The Little Guyana strip of Queens, New York runs for about 25 vivid blocks, with the thriving storefronts a feast of wild colours, bustling with immigrants sporting a range of distinctive musical accents that mark their origins in faraway tropical villages with rather strange names ranging from Ankerville to Zeelugt.
One can find almost anything that comes from their southern native land of many waters – be it fun fairs and festivities, flashing finery, frosty snow cones, fresh snapper, trout, crabs, hassar, tropical greens and fruits, to the Golden Arrowhead, and glowing El Dorado/XM-rums with ice-cold I-Cee, consumed in a cheerful chutney culture of cricket, cuisine, company, colourful curses and card-games.
Dividing Richmond Hill and South Ozone Park, the commercial enclave is booming, testament to the enduring spirit of a people who dream big, work hard, save and persevere, patiently transforming formerly dilapidated areas during several decades into a key business and residential hub. Like distinctive, smaller communities that have sprung up in the United States of America (USA) and Canada, Little Guyana is a marvellous microcosm of the growing diaspora.
Indeed, over a third of all Guyanese, 460,000, are estimated to be living overseas according to data from the United Nations’ (UN) Population Division, and half of this amount migrated in merely 25 years, between 1990 to 2015.
Information released by the independent Pew Research Center on Global Attitudes and Trends reveal the bulk of those leaving their birthplace annually head in the millions and multitudes to the international immigrant magnet of the “Land of the Free, and the Home of the Brave.” Among destination countries, the US continues to attract the most international migrants being home to about one-in-five (46.6 million).
At the last count, a minimum 270,000 Guyanese resided in the US with the next largest category being the 100,000 battling the extreme cold in neighbouring Canada, followed by 20,000 in the United Kingdom. An average of 6,000 people emigrated from Guyana annually between 1969 and 1976, increasing to about 14,000 yearly through to 1981. News Americas Now (NAN) reported in 2016 that three-quarters inhabit the Northeast US, with 140,000 of them in New York City, making the group the Big Apple’s fifth-leading foreign-born population.
Here, too, the ethnic divide is visibly evident with Queens recording the top concentration of Indo-Caribbean peoples in the five boroughs – these Guyanese represent the second highest foreign-born population with 82,000 individuals in their favoured southwestern zones. The city’s Afro-Guyanese are particularly established in the East Flatbush, Flatbush, and Crown Heights sections of Brooklyn. Guyanese also inhabit New Jersey, Maryland, Florida, California, Texas, and Pennsylvania.
By 1990 around 230,000 Guyanese had permanently left their birthplace, with another 130,000 departing in the decade up to 2000 (360,000), and 60,000 others waving goodbye by 2010., taking the overall volume to 420,000. In the next five years a surge of 40 000 emigrated, leaving a Guyana-based population hovering at 770,000.
Nearly all new Guyanese migrants to the USA are sponsored by faithful families – a whopping 97 per cent, the most of South Americans according to another Washington-based non-partisan organization, the Migration Policy Institute (MPI). In fact, Guyana is the fifth main source of emigrants to the US from that continent, with nearly 10 per cent of the net 2.856M.
Among SA’s diaspora divisions, the Guyanese fraternity is at 336,000, the US Census Bureau said, clarifying that the term diaspora includes persons born in Guyana as well as those who cited that origin as their ancestry, race, and/or ethnicity regardless of where they were born.
Seventeen per cent of these Guyanese were seniors aged 65 and older, the MPI stated. Although Guyanese tended to be less educated than some of their brilliant South American counterparts, they still recorded greater incomes than the total foreign-born population. In 2014, the median income of SA households measured US$52,000, compared to US$49,000 and US$55,000 for the gross immigrant and native-born households, respectively. Households headed by those from Bolivia (US$62,000), Guyana (US$58,000), Venezuela (US$57,000), and Brazil (US$56,000) shone.
Guyanese led the naturalization rates of South Americans (74 percent); they tied with Chileans at 68 per cent for having entered the US before 2000, and 34 percent enjoyed public insurance coverage.
Among the first batch in the US, were `private household workers’ and nursing aides of African descent according to Jacqueline A. McLeod in “Guyanese-Americans.” Some 70,523 fled after the racial and political tumult of 1964, NAN estimated.
Citing Monica Gordon’s ‘In Search of a Better Life: Perspectives on Migration from the Caribbean,’ NAN referred to her finding that more Guyanese women than men left for the US in the 1960s and 1970s, making them primarily responsible for securing immigrant status for their families. These ambitious, pioneering ladies tended to see migration as a necessary means to improve their economic and social status and the educational opportunities of their children.
“Like typical first generation immigrants, the Guyanese worked hard and saved most of their earnings, doing without the simplest of pleasures. Their primary goal was to facilitate the passage of their family members to the United States. Many of the males worked around the clock and went to night classes to better themselves educationally; women typically performed ‘sleep in’ work—living six days per week at their place of employment and returning to the boarding house for one day, usually beginning Saturday night and ending Sunday night. That one day off was spent in church and at stores shopping for things to `pack a barrel’ for their kin back home,” Gordon recalled.
After acquiring permanent resident status and securing their relatives’ legal journey to the US, Guyanese immigrants turned to improving their economic and educational status. Some women pursued nursing degrees part-time while holding multiple jobs. “The core of the social network of the Guyanese is the family. Other Guyanese are preferred as marriage partners, but many Guyanese marry persons from other Caribbean nations, or Americans of Caribbean parentage,” Gordon recognised.
Annually, Guyanese are among the Latin American and Caribbean migrants who make an invaluable 250 million different money transfers to their birth countries. While the individual sum sent averages US$300, taken in total these remittances by far outstrip all sources of foreign aid to the region. The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) disclosed on its online website that in several nations they constitute further than a tenth of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
In Guyana’s case, the publicized US remittances reached US$438 million, (G$90.7 billion), according to the Bank’s Multilateral Investment Fund (MIF). Sums sent to South America (SA) grew rapidly starting in 1998, peaked in 2008, dropped sharply in 2009, and have remained relatively stable since. Global remittances via formal channels equalled nearly US$15 billion in 2015, representing only 0.3 percent of the region’s gross domestic product (GDP). In most SA countries, these accounted for a negligible GDP, with the exception being smaller, dependent economies like Guyana at 10 percent compared with Ecuador (3 percent) and Paraguay (2 percent).
The five largest sources of SA/US immigrants were Colombia (707,000, or 25 percent), Peru (449,000, 16 percent), Ecuador (424,000, 15 percent), Brazil (336,000, 12 percent), and Guyana (273,000, 10 percent). Together, they accounted for over three-quarters (77 percent) of the US total SA-native population.
Other major clusters of foreign-based Guyanese include 13,000 in Suriname, 10,000 in Trinidad and Tobago, 7,000 in Barbados, 5,000 in France, about 2,000 each in the Netherlands, Brazil, St Lucia and the British Virgin Islands, and 1,000 in Australia. According to 2015 rounded calculations from MPI, at the time of the analysis there were 9,000 Guyanese living in neighbouring Venezuela, although with the escalating economic and social crisis, caused by low oil prices, the record is now likely to be a lot less with hordes expected to have returned home in a reversal of net flows.
The 6,000 total used for Antigua-Barbuda (AB) by the MPI appears far lower than reality, with Prime Minister Gaston Browne last year estimating that Guyanese comprise the biggest lot of non-native peoples permanently based in the twin-islands. He put the figure as between 15 per cent to 20 per cent of AB’s 90,000 population.
In nine nations with at least a million home-based population, a minimum one fifth now live in a different country, the Center said. So one out of every four Jamaicans dwelled abroad in 2015, with 83 per cent making a fresh start in either the US or UK. Outside, Jamaicans scaled 1.07M, compared with the 2.7M on the island, as against 590,000/2.39M in 1990.
In Trinidad and Tobago, one of every five Trinis currently live elsewhere, mainly in the US, Canada, and the UK. Warning that emigration can have grave demographic impacts on small, vulnerable nations, the Center identified TT as an example of where those leaving, comprise the highly educated and most skilled. In some instances, out-migration among particular categories can exacerbate population aging and leave serious skill gaps within these source countries, it acknowledged.
Countries with populations below the one million home baseline were not considered as major emigrant nations, the Pew Center explained. Consequently, Guyana and several Caribbean island countries are not highlighted on this list. The number of emigrants for selected CARICOM countries include: Barbados, 100,000; Grenada, 70,000; St Lucia, St Vincent and Belize, 60,000 each; and St Kitts and the Bahamas, 40,000 each.
A respected, nonpartisan “fact tank” the Center informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world. Founded in 2004, it conducts public opinion polling, demographic and empirical social science research, and media content analysis.
The famous last lines of the poem inside the pedestal of the iconic Statue of Liberty reads: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Now with a New Colossus set to take up the American Presidency, and the fate of much and many hanging in the balance, freedom may again become “fleedom” in the perpetual search for a better life. Uncertainty reigns with perhaps the one certainty being that dissatisfied Guyanese, like millions around the globe will keep migrating in an age-old quest, whether to the US or elsewhere.
ID speaks Guyanese, reverts to conquintay, cuffum, awarra, gill backer and bunduri and advises her puzzled adult children, “Monkey mek he pickney til he spoil’um” and “If yuh guh to crab dance, yuh mus get mud!”
