Jamaica Diaspora Five-Year Roundup 2010–2014: Crisis, Recovery, and Athletic Glory

Five-Year Retrospective | Published: 31 December 2014 | Jamaica Homes News

Key Takeaways: 2010–2014 in Six Lines

• Haiti Earthquake January 2010: Diaspora’s Largest Humanitarian Response
• Dudus Crisis Damages Jamaica’s Governance Reputation in 2010
• London 2012: Bolt’s Second Triple Gold in the Diaspora’s Home City
• 4th, 5th, and 6th Biennial Conferences Mature the Institutional Framework
• Ferguson 2014 Opens US Black Lives Matter National Movement
• Remittances Recover From US$1.8B to US$2.1 Billion by 2014

2010–2014: From Haiti to Holyrood, From Tivoli to Stratford

The second quinquennium of this series opened with the hemisphere’s worst natural disaster in a generation and closed with the opening of the United States’ most significant racial justice movement since the civil rights era. The Haiti earthquake of 12 January 2010 — which killed an estimated 230,000 people — produced the Caribbean diaspora’s largest humanitarian mobilisation: church networks, professional associations, community foundations, and the remittance infrastructure that the diaspora had built for family transfers all pivoted to emergency response mode. The diaspora’s capacity to act quickly and transnationally — a capacity built over decades of sending money home — was demonstrated at its maximum in the January and February weeks after the earthquake.

The same year produced Jamaica’s most damaging governance episode of the period: the Dudus extradition crisis, in which the Golding JLP government’s initial resistance to the US request for Christopher Coke’s extradition — including the payment of US$50,000 to a lobbying firm — and the May security operation in Tivoli Gardens that killed 73 civilians, produced an international reputational crisis that diaspora community advocates in host countries found deeply difficult to manage. The crisis was a reminder that diaspora communities’ ability to represent Jamaica positively in their host societies was hostage to governance standards on the island. The UK’s Cameron-Clegg coalition government and its 2010 spending review inaugurated a decade of austerity whose effects on the public services that Caribbean-British communities relied upon — NHS, social housing, local government, education — would compound through the period.

2012 was the five-year period’s athletic and emotional summit. The London Olympics — staged in the city that is home to the world’s largest Jamaican diaspora outside the Caribbean — produced Usain Bolt’s second consecutive triple gold and Jamaica’s most comprehensive sprint domination of an Olympic Games. The Stratford stadium became, on the nights of the sprint finals, a temporary homeland — a space where the British-Jamaican community’s identity was not hyphenated but simply expressed. Portia Simpson Miller’s return to the prime ministership in December 2011 and the 5th and 6th Biennial conferences of 2012 and 2014 consolidated the institutional diaspora relationship. Ferguson and the emergence of Black Lives Matter in 2014 opened a new chapter in the relationship between Caribbean-American diaspora communities and the racial justice politics of the United States. Remittances recovered from the 2009 recession dip to reach approximately US$2.1 billion by 2014.

Jamaica Diaspora Five-Year Roundup 2010–2014 | Jamaica Homes News. Compiled from twenty quarterly editions and five annual roundups, 2010–2014.

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