104 p., According to the 2010 census Caribbean immigrants make up 49% of the Black immigrant population of the United States, yet there remains a limited amount of acculturation research with Caribbean immigrants. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between acculturation, ethnic identity, and psychological outcomes in a sample of immigrants of African-Caribbean descent. Using Berry's (1997) theoretical framework for acculturation research, the author hypothesized that ethnic identity mediates the relationship between acculturation and psychological outcomes. A sample of adult, self-identified immigrants of African-Caribbean descent recruited in the Houston metropolitan area completed a survey packet that included a bidimensional measure of acculturation, a measure of ethnic identity, and scales of self-esteem, life satisfaction, and depression.
196 p., While some scholars contend that Caribbean Black Americans' socioeconomic successes suggest the declining significance of racism, ethnographic studies have found that Black Caribbean Americans are often shocked, disheartened, and angered by the racism they encounter in the U.S. Findings suggest that racism is an enduring problem in the U.S. for both foreign and native-born Black Americans and that it cannot simply be dismissed as a worldview that serves to protect one's sense of self-worth. Itappears to be an obstacle for Caribbean Black Americans pursuing the American dream and may be associated with decreasing perceptions among Caribbean Black professionals that hard work and perseverance are all one needs to succeed in the U.S.
161 p., Today little is known about the lives of the Windrush population and the settlement of Today little is known about the lives of the Windrush population and the settlement of Caribbeans in Brixton, London despite the large body of research on postwar Jamaican immigrants who migrated to England during the immediate postwar era (1948-1962). Previous scholarships on Jamaican immigrants primarily utilized quantitative methodologies to detail this history. However, this study recaptures some of the experiences through recorded documentations and oral narratives.
191 p., How does recent black migration impact Atlanta's geographies of black life? Since 1990, the Atlanta metropolitan region has become a major destination for three groups of black migrants from disparate origins: native-born "return south" blacks from other U.S. regions, Afro-Caribbean immigrants, and sub-Saharan African immigrants. These migrants' ethnic diversity dismantles existing notions of "black" culture, politics, and place. Black Migration to Atlanta revises scholarship by demonstrating that we cannot understand the complexity of black lives in Atlanta without investigating the complex relationship between space, migration, and popular culture. Atlanta emerges not just as an urban core, but as a region --a multiplicity of metropolitan sites--imagined and contested through residential patterns, commercial geographies, and popular culture's attempts to accommodate cultural and geographic shifts brought by recent black migration.
43 p., A retrospective exploration of the health perceptions and health experiences of first generation black Caribbean immigrant women during their transition from the Caribbean to the United States. This study utilized a cross-sectional qualitative method. Eight female study participants born in Grenada were recruited from New York, Houston, Washington D.C. and Columbus, Ohio. Interviews were analyzed thematically per standard qualitative analysis techniques.
266 p., The premise of this research rests on the idea that race, class and gender are all central to the immigrants' experience and that assimilation into the dominant culture is influenced by the immigrants' national origin, the immigrants' gender and his or her family's socioeconomic status. employ the Children of Immigrants' Longitudinal Study to determine the assimilation patterns of second-generation immigrants from Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica and the West Indies to the United States.
129 p., As the numbers of Black second generation immigrants (SGIs) in the United States increase because of increased numbers of immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean, more research is needed to explain how varying Black ethnic groups perceive and interpret illness to address health disparities (Ayalon & Young, 2005). General health locus of control (HLOC) helps to explain how people attribute the sources of control over their health (Masters & Wallston, 2005) and engage in help-seeking behaviors. HLOC has not been examined in SGIs because of a failure to examine group identity to account for within group differences among Black populations and a lack of culturally sensitive measurements of HLOC. The purpose of this study was to utilize a HLOC measure that included conventional and supernatural dimensions to examine the relationship between group identity, HLOC, and help-seeking in a sample of Black African and Caribbean SGIs. 157 second generation Black immigrants (72 West African and 85 Caribbean) were recruited for this study.
347 p., Historically, the integration of European immigrants and their children into U.S. society has been signified by their ability to assimilate into White middle-class society and enjoy the advantages of upward mobility. However, similar privileges are not experienced by immigrants of color; most often these groups assume a minority status in the United States, which (i) creates socio-economic impediments in their journey toward upward mobility and (ii) destabilizes their deeply embedded notions of self and identity. Within this social dilemma, 1.5 and second generation U.S.-born children of Caribbean immigrants occupy a distinctive and theoretically-valuable location for researchers. Grounded in critical race theory and the notion that racial hierarchies and racism are inescapable markers of the Black experiences in the U.S., this study explores the ways in which ten children of Caribbean immigrants come to understand themselves and their place in U.S. racial discourses and conventions given the racial and ethnic socialization messages they receive at home and their experiences with institutionalized racism and racial hierarchies in U.S. schools.
155 p., The present dissertation examines nativity-status and place-of-birth-differences in locational outcomes among native-born black American, and foreign-born black Caribbean and black African households. The main objective is to evaluate the degree to which the spatial assimilation model, which was formulated to capture the experience of white European ethnic groups arriving to the U.S. during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, can describe the outcomes of black immigrant ethnic groups arriving to the U.S. in the late twentieth century. Using data from the five percent Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) of the 2000 Census extracted from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS), I investigate the degree to which native-born black Americans and foreign-born black Caribbeans and black Africans are able to translate their individual-level socioeconomic status attainments, such as income and educational levels, into residence in suburban versus central-city neighborhoods. In addition I also test to see if black immigrants' returns to their socioeconomic attainments differed from those of native-born blacks. This study contributes to the literature on immigrant socioeconomic and locational attainment in three ways. First, it revisits traditional residential assimilation theories, and attempts to identify the factors that enable black immigrants to reside in qualitatively different neighborhoods compared to those in which native-born black Americans reside. Second, it examines intra-ethnic black locational outcomes by place-of-birth/national origin status. Finally, up-to-date census data will provide an updated snapshot of black immigrants' socioeconomic and residential status attainments, an important endeavor given the large increase in size and diversity for this population.
369 p., Reconstructs the process of migration, assimilation, and the realization of full sociopolitical participation in the United States in terms of the relationship between peoples of African descent--who were compelled to migrate as slaves across the Middle Passage, and who also voluntarily immigrated from various localities within the Black Atlantic--and select groups of immigrants from other locations around the globe. The author concentrates on novels by William Faulkner, Paule Marshall, James Baldwin, and cartoonist Chris Ware, and examine closely how these authors, in their respective texts, work to restructure, reimagine, and thereby challenge the enshrined American narratives of national belonging and acculturation through literary constructions of the identities and experiences of peoples of African descent, as migrants themselves, in tandem with their social, political, economic, sexual, racial, and cultural engagements with other immigrants to the nation-state.
