Three Great Migration Traditions: African American, Puerto Rican, and West Indian Community Formation and Succession in Hartford

This paper explores how three waves of internal and transnational migrations of African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and West Indians transformed Hartford into a minority-majority and a Caribbean city. Using oral histories and GIS methodologies, this research project offers new visual and spatial histories of race, ethnic belonging, community formation, and community succession in post World War II Hartford. These three groups shifted the demographic landscape of Hartford as declension narratives of urban decline and pathology became ingrained in public and private portrayals of the city. Oral histories and research in community-based archives disrupt these narratives and offer alternative visions and experiences of the city, suggesting a pathway for inclusive, recuperative, place-based urban histories. Hartford’s position as a Black and Latino city in New England, and a distinctly African American, Jamaican, and Puerto Rican enclave, suggests ways for thinking about new histories of the intersections of Caribbean and African American migration traditions. The diversity of Black and Latino experiences, the regional specificities of their countries complicates the picture of belonging, heritage and identity-formation. The paper concludes by highlighting what insights are possible when using an integrated and transnational framework that privileges analyses of mobility, labor, race, diaspora and ethnicity beyond the large urban enclaves like New York and Chicago that have dominated the historiographies of the Great Migration and urbanization.