Anthropologist Drawn to Island To Study Jamaican Workers Lifestyle
By Karen Gould

Dr. Deborah Thomas, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania (left), has been doing research at the Mackinac Island Library for a book on Jamaican migrant workers. Also doing research from the university is graduate student Caitlin Anderson, who is starting the dissertation phase as she works toward her doctorate degree.

Cultural anthropologist Deborah Thomas is visiting Mackinac Island and the Straits area for a month while doing research for her next book, expected to be published within the next two years. She is studying Jamaican migration. While the main themes of the book will be decided once she is farther along in her research, she said, her concentration has been on the types of goods and ideas Jamaican migrant workers bring to Michigan, and the items and ideas they take back to their native country.

This year, she also has become interested in area history and historical tourism, focusing on the black influence in the area and past migrant labor.

An associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Thomas previously taught at Duke University. In 2004, she published the book, "Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica."

While her father is Jamaican, her mother is from Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and she was born in Milwaukee. She was not familiar with the Straits area until she began her research.

Dr. Thomas has been studying Jamaican migration, specifically focusing on the hotel workers program, since 2000. She first came to the Straits area in 2005 after learning that many Jamaicans who work in the U.S. are coming to Michigan to work at hotels and restaurants.

More than one quarter of Jamaicans who work in the U.S. come to Michigan, she said. Approximately 1,100 Jamaicans travel to Michigan each year, while the second highest state employing Jamaicans is Florida, with approximately 650 workers, and more than 500 are employed in South Carolina.

While here, Dr. Thomas has talked with hotel owners and workers about their experiences. She asked workers how many times they've come here to work, what they thought of this area, how it has changed their lives, and the lives of their families and what they do for them.

She has learned that working here seasonally allows the Jamaicans to buy land and build additions onto homes.

"For a lot of people, it really changes what they are able to do with their lives," she said, "even though it is only six months" of employment.

Workers rely on family to help them while they work here, and, in return, they provide some economic support.

"Many of them have very dense social networks and family networks back home, to whom they distribute a lot of resources," she said, "because those people back home have really made it possible for them to be gone for six months out of the year."

The family members remaining in Jamaica typically take care of their children and manage personal business for them.

"They spread their resources around in their communities," said Dr. Thomas.

The employment situation in Jamaica is not very good, she said, and it is even more difficult for those who work the summer season here. Those workers have a harder time getting jobs in the winter in Jamaica, she said, because employers know that the person will leave again in the spring.

"So what they earn here has to stretch through the year," said Dr. Thomas.

Dr. Thomas has learned that adjusting to the climate change between Jamaica and northern Michigan is a bit of a challenge for the migrant workers. Making the transition less difficult is Lake Huron.

"Once they get used to the cold," she said, "it [the water] comes to remind them of Jamaica, because it's an island, too."

While in the area from June until early July, Dr. Thomas is staying in Mackinaw City and visiting Mackinac Island historic sites and local churches. She is attending social functions involving Jamaicans and reading old newspapers.

"It's always amazing to me what people make of the places they go to, and how much they want to make a mark on this place by having the church services," she said. "How much people bring Jamaica to where they are."

During the school year, Dr. Thomas teaches anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, including cultural politics in the Caribbean, the politics of nationalism, and political and economic dimensions of migration. She also teaches a course in the African Diaspora from the time of the slave trade, when Africans were dispersed throughout the world.