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In the late nineteenth century, migrants from Jamaica, Colombia, Barbados, and beyond poured into Caribbean Central America, building railroads, digging canals, selling meals, and farming homesteads. On the rain-forested shores of Costa Rica, U.S. entrepreneurs and others established vast banana plantations. Over the next half-century, short-lived export booms drew tens of thousands of migrants to the region. In Port Limon, birthplace of the United Fruit Company, a single building might house a Russian seamstress, a Martinican madam, a Cuban doctor, and a Chinese barkeep--together with stevedo

In the 19th century, migrants from the USA, across the Caribbean and beyond poured into Caribbean Central America, drawn by the established banana plantations and economic booms, creating a very mixed population. This work explores the effects of this change on gender, kinship and community.

Large-scale U.S. investment on the Central American isthmus began with the building of the Panama Railroad between 1850 and 1855, paused during the years of the U.S. Civil War, and then expanded rapidly from the 1870s onward, as Central American governments subsidized the building of railroads to Caribbean ports by giving away land concessions that Northern investors parlayed into a multi-million-dollar banana export industry.

Large-scale U.S. investment on the Central American isthmus began with the building of the Panama Railroad between 1850 and 1855, paused during the years of the U.S. Civil War, and then expanded rapidly from the 1870s onward, as Central American governments subsidized the building of railroads to Caribbean ports by giving away land concessions that Northern investors parlayed into a multi-million-dollar banana export industry.

AbstractNew immigration restrictions in the United States and elsewhere in the 1920s and 1930s made legal entry dependent on specific kinship formalities. This article explores the impact of the new system through a study of British Caribbean migrants. Because family patterns and the place of church and state sanction within them varied greatly by class—here, as in many parts of the world—the result was a curtailment of mobility that affected elites very little, and working-class would-be migrants enormously. In order to elucidatede factopatterns of exclusion, the author concludes, historians of transnational labor must begin paying more attention to the work "family" does.