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THE DIASPORA STRIKES BACK
REFLECTIONS ON CULTURAL REMITTANCES  
Migrants carry and send back much more than just money. Ideas, values, political causes and cultural styles all make their way from diaspora to homeland settings. This remittance process, generated "from below," can have a redicaly unsettling impact when it collides with the traditional cultural and ideological values in home countries.

By Juan Flores

...In her book, The Transnational Villagers, on relations and interactions between Dominicans in Boston and the Dominican Republic, sociologist Peggy Levitt coins the term “social remittances.” She uses the term to account for the range of ways that individuals and communities in the diaspora send and bring back social values and experiences along with the concomitant repercussions of such flows when they land “back home.” Levitt writes of social remittances as “the ideas, behaviors, identities, and social capital that flow from host- to sending-country communities.” She calls for an understanding of how the social and cultural resources that migrants bring with them “are transformed in the host country and transmitted back to sending communities such that new cultural products emerge and challenge the lives of those who stay behind.” Using ethnography and interwoven life-stories, Levitt addresses forms of business practices, political participation and changing gender relations to illustrate the dynamic effects brought to Dominican social experience at a local level and in everyday life.

...This is not to say that return- or remitting-migrants have learned “American culture,” and are then blessing their homelands with “American values,” such that their remittance process simply goes to reinforce predominant patterns of Americanization and the spread of hegemonic world culture. Rather, experiencing diaspora life “from below” has to do with recognizing individual and group oppression more clearly, becoming more sharply cognizant of the place of one’s native culture and nationality within transnational and local structures of power, and learning how to struggle for equality and justice. What the diasporic experience in the United States offers millions of emigrants and exiles from Latin America and the Caribbean is the space and perspective to comprehend their own individual and collective subordination in its many dimensions, as well as the need and means to stand up to it, whether by self-advancement or grass-roots political activism.

Though most public and scholarly attention has focused on entrepreneurial initiative and know-how, it is clear that civic conscience, political savvy and critical, oppositional vision constitute at least equally widespread and significant lessons derived from life in present-day diaspora communities, especially when our sights are set on changes emanating “from below.” Clearly, when such lessons take the form of “social remittances” by intervening in home-country ways and doings, they make for serious challenges wrought not “from outside,” but by “one’s own.” As I heard a woman say in response to the sundry injustices she encountered after returning to live on the Island, “Soy puertorriqueña, pero me crié en Nueva York y sé de las leyes” (I’m Puerto Rican, but I was raised in New York and I know how the laws work).

The idea of social remittances needs to be supplemented and sharpened by what I would term “cultural remittances.”

...Perhaps the most electrified field for the play of cultural remittances, however, has involved the issue of race and racial identity, and most of all, questions of blackness. Although the legacy of denial and the age-old myths of “racial democracy” do persist in Latino and Caribbean diasporas, significant alterations in relation to African heritages and awareness of racism are evident, sometimes dramatically so—especially among younger generations and, of course, Afro-Latinos. Many Caribbean Latinos are racialized toward blackness, not only by the wider U.S. society but to some extent by light-skinned Latinos as well. This process has been complemented, and complicated, by relations with African-Americans and non-Hispanic Caribbeans, which has in some cases—most strongly, again, among youth—engendered an Afro- or Atlantic- diasporic consciousness and identity. Political activism and organized politics going back to the 1960s, and the more recent cultural phenomena related to hip-hop and reggaetón, have fostered this eminently diasporic sensibility. A vibrant sense of cultural hybridity and racial affirmation has made such sensibilities the crux of cultural remittances in our times. Youth in countries throughout Latin America and the Caribbean and in many parts of the world are asserting their specific and often combative sense of cultural identity in these expressive and philosophical terms. Indeed, the forceful new video documentary Estilo Hip Hop by Chilean-American Vee Bravo and his associates provides stark portrayals of the highly politicized, revolutionary use of hip-hop in Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Cuba.

It is no exaggeration to say that growing up in urban diaspora communities has been a lesson in blackness for many Puerto Rican, Dominican, and other Latino and Caribbean young people. Racism in the form of profiling and police brutality has wielded the stick that imparts this bitter learning experience. But the emulation of African-American culture has been a national and international pattern for many years, one that has by no means abated in recent times of transnational cultural diffusion. Whether it be Brazil, Belize, Trinidad and Tobago, Colombia, Mexico or El Salvador, there is not a country or region of the hemisphere that has been without its imprint of African-American expression and stylistic influence. But it is in those national cultures with massive diasporas in the United States, and particularly those among them with sizable Afro-Latino populations such as the Dominican and Puerto Rican communities, that this diffusion has most conspicuously taken the form of a cultural remittance, with its usual explosive effects. In our time, the very foundations of Dominican, Puerto Rican and even Cuban national ideologies are being shaken by the remittance of Afro-Dominican, Afro-Puerto Rican and Afro-Cuban identities. These are borne in decidedly new ways by return migrants and their children as they resurface in home-country settings after a veritable apprenticeship in black consciousness acquired in working-class diaspora “hoods” in the United States. Can this be written off as just another phase of Americanization, as globalization “from above,” or is it rather a cogent example of what has been termed by cultural theorist Stuart Hall “vernacular cosmopolitanism” and by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai “grassroots globalization”?