From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/Jamaicans/George E. Eaton
A history of Jamaica from first European contact to the present is provided in Samuel J. Hurwitz and Edith F. Hurwitz, Jamaica: A Historical Portrait (New York, 1971). The complexity of Jamaican society is discussed in the seminal work by Michael G. Smith, The Plural Society in the British West Indies (Berkeley, Calif., 1974). Similar themes are treated in Rex Nettleford, Mirror, Mirror: Identity, Race and Protest in Jamaica (Los Angeles, 1970); George Eaton, Alexander Bustamente and Modern Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica, 1975); and Mervyn Alleyne, Roots of Jamaican Culture (London, 1989).
Jamaican immigration to, and settlement in, Canada is difficult to analyse because demographic data is not disaggregated and immigrants can be covered under a number of rubrics including West Indians, Caribbeans, black and visible minorities. Some of the works mentioned above, notably those by Eaton and Nettleford, discuss emigration from Jamaica to the Americas and elsewhere. James Walker, The West Indians in Canada (Ottawa, 1984), includes Jamaicans and other immigrants from the Caribbean in a general discussion, as does Anthony Richmond in Caribbean Immigrants: A Demographic Economic Analysis (Ottawa, 1989). George Eaton in Canadians of Jamaican Heritage (Chatham, Ont., 1986) and Demographics of the Jamaican Community in Ontario (Toronto, 1990), refers specifically to the group in Canada and Ontario.
Individual Jamaican Canadians in various parts of the country began making their mark from the nineteenth century, and in this respect the reader will find particularly interesting Linda Eversole, “John Robert Giscome, Jamaican Miner and Explorer,” British Columbia Historical News, vol.18, no.3 (1985); “Canada’s First Black Jamaican Lawyer,” Jamaican Weekly Gleaner (February, 1996), which deals with Robert Sunderland, the first black-Jamaican lawyer in Canada; and Crawford Kilian, Go Do Some Great Thing: The Black Pioneers of British Columbia (Vancouver, 1978).
The role of women in Jamaican society is explored in another seminal work, Edith Clarke, My Mother Who Fathered Me: A Study of Three Selected Communities in Jamaica (London, 1974), while women of middle-class background and in various Canadian settings is touched upon by Rosemary Brown in her autobiography Being Brown: A Very Public Life (Toronto, 1990). The strong role played by women of Jamaican-origin families in Ontario and Canada is also examined in A. Mendoza, “Caribbean Women in Toronto” (Ph.D. thesis, York University, 1989). Of interest too, although focused on women in a specific occupational group, is Agnes Calliste, “‘Women of Exceptional Merit’: Immigration of Caribbean Nurses to Canada,” Canadian Journal of Women and Law, vol.6 (1993), 85–102.
The ability of students and parents of Jamaican origin to adapt to Canadian provincial education systems has been a continuing concern. Two decades ago Subhas Ramcharan, “Special Problems of Immigrant Children in Toronto,” in Education of Immigrant Students: Issues and Answers, ed. Aaron Wolfgang (Toronto, 1975), first drew general attention to this problem; his work was followed by R.P. Solomon, “The Lived Culture of West Indian [Jamaican] Boys in a Toronto High School,” in Race, Class and Schooling, ed. Lois Weis (Buffalo, N.Y., 1986). Elizabeth Coelho, Caribbean Students in Canadian Schools, Book 1 (Toronto, 1988), broadened this theme, and, more recently, Carl James, “Getting There and Staying There: Blacks’ Employment Experience,” in Transitions, Schooling and Employment in Canada, ed. Paul Anisef and Paul Axelrod (Toronto, 1993), 3–20, also dealt with the topic.
Within the context of adaptation, integration and inter-group relations particularly in the workplace, readers might consult Wilson Head, Adaptation of Immigrants: Perceptions of Ethnic and Racial Discrimination: An Exploratory Study (Toronto, 1981); Frances Henry and Effie Ginzberg, Who Gets the Work: A Test of Racial Discrimination in Employment (Toronto, 1994); and the pioneering and influential work by Jeffrey Reitz, Liviana Calzavara, and Donna Dasko, Ethnic Inequality and Segregation in Jobs (Toronto, 1981). On the highly emotive and problematic areas of race, ethnicity, policing, and the administration of justice, Brian Cryderman and Augie Fleras, Police, Race and Ethnicity, rev.ed. (Toronto, 1992), is of general interest, as is Frances Henry, The Caribbean Diaspora in Toronto: Learning to Live with Racism (Toronto, 1994).
