This panel examines how movement reshaped authority across the twentieth-century Greater Caribbean, reconfiguring state formation, racial regimes, and political belonging. Rather than treating migration as a demographic outcome or economic necessity, the panel approaches it as a political process through which states sought to consolidate power, racial hierarchies were negotiated and contested, and new political communities emerged. By placing island and mainland contexts in conversation, the panel demonstrates how mobility functioned simultaneously as a strategy of governance and a catalyst for social and political transformation.

The papers analyze distinct yet interconnected migratory movements: state-promoted internal and international migration tied to free-port development; Chinese commercial migration and the circulation of racialized narratives across Caribbean and continental spaces; and Afro-Caribbean and Garífuna labor migration linked to Garveyism, Black internationalism, and emerging nationalist projects in Central America. Together, they show that migration in the Greater Caribbean was not merely movement across space, but a process that reordered authority at multiple scales—local, national, and transnational.

Sharika D. Crawford examines mid-twentieth-century migration as a deliberate instrument of national integration. Through free-port policies in San Andrés, the state encouraged mainland and foreign settlement under the banner of modernization. Yet these demographic shifts destabilized local landholding patterns and cultural identities, generating political mobilization that revealed the limits of state authority in a Caribbean borderland.

Laura De Moya-Guerra turns to earlier twentieth-century migration to explore how class structured racialized narratives of immigration across Caribbean and circum-Caribbean contexts. By tracing the circulation of anti-Chinese representations shaped in mainland port cities to insular spaces, she demonstrates how geography and economic role mediated racialization and belonging, producing uneven regimes of inclusion within the same national framework.

Cristian Padilla Romero examines Afro-Caribbean and Garífuna migration along the Central American Caribbean coasts during the 1910s–1930s. Situating labor mobility within overlapping circuits of Garveyism, religious networks, and associational life, he analyzes how migration fostered emergent forms of Black political consciousness while confronting anti-Black national projects. His paper underscores how movement enabled the formation of political communities that both engaged and unsettled state definitions of citizenship.

Read together, these papers argue that migration was a central force in shaping authority, race, and state formation across the Greater Caribbean. By tracing the circulation of people and ideas across interconnected spaces, the panel reframes the region as a dynamic arena where power was continually negotiated through movement itself. The panel contributes to broader historiographical debates on migration, race, empire, and governance, offering insights relevant far beyond Caribbean studies.