Contents:
His feet itched for the pitch, so he made a career in his cleats. Gillie played in the Detroit District Soccer League in , netting an astonishing forty-four goals in a fourteen-game season. By , the Detroit Wolverines, a professional team, signed him. In his debut match against the Chicago Vikings, Gillie disoriented the opposing defense, dazzled fans, and delivered a hat-trick.
North Americans who had a cross-border, Pan-African outlook believed that, in the northern US or Canada, they could escape racial caste. Unable to find the elusive promised land, they imagined the US-Canadian borderlands as their Pan-African, cosmopolitan zone. Migrants such as Beulah Cuzzens and Gillie Heron and many others relocated, subverted, and agitated to find, reimagine, and build a diasporic and transnational community. Their efforts connected the postwar struggle for civil rights in the United States to human rights in Canada, highlighting the ways that activists could advance similar yet distinct rights regimes in neighboring polities.
With the advent of Black Power in the late s and s, however, US and Canadian security and intelligence services clamped down on cross-border activists whom they suspected of radicalizing black communities. Like the early twentieth century when blacks from the Caribbean, Central America, and Canada encountered and fought Jim Crow in the United States, a resurgent white nationalism is confronting migrants on the southern border.
Because the United States is a settler colonial society founded on indigenous dispossession, extensive exploitation of enslaved African labor, and mass immigration from Europe and Asia, notions of who belongs are likely to change from time to time. Are there cross-border cosmopolitans today? If so, will they continue to reshape our understanding of race, borders, and transnational citizenship? As physical borders continue to tighten under political pressures, it seems likely that aspiring cross-border cosmopolitans will find it increasingly challenging to foster a vibrant, transnational community and identity.
Skip to main content. Main Menu Utility Menu Search. By Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey The international refugee crisis—the result of internal strife and wars, poverty, climate change, and unstable governments—threatens the global order. Credit: Smithsonian Institution Students from the S. Beulah Cuzzens was a teacher there. Post-Confederation, Ontario was one of only two provinces to legislate black segregated schools. Thanks to black parents and politicians, the last one in the province finally closed in Credit: The Celtic Wiki , accessed on May 13, A third key pattern of relationship between marriage and migration in the early republic linked indigenous women with European men.
This pattern predated the United States by many years, yet it continued as the country expanded. Some European-descended women also joined American Indian populations and married, but the other gender pattern prevailed for understandable reasons. First, in terms of demographics, there tended to be more men than women arriving from Europe. Second, European descended men interested in trade usually came into Indian territories without families. As single men they would at times create partnerships, sometimes marriages, with native women which helped foster both economic and diplomatic relations.
Third, in addition to the formal benefits there were more practical advantages and some long-term implications. In cases such as the Cherokee, where matrilineal kinship and matrilocal residence prevailed, a man could move into an existing household. A child from this gendered marriage combination could gain both the clan status and acceptance that came with a Cherokee mother, as well as the patrilineal heritage of a father of European descent. Their principal chief who fought removal, John Ross, himself embodied the linkages of European men and Cherokee women over three generations.
Moving chronologically towards the middle of the nineteenth century, the pattern of Europeans migrating and fitting into marriages based on coverture continued, though with some variation. Opportunities in the developing industrial sector, initially centered in the northeast, attracted young single women as well as family migrants from Europe in addition to those coming across the northern border or from internal rural hinterlands. Wage earning often remained within a family economy, but it also allowed some to live on their own and to make other decisions, such as marriage, without as much parental intervention.
A similar pattern appeared in developing urban centers which attracted labourers, particularly women for domestic service. Rural labour in transportation and resource extraction tasks tended to target men for itinerant work, meaning few would marry or bring spouses under these conditions. Likewise, domestic service targeted unmarried women and work conditions typically precluded marriage. These kinds of wage-earning jobs, often taken by migrants, conversely provided the funds that might be the basis for a marriage, while simultaneously making getting married difficult for a time.
At the same time as urbanization and industrialization attracted individuals for wage-earning, the United States also witnessed a boom in rural settlement. Land formed a key incentive to many migrants, especially in the middle years of the nineteenth century. Under the Homestead Act of the government offered free land to individuals including immigrants in territories newly gained from American Indian hands. Free or inexpensive land in the plains meant opportunities to farm for many coming from Europe. Letters of German and Dutch men made it clear that to farm you needed both a husband and wife, and preferably thereafter a number of children who would become farm workers for a time.
In this, the gendered hierarchy of coverture still remained in place. Migration of family units continued to be a major pattern in this era. Single or widowed men who wanted to make their livelihood on the land sought wives in order to farm successfully. Unmarried women with experience on farms could expect marriage proposals. Gendered expectations still meant women could not ask, but they might be able to make choices among potential suitors.
The other major pattern associated with this migration to the land involved couples. People migrated because their spouses migrated. Many times the couple agreed on the decision. Sometimes only one partner wanted to go. Whether the couple migrated together or in sequence depended on the circumstances.
Many made the move together. In other cases economic conditions or logistics might make it more feasible to have one person go first and then send for the other. In the south, coverture applied to the European descended population, but not further. The more affluent still relied on slavery for part of their labour force.
The demand for cotton tied to westward geographic expansion, spreading plantations and the marriage regimes they enforced. After slave importation officially ended in , limitations on marriage for enslaved people continued and applied in similar fashion to those caught in the internal slave trade through mid-century.
Local communities sometimes ignored intimate relationships between white men and African-descended women. Less often would they tolerate white women crossing the racial line they envisioned, though there were exceptions. The story underscored how local conditions could complicate racial and gender hierarchies. Connolly enjoyed greater status as the spouse of an elite man in the islands than she had in New England as an impoverished white labouring woman.
Determining a racial hierarchy by policing a racial divide was not limited to the south. Of 34 states, 21 had enacted laws against interracial mixing by The marriage of African-descended people to those of European origin constituted one element in all, but in western parts of the country the laws targeted other groups such as American Indians and Asians. Antipathy to people crossing racial lines, whether enshrined in law or not, limited that likelihood. So one key pattern from this era consisted of people who due to migration could not marry. Racial and ethnic prejudices targeted those of African and Asian background in particular.
Beyond that, persons who sought spouses of similar background sometimes found the demographic situation so skewed that they had no opportunities in their local area to find spouses. The two combined for male Chinese migrants of the mid-nineteenth century, who faced significant legal as well as demographic barriers on the west coast if they sought spouses locally.
But most did not. Many arrived already married and others arranged marriages to women sometimes plural in their home region.
A long tradition of husbands going overseas to pursue wealth and of spouses living in separation for extended periods of time, meaning years or decades, existed in the Guangdong, the region from which most migrants came. The expectation to return eventually, reinforced by racial discrimination, which also precluded naturalization, supported this resolve.
Family fortunes developed and expanded in the Chinese hometowns of these overseas Chinese. Demographic imbalances of men and women led to other consequences. Providing the services people associated with women in largely male settings often proved lucrative. Moreover, the fluidity of gender roles and lack of enforcement of many rules appealed to some.
For the minority of women, both work and marital opportunities existed. Her impoverished family in China sold her, and she arrived in the United States illegally, bound for brothel work. She came to the mining town of Warrens, Idaho in about where she gained the name Polly and started working in a saloon owned by a Chinese man. There she began a relationship with Charlie Bemis, a white man who operated another saloon in town. At some point they started living together and the two later married officially despite an Idaho statute forbidding it.
Bemis went against the ban on prostitution, against the anti-miscegenation law, and against the demographic pattern that would have predicted she marry a male Chinese migrant. In the boom and bust economy of industrializing America late in the century, migrants played a crucial role.
This title depicts how immigrant women use international migration as a strategy to challenge existing patriarchal hegemonies operative both in the United States and Africa. It also weaves the United States. Crossing Transnational Borders. African Women Immigrants in the United States: Crossing Transnational Borders [ J. Arthur] on giuliettasprint.konfer.eu *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. This title.
More men than women came in these years, increasing the labour supply. Quite a number of the migrants were already married, but came alone, assuming they might return or send for their spouses later. As years passed this could become a permanent separation. Letters of migrants and newspaper notices attest to cases of desertion.
Countries varied as to the time one had to wait to assume the person had died or to grant a divorce based on years of no support after departure.
Under the old assumptions of coverture, husbands had to support wives and children. The theory, however, did not ensure employment. Through the late nineteenth century free married women migrants qualified as both wives and workers in terms of the developing immigration regulations.