Caribbean nations long have endured the influence of the “colossus to the North.” Yet, as ideas, styles and people have traveled north, they have established distinctive communities, complicating American minority politics and culture. Two million Caribbean immigrants have arrived since the 1960s (alongside Puerto Rican US citizens); large urban communities include Haitians in New York and Miami, FL, Cubans in Miami, Dominicans on the Eastern Seaboard, Jamaicans, Belizians and others.

Some West Indian immigrant families come to embody the American dream Colin Powell, former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and possible presidential contender, is the son of Jamaican immigrants, congresswoman Shirley Chisholm has roots in Barbados, singer Harry Belafonte in Jamaica and Martinique, actor Sidney Poitier in the Bahamas and writers Paule Marshall in Barbados and Edwige Danticat in Haiti. Others have been identified with problems of race, class and crime.

While the US has intervened in the Caribbean for centuries, it has not always been a one-way street. Cubans participated in the radicalization of the Florida cigar industry and Jamaican Marcus Garvey tested his models for pan-African unity in the US before being deported in 1927. Yet, except for elite or seasonal migrations, few West Indians went north: less than 500,000 had immigrated before the Second World War.

Political and economic movements, as much as new immigration rules, fostered subsequent migration. Cuban Americans fleeing Castro and Haitian boat people escaping Duvalier and crushing poverty gained particular mass media attention, while other West Indians tended to be conflated with existing black or emergent Hispanic populations. Some men gained citizenship by joining the military in the Vietnam War.

West Indian migrants often have proved more successful in business and education than existing African American populations: by the 1990s, their average income approached general norms and far surpassed that of other African Americans, while immigrants and their children gained responsibilities in politics, civil service, the military and business. Nonetheless, seasonal migrants like cane-cutters in South Florida and women leaving their families for domestic service underscore continuing exploitation. A Caribbean cultural presence may be more muted: fads for calypso, reggae and soca do not necessarily identify an American population so much as characterizing transnational styles. Caribbean food (especially Jamaican and Cuban) moved out of its ethnic communities in the 1990s.

West Indian success has exacerbated tensions between insiders and outsiders, especially as West Indians bring different cultures of color and class to the US—Afro-Cubans, for example, fall within multiple census categories, as do Caribbean Asians.

Fair-skinned Creoles challenge the phenotypic classification of race in everyday life for both blacks and whites. Nor is theirs a simple story—Colin Powell, on the path to the White House, is balanced by Louis Farrakhan (with family origins in St. Kitts and Jamaica as well as Boston’s West Indian community), leading the Nation of Islam.

Marshall, Danticat and others have explored ambiguous positions inside and outside of both American and Caribbean culture.

Moreover, political and economic issues in their nearby homelands influence both Caribbean communities and the image of West Indians in the US. This underpinned the problematic association of Haitian refugees with AIDS in the 1980s or the US invasion in the 1990s. Other difficulties face Voudou and Santería, which may include animal sacrifice, within American civic religion. West Indian immigrants also have been associated in the media with drugs, and brutalized by police and immigration authorities.