Editorial Unimagdalena

Description in English: The book West Indies Migrations: Labor, Inequality and Xenophobia, collects studies on the diaspora of West Indies workers from Haiti and the British West Indies in the Greater Caribbean during the 19th and 20th centuries. The cases analyzed refer to the correlation between economic growth and immigration. The development of the sugar, banana, cocoa or coffee industries since the 1880s, and the construction of the Panama Canal, highways or railroads, required a large mass of labor force coming from countries marked by economic stagnation, low wages, scarcity of resources or land, high prices of basic goods, unemployment, overpopulation and political crises. The essays in the book also analyze the racial dynamics in post-slavery societies, the relationship between class, race and gender, and the construction of identity and xenophobic discourses in which these workers were identified with different names, yumecas in Colombia, cocolos in the Dominican Republic, tórtolos in Puerto Rico or English-speaking blacks in Honduras. Since the mid-19th century, the West Indies diaspora began to move to different countries where diasporic and transnational communities were created. The Dominican Republic, Panama, Cuba, Costa Rica, Honduras, Colombia, Venezuela, the United States... were some of the countries that hired this labor force whose work was fundamental for the expansion of their economies.