Nancy Foner’s essay entitled “West Indian Migration to New York: An Overview” provided an excellent synopsis of the issues that we’ve been discussing since the beginning of the semester. Her use of census data along with specific stories provided a great look into the ways that major shifts in West Indian immigrant populations affected people in their daily lives. As this writing was meant to introduce a collection of writings from a book that I have yet to read, I feel that some of the very specific details- such as where she explains certain authors’ use of language- were lost on me. Overall, Foner’s essay did a great job of recapping the information we’ve learned in the semester and presenting the history that culminates in widespread transnational migration today.
“New York as a Locality in a Global Family Network” by Karen Fog Olwig was one of my favorite academic writings of the semester. I love the way that she completely zeroed in on the experience of one family and then magnified their experiences to highlight bigger societal issues. I find this approach to writing both challenging and effective, if done properly. The challenge of such writing is ensuring that the experiences about which one writes are not extremely isolated events so that readers can relate. If this is done well, the piece smoothly flows from the micro view to the macro view without implying that the world revolves around the subject.
The most compelling part in Olwig’s writing was the underlying discussion on the after effects of desegregation. Though the 1960s and 70s saw great revolution in terms of legislation, the work of eradicating racism from the American psyche was not- and is not- complete. The institutionalization of racism in the mid 20th century made simple tasks, such as applying for housing loans, nearly impossible for blacks in America. By using the stories from the descendants of the subjects- William and Marie- Olwig portrayed issues like these in a very tangible way.
Lastly, I found Tilly’s writing on “Trust Networks in Transnational Migration” very lively and informative. Before reading the paper, I found this topic uninteresting because I felt that trust networks being at the center of transnational migration was not new news. However, through his personal experiences and statistical data, I felt that reading this paper gave me a bird’s eye view of the topic. Seeing that most of the Caribbean economy depended on the money that family member sent home was shocking. Though I’d realized that most families depend on remittances in some form or another, having statistical data to quantify this dependence was eye opening.
