Migration
Migration, the voluntary and involuntary movement of people from one geographical area to another, has been central to the development of an African presence in North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean. The earliest African migrants were probably explorers who came voluntarily as early as 800 A.D.
The African Slave Trade to the Western Hemisphere has been very conservatively estimated at 10 million. Of this number, the United States received 399,000 slaves, the Caribbean 3.7 million slaves, and Brazil another 3.6 million.
Blacks were present for the very first European financed incursions into the continent. An African navigator sailed with Columbus' crew. The free Christianized African, Juan Garrido, was among the early conquerors of the island of Boriquen (today Puerto Rico), and also participated in the colonization of Mexico, where he was the first person to plant wheat in this hemisphere.
The genocide practiced against the indigenous peoples and the growing demand for labor resulted in the expansion of the slave trade.
There are countries to which we do not attribute an African past but in which the presence of Africans predates any significant presence of Africans in North America by over 100 years. During the 17th century, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Cartagena, Columbia; and Lima, Peru were major slave ports and points of distribution for Africans throughout South America. By 1537, there were already 338 slaves in Peru. In 1590, there were at least 20,000 blacks in Lima and Callao, Peru. A 17th-century census shows that in 1614, 40% of the population of Lima was black. Until the early 19th century, there was not one region of Brazil with a population of less than 50 % blacks. In fact, the earliest and largest transport of slaves was to South America which from 1451 to 1870 received in excess of 5 million slaves or 49% of the total African Slave Trade.
The end of the slave trade accelerated already existing patterns of voluntary internal migrations. In the Caribbean, newly emancipated African men and women moved from the countryside to the towns or to other islands, particularly British Guiana and Trinidad and Tobago, where they were recruited to work on sugar plantations. Between 1885 and 1930, Caribbean people migrated to Panama, Mexico, Columbia, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala. Costa Rica, Curacao, Cuba and the United States. Eventually, racially restrictive immigration policies were enacted to limit the entry of Africans into Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela and the United States.
The volume of these migrations has rivaled that of the slave trade. In the United States, for example, six and a half million African-American people moved from the South to Northern and Western cities during the period from 1910 to 1970. These urban centers continue to receive blacks from the Caribbean and South America. In the United States as elsewhere, each wave of migration has brought changes in the demographic, cultural, economic and political life of the receiving society.
Introduction | Who are the African Americans? | Migration | Work | Culture | Resistance