John Bull Meets Jim Crow
John Bull Meets Jim Crow
Jamaican Guestworkers in the Wartime South
This chapter looks at the Jamaican guestworkers' transfer to Clewiston, Florida, where their status sank from exotic British war workers to “alien negro laborers,” and neither their British citizenship nor U.S. officials could protect them from the perils of farm labor relations in the southern countryside. In Florida, guestworkers' foreignness provided employers with a new and effective weapon in the arsenal of labor discipline: workers who protested their treatment now faced detention, repatriation, and blacklisting. In this new era of transnational labor, the threat of deportation became the new whip. No longer were Jamaicans told to expect “a friendly English-speaking people,” with habits and customs “somewhat different” from their own. In Florida, they were warned to adapt to the dictates of “the Jim Crow Creed.”
Keywords: Jamaican guestworkers, Florida, U.S. South, alien negro laborers, Jim Crow, labor discipline, deportation, World War II
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