Bustling across the Canada-US Border: Gender and the Remapping of the Caribbean across Place

While discussions of transnational migration now offer rich studies of the embodied transgression of territorial boundaries, empirical investigations in the social sciences have largely tended to be preoccupied with the relations sustained between origin/home/departure and destination/away/settlement societies. This emphasis has arguably restricted our comprehension of the complexity of transnational practices that connect people not just with the place they left but across sites of migration. Drawing on the example of Caribbean women who travel regularly between Toronto and New York, this essay explores gendered and routinized modes of travel across sites of migration that displace the home-away dyad. How might we explain these visits to Caribbean people in places other than the Caribbean and to Caribbean places in North America? How might we account for the prominence of women across these circuits, and what might such gendered journeys offer to discussions of Caribbean culture and identity?