I made up my mind to stay here, regardless of how this country was, I must survive where I was born. Here I grow and here I lived and here I die'. 'Each country need to develop, right?' asked Morris Derby, who only finally migrated to England in middle age: 'I feel every man is supposed to make their living in one country.' In a similar spirit, Jack Rawlings, still a working smallholder in his seventies, was content to stay rather than follow his brother abroad, because 'me a Jamaican, Jamaica me country, me must love Jamaica more than the other man country ... Why me no fe love Jamaica, when a fe me country?'

Others spoke of powerful particular commitments - of reluctance to leave their children or the older generations in the family. Sid Constable, truck driver, remembered how 'the old people was alive and I couldn't -- everybody else went away now, so I decide it's my duty to them'. And indeed, older people certainly could grieve for the loss of the young: when Dahlia Noble set off as a teenager from her Hanover village for England in 1961, 'the elderly people, a lot of them cried when I was leaving ... People who were poor, I used to go around them a lot, and quite a few people cried'. Rose Lyle recalled how her father had migrated to the United States, and after two years 'he wanted my mother to move over there, and she decide she wasn't going, because she wasn't leaving her parents'.

COMMITMENT TO CHILDREN

Commitment to children was still stronger. One father decided for his children, 'until they can fend for them own, I never leave them'; while a mother remembered how when her son was small, 'I used to consider going abroad, and I'd say something to him about it, he'll say that I should not leave him'. Another mother explained how she delayed following her husband abroad for ten years, in order to see her children through their education in Jamaica. Howard Beck, shopkeeper's son turned farmer, summed up his various reasons against migrating: 'I decided that I was not going to go. My wife was a teacher, and we decided that I wasn't going to go. I think it was very important for me to be here for my children. And I don't think everybody should go either. Somebody need to stay here to hold the fort, keep the base firm.'

The tug between opportunity and commitment is especially well expressed by two men who both did eventually migrate to North America, in the late 1970s and 1980s. Ted Oliver grew up with his farming grandmother as part of a large family of cousins, with migration clearly a possibility from his earliest years. He had cousins in England, and his mother had migrated first to Kingston when Ted was three, and then on to Canada 'for a better job offer'.

His reaction to her leaving was strikingly positive: 'Well, it's kind of happiness too, because, "Our mum went to Canada" -- it was the thing in those days, right? People travelling, right?