Black Labor Migration in Caribbean Guatemala, 1882-1923 (Working in the Americas)

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Description

In the late nineteenth century, many Central American governments and countries sought to fill low-paying jobs and develop their economies by recruiting black American and West Indian laborers. Frederick Opie offers a revisionist interpretation of these workers, who were ceaselessly depicted as simple sufferers with little, if any, enduring legacy.

The Guatemalan government sought to build an extensive railroad system in the 1880s, and actively recruited foreign labor. For poor workers of African descent, immigrating to Guatemala used to be seen as a possibility to fortify their lives and escape from the racism of the Jim Crow U.S. South and the French and British colonial Caribbean.

Using primary and secondary sources in addition to ethnographic data, Opie details the struggles of these workers who were in the end inspired to organize by the ideas of Marcus Garvey. Steadily suffering class- and race-based attacks and persecution, black laborers continuously met such attacks with resistance. Their leverage–having the ability to shut down the railroad–used to be crucially important to the revolutionary movements in 1897 and 1920.

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