Quarterly Update | July–September 2001 | Jamaica Homes News
Key Takeaways: Q3 2001 in Six Lines
- September 11: New York’s Jamaican community confronts catastrophe and loss
- Jamaican-American workers in lower Manhattan among September 11 victims
- Diaspora phone lines overwhelmed; community radio becomes lifeline across London
- Summer quarter began in peace; world irrevocably changed in its final weeks
- Genoa G8 protests July: diaspora anti-globalisation voices find common cause
- Jamaica tourism at record summer; September 11 ends boom in a single morning
September 11, 2001: A Day That Changed Everything
We publish this edition of the quarterly update in the shadow of events whose full meaning we are still trying to comprehend. On the morning of September 11, 2001, nineteen hijackers took control of four commercial aircraft and turned them into weapons. Two were flown into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. One struck the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. The fourth crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers overpowered the hijackers. The towers — for thirty years the most recognisable skyline in the world — collapsed. Nearly three thousand people were killed. The world that existed before 8:46 am Eastern time on September 11 is gone.
For the Jamaican diaspora in New York — the largest concentration of Jamaicans anywhere outside Jamaica itself, spread across the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Flatbush — September 11 was not a distant atrocity. It happened in the city where the community lives, in the financial district where many community members work, at an hour when the streets and offices of lower Manhattan were filling with the morning commute. Jamaican-American workers in the financial sector, in building services, in the restaurants and infrastructure that served the World Trade Center complex, were among those who were killed. In the weeks since, community organisations have been receiving calls from families seeking information about missing relatives, and the grief is specific and located in specific homes and specific families across the city’s boroughs.
On the morning of September 11, the phone lines to Jamaica were immediately overwhelmed as thousands of diaspora Jamaicans in New York tried to reach family on the island to say they were alive, and thousands of Jamaicans on the island tried to reach relatives in New York to find out if they were safe. The circuits were jammed for hours. In London, community radio stations and the Jamaican High Commission switchboard experienced similar volume as the Jamaican-British community desperately sought information about New York-based relatives and friends. Community radio — the informal nervous system of diaspora life — proved its irreplaceable value: stations stayed on air through the day and night, broadcasting updates and providing a space for communities to hold their collective shock together.
The days and weeks since September 11 have been unlike anything the diaspora community has experienced in peacetime. In New York, the smell of Ground Zero permeated the outer boroughs. Missing persons posters — hundreds of them, then thousands — covered the walls of hospitals, community centres, police stations and the surfaces of lower Manhattan. Community members who work in emergency services, in healthcare, in the trades, volunteered at the site and at the makeshift support centres that sprang up around the city. The mutual aid tradition that is one of the Caribbean diaspora’s deepest characteristics — the instinct to feed people, to provide childcare, to organise support without waiting for institutional direction — operated at scale across the city’s Caribbean communities in the weeks after the attacks.
The Jamaican Community in New York: Grief and Solidarity
The scale of the Jamaican community’s personal loss in the September 11 attacks is still being tallied as this edition goes to press. What is clear is that the community’s intersection with the World Trade Center — through employment in the towers themselves, in the financial firms that occupied them, in the service and infrastructure companies that served the complex, and in the emergency services that responded — was substantial enough that individual losses are distributed across virtually every neighbourhood with a significant Jamaican population.
Churches across the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens — the primary institutional centres of Jamaican-American community life — held emergency services in the days after September 11, opening their doors through the day and evening for people who needed a space to pray, to cry, to sit in silence together. The pastoral response of Jamaican-British and Jamaican-American churches in both countries was remarkable and is widely commented upon within the community: in moments of acute grief, the church remains, for many, the first and most trusted point of support.
In the United Kingdom, the response to September 11 was one of profound solidarity with the American people and with the Jamaican-American community specifically. The September 14 national day of mourning was observed across the UK with a depth of feeling that surprised some commentators but was immediately understood by the Caribbean-British community, which has family in New York the way that the mainland British have family in Australia: not a foreign country but a place where your cousins live, where your children have gone. The depth of British-American people-to-people connection — in which Caribbean diaspora networks are a quiet but significant thread — made the grief of September 11 genuinely shared.
The Summer Before: A World Briefly at Peace
It is difficult now to recall what the summer of 2001 felt like before September 11. The months of July and August were, by the standards of the preceding decade, relatively settled. In Jamaica, the tourist season produced record visitor numbers — the north coast resorts were at capacity through August, and the Jamaica Tourist Board was preparing optimistic forecasts for the autumn. Diaspora Jamaicans were flying home in the usual summer numbers for holidays, family events, and for the preliminary site visits that precede property purchases or business investments. The mood within the diaspora community was generally positive: a new US president had taken office in January, the UK was in its second Blair term, and the structural concerns about deportation and immigration enforcement — while real — were not generating the acute anxiety that has characterised the weeks since September 11.
In July, the G8 summit at Genoa produced the most violent confrontations between police and protesters in a European city in years. Carlo Giuliani, a young Italian protester, was shot dead by police on July 20, and thousands of demonstrators were beaten, tear-gassed and detained in what an Italian parliamentary inquiry later described as a suspension of democratic rights. For the Jamaican-British community’s significant presence in global justice and anti-globalisation networks, the Genoa protests — and the state violence with which they were met — were a major political moment. The issues the protesters raised — unfair trade terms for developing nations, the democratic deficit of international financial institutions, the widening global inequality gap — are issues with direct relevance to Jamaica and the Caribbean region.
Jamaica’s Tourism Record Summer: Ended Overnight
The summer of 2001 had been Jamaica’s strongest tourism season in years, and the industry was preparing to carry that momentum into the autumn and the new year bookings cycle. On September 11, every forward booking from North America was suspended. Airlines cancelled transatlantic and Caribbean routes. Tour operators froze sales. The projected autumn revenue from American and Canadian visitors — many of whom had already made bookings — evaporated. The Jamaica Tourist Board has moved quickly into recovery mode, but the reality is that no amount of marketing can overcome the fundamental disruption to the “fear of flying” and the broader economic shock that September 11 has generated in the United States.
For diaspora Jamaicans with investments in Jamaican tourism — villa rentals, guesthouses, tour operations — the impact is immediate and severe. Community organisations are urging diaspora members who had planned to visit Jamaica for the autumn to maintain their plans where possible, both for the personal value of the connection and for the concrete economic benefit to the island’s hard-pressed tourism sector. For the broader community, the message is as it always has been in moments of crisis: the answer is to send more, not less. The remittance in difficult times is the economic immune system of the island.
We publish this edition of the quarterly update in mourning for those who were lost, in solidarity with the families who grieve, and in the enduring belief that the communities we have built — across New York, London, Toronto, Kingston and everywhere the diaspora gathers — will endure through this as they have endured through everything that came before it.
Jamaica Diaspora & Returnee Quarterly Update — Edition 101, covering July to September 2001. Published by Jamaica Homes News on 2 October 2001.
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