This immigration piece from 1985 is a long reach into the archives to look at an issue that has become a much more volatile element in contemporary U.S. society. But the story chronicles an impressive catalogue of achievement by black populations who have immigrated to Los Angeles from the Caribbean and Central America.
April 25, 1985|EDWARD J. BOYER, Times Staff Writer
For Roland Yorke, the consuming passion to immigrate to what many of his countrymen still consider “the land of milk and honey” began with Sugar Ray Robinson, Joe Louis and Adam Clayton Powell staring down at him from the pages of Ebony magazine.
Growing up in Belize (then British Honduras), Yorke, 42, recalls that poor people who could not afford wallpaper covered their walls with pages from Ebony.
“You could look on the walls and see all of these pictures,” Yorke said. “I was tremendously influenced by being able to identify with black Americans. I wanted to leave home and make it in the real world.”
Yorke made it to the “real world” in 1961 when he was 18, landing in Harlem with a Belizean friend who was later killed in Vietnam and becoming, by his own assessment, “a very good dishwasher.”
College Degree
Twelve years of struggle later, with a sociology degree from Syracuse University in his pocket, Yorke headed for Los Angeles where he helped organize the Concerned Belizean Assn. and now works as director of the county’s Willowbrook Senior Citizens Center.
His odyssey duplicates one that tens of thousand of immigrants from the English-speaking Caribbean have been following for generations, making their way to American cities from island nations stretching east from Jamaica and sweeping south to Trinidad and Tobago, from Guyana on the South American mainland, Belize in Central America, Bermuda and the Bahamas (Atlantic countries with strong cultural ties to the Caribbean).
New York, with this country’s largest concentration of Caribbean immigrants, was often their first stop. Since the 1960s, however, increasing numbers have been fleeing the harsh Northeastern winters for California’s climate.
With no language barrier to overcome, and driven by a work ethic characteristic of immigrant groups, they have seized educational and economic opportunities often unavailable to them in their own countries.
Based on Class
“Distinctions in the West Indies are based on class rather than race,” said Los Angeles Municipal Judge Alban I. Niles, a native of St. Lucia, a tiny island in the eastern Caribbean with a population of 100,000.
“If you went to school, you could be anything,” he said. “That was drilled into you. Consequently, West Indians who come here tend to be hard-driving, ambitious, and they go out to achieve something.”
The success of established Caribbeans, however, has left some caught in what they call “in-betweenity”–competing tugs from their countries of origin and their country of residence. And the promise of prosperity, some Caribbeans say, is luring increasing numbers to enter the country illegally, sometimes to their disappointment.
“Only in the last five years have we been able to get American television at home,” said Sylvia Flowers, an urban planner who was born in Belize. “People see all these things on television and think that all Americans are really wealthy. But when they get here, they find that life in this country is very hard, looking for a job is hard–just adjusting to life in a city like Los Angeles is a completely new experience for them.”
For thousands of these immigrants who arrived earlier, however, the adjustment period is behind them, and they often pursue the American Dream more aggressively than their neighbors who were born in this country.
Altadena dentist Lennox Miller said there are probably hundreds of physicians and dentists from the Caribbean in the Los Angeles area. A former USC track team member, Miller won medals for Jamaica in the 100-meter dash at the 1968 and 1972 Olympics.
Preponderantly black, Caribbeans are concentrated in South-Central Los Angeles, home to more than half of their estimated population of 70,000 in the area. But they point out that their countries are melting pots and that their number in Southern California includes blacks, whites, East Indians and Asians arcing in ethnic rainbows from the Simi Valley to San Dimas, from Lancaster to San Diego.
Theirs is a richly diverse culture bound together, among other things, by reggae and calypso music; a passion for dominoes; distinctive food such as curried goat, cassava, fried plantains, conch; and an addiction to cricket.
City Councilman Robert Farrell, acknowledged by Caribbeans as their greatest friend in local government, dreams of one day persuading recreation authorities to lay out an oval cricket field in a South-Central Los Angeles park. Residents and recreation officials alike would be stunned by the hundreds, if not thousands, of Caribbeans who would turn out for matches, he said.
Cricket League
As matters now stand, the 21-team Southern California Cricket Assn., with five teams made up primarily of Caribbean players, is quietly prospering on three fields laid out in Woodley Park in the Sepulveda Basin Recreation Area.
On the streets of South-Central Los Angeles, the most visible indications of the Caribbean presence are restaurant signs advertising foods of Jamaica, Belize and Trinidad, but the musical, lilting cadences of their accents are often the predominant voices at scores of other small businesses.
Driving his battered Ford panel truck with a cracked windshield, Noel Stone, a 42-year-old ex-Marine who still speaks in a heavy Jamaican accent, pulled into the tiny lot outside his bakery and market at 67th Street and Crenshaw Boulevard on a recent Saturday.
Employees busily set about unloading cassavas, yams, Red Stripe beer, goat meat–threading their way through knots of shoppers who descend on the market from as far away as San Diego.
Caribbeans spend hours at the market–a converted service station–swapping news, analyzing cricket and soccer matches, assessing the skills of domino players, unabashedly enjoying the opportunity to converse in the patois or Creole dialects of their native countries.
“We have people from all over–not just the Caribbean,” Stone said. “We get Samoans, Tongans, Hawaiians and Africans because the food is so similar.”
Despite appearances, Stone is a prosperous entrepreneur who owns a construction company, a real estate firm and a full city block on West Boulevard where he plans to relocate his store as part of a $3-million Caribbean and African Village complex of shops and restaurants that he and a partner hope to begin developing later this year with financial help from the city.
Many prominent Americans trace their roots to the Caribbean, either having been born there or being first-generation Americans of Caribbean descent. A list that is in no way comprehensive includes Marcus Garvey, the charismatic Jamaican who arrived in New York in 1916 and ultimately attracted about 2 million blacks worldwide to his Universal Negro Improvement Assn.
Equally charismatic Malcolm X, who rose to prominence as the most articulate spokesman for Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, came from a family whose father was a Garveyite and whose mother was born in Grenada.
Sir W. Arthur Lewis, retired Princeton University professor and a native of St. Lucia, shared the Nobel Prize for economics in 1979, the only black to ever win a Nobel other than the Peace Prize.
Former Democratic presidential hopeful Shirley Chisholm; film stars Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte and Cicely Tyson; civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael; actresses Esther Rolle and Madge Sinclair; Georgetown University all-America center Patrick Ewing . . . and the list could go on.
Warm Affections
Those individuals are as much a part of black American life as they are of the Caribbean. Caribbean immigrants generally see their relationship with black Americans as one of warmth and affection, expressing admiration for those who put their lives on the line during civil rights struggles.
West Hollywood physician Lloyd Greig, as a college student in Nashville, Tenn., during the 1960s, remembers challenging John Lewis, the president of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, about the effectiveness of nonviolent civil rights protests.
“God, these people were getting the hell beat out of them,” he said. After talking to Lewis, he realized that “this was the first time I ever came across somebody who really believed in a cause. That has never left me. That gave me a different insight into life in this country, especially life among fellow blacks.”
UCLA historian Robert Hill spent 10 years traveling the world to collect Marcus Garvey’s papers, and he now heads the university’s project, which has published three of a projected 10 volumes. “My very close ties to Afro-American scholars have been incredibly important to my work,” he said. “As I’ve gotten to know more and more of them, I find that many have parents or an uncle or an aunt who came from one of the islands or elsewhere in the Caribbean.”
Once in America, however, some Caribbeans initially had strained relations with their fellow blacks, the result of what attorney Derrick Hoo called “mistaken perceptions.”
Hoo, a Jamaican of black and Chinese ancestry, remembers taking “crummy jobs black Americans refused–doing whatever we could to make it. All of a sudden the West Indian guy is working and going to school at night. Soon he has a degree and is buying a house. Black Americans would wonder: ‘What’s going on? This guy just got off the boat.’ ”
Effects of the System
Only after years of living in this country, he said, did he realize that “black Americans are told they are inferior from Day One, and the media write them off. You begin to realize the effect the system has had on them. I’ve met teen-agers from Watts who have never seen the ocean except on television. I couldn’t believe their lives were so confined. It kind of blew me away.”
“He kicked the bucket, mon,” Robert McLeod, a Jamaican accountant, announced as he picked up his copy of Jamaica’s weekly Gleaner at Barton’s Record and Gift Shop on Buckingham Road. Balfour Barton, the owner, was preoccupied with filling a telephone order as McLeod pursued his point.
“He was one of the strongest supporters of Reagan’s invasion of Grenada, and his death doesn’t even get a line in the paper.” McLeod was referring to Barbados Prime Minister J. M. G. (Tom) Adams who had died the day before of a heart attack.
He chuckled at the irony before adding, “If you’re a small country, you don’t get any attention here.”
Many Caribbeans see Americans as suffering from a superficial travel poster image of their native countries–if they know anything about them at all–or from what, in their view, is an equally damaging image spawned by U.S. headlines:
San Diego Financier J. David Dominelli, his empire crumbling, flees to Montserrat; the chief minister of Grand Turks and Caicos is arrested on drug charges; armed political factions exchange fire with automatic pistols during Jamaica’s last election; hundreds die in a mass suicide at Jonestown in Guyana; American Marines invade Grenada.
Source of Irritation
Those images irritate some Caribbeans, but not to the point of abandoning opportunities this country affords.
“People may knock this country, but they don’t knock the opportunities,” said attorney Hoo, 39, who practices in the mid-Wilshire District. He worked a series of menial jobs to put himself through junior college, California State University, Northridge, and UCLA Law School.
“I just went one step at a time,” he said. “The next thing I know, I’m a lawyer. I said to myself: ‘My God, it works.’ ”
Greig, the West Hollywood doctor, chuckled when remembering his reaction after learning the cost of tuition at an Ivy League school where he had been accepted. “I didn’t want to buy the country,” he said. “I just wanted to go to school here.”
He opted instead for Fisk University and Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tenn., and found life in this country to be “an eye opener.” After 24 years in the United States, he is still fascinated that in this country there is “absolutely no shortage of anything.
“Things regarded as everyday necessities here are luxuries in most other countries, especially in the developing countries. I sometimes feel guilty because I’m so comfortable up here.” Several established Caribbeans expressed similar sentiments.
As a result, Greig, who lives in Beverly Hills, has a “burning desire” to share his medical expertise with his native country. He returns to Jamaica at least twice a year, and he has organized a group of physicians from the Caribbean who, beginning later this year, will make annual trips there, spending two to three weeks providing free medical care.
Thousands of Caribbeans accept their sojourn in America as permanent, but significant numbers still feel the effect of “in-betweenity.”
“You never adjust totally,” said UCLA’s Hill. “There is not a day that goes by that I do not think of Jamaica, that I do not feel a longing for Jamaica–for the closeness of the people, the informality, the spontaneity, the joviality, the way in which people share much more of themselves.”
By all appearances, the car pulling up to the border checkpoint in Tijuana was filled with black Americans. The American driver had coached the passengers on what to say to the border patrol officer when he asked where they were born, but one nervous and confused passenger blurted out: “Mississippi, Texas.”
“There is no such place,” the officer said calmly, and motioned the car out of line to a detention area.
Belizeans can laugh telling that story, but the desperate efforts their countrymen make to reach the United States is no laughing matter to them.
Their country of 140,000 is one of the least developed in the Caribbean and is connected to the United States by a land bridge across Guatemala and Mexico. Belizeans’ English, albeit heavily accented, allows them to pass as American tourists returning from a shopping trip to Tijuana when American coyotes–smugglers of aliens–pick them up for the drive across the border.
Invisible Illegals
In Los Angeles, they become “invisible illegals” who disappear into the city’s black community. If they are stopped and questioned about their accents, they usually answer that they are from New Orleans.
“People who are lucky to earn $600 a year spend their last dime to get to this country,” said one Belizean woman who requested anonymity. “They spend hundreds of dollars to get through Mexico, or they walk hundreds of miles just to get to the border.”
Once they get to the border, there is no shortage of coyotes willing to drive down from Los Angeles and charge up to $2,000 to bring them into the country.
“The coyotes are mostly blacks–Belizeans and Americans,” the woman said. “I know an American woman who was able to send her three daughters to private schools back East and buy two homes from the profits she made smuggling.”
Belizeans say that illegal immigrants from other parts of the Caribbean are now beginning to use that same route to this country.
Some of those new arrivals are drifting into crime, primarily drug trafficking, community leaders said. “There is a growing concern about drug activity,” said Dellone Pascascio, a registered nurse who heads the Concerned Belizean Assn.
“Most Belizeans involved in drugs are unable to compete here. They become frustrated and look for opportunities to make money in different ways. One way is illicit activity.”
No Knowledge of Numbers
In general, Caribbean community organizations recognize that illegal immigration is a growing problem, especially among younger immigrants, but neither they nor the Immigration and Naturalization Service has a firm handle on the size of the illegal population.
Like leaders in Los Angeles’ Latino community, Caribbean leaders see “a crying need for a solution to the immigration problem,” said Edgar Menzies, a native of Guyana who serves as a liaison between Councilman Farrell and his Caribbean constituents.
But they know it will be difficult to keep people waiting for that solution in countries like Belize. Visa or no visa, they will continue to come, inspired by the solid foothold that other Belizeans such as Leo Bradley have legitimately gained in Los Angeles.
Bradley, 38, moved to South-Central Los Angeles 13 years ago “to make a better living and provide a future for my children. I bought my own home, I own an eight-unit apartment building and I own my own (maintenance) business.”
Life in Los Angeles has enabled him to take the first steps toward realizing his biggest dream:
“To become wealthy.” ◼︎
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