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• 1 media/guadalupe-1911.png media/background-2.jpg media/guadeloupe-la-rue-gambetta.jpg 2019-03-23T11:43:49-07:00 Guadeloupe women [1911] 2 plain 2019-04-24T09:48:52-07:00 Not all arrivals at Ellis Island intended on staying in the U.S. on a permanent or even temporary basis—they were simply in transit to another destination. Even though they had no intention of staying in the United States, such non-immigrant aliens had to undergo the same inspection regime that actual immigrants went through, which gave Sherman an opportunity to photograph them. A few of his surviving portraits capture such people midway through their transnational migrations and like many of his other portraits, Sherman didn't differentiate between immigrant, non-immigrant alien, contract laborer or deportee. One set of at least three photos includes a photograph of a large group of female domestic servants from Guadeloupe who stayed a day or night at Ellis Island, then left for Canada.
  
  Sherman actually gave precise details about both their date of entry and the ship they arrived on in a typed caption, but no names or mention of the fact that the individuals were simply in transit and not immigrants to the U.S.  Working backwards with the ship's manifest instead of any names of arrivals, I discovered the group of 58 unmarried women from Guadeloupe, most under the age of 30, who arrived at Ellis Island on 6 April 1911. None carried any money of their own and all had their passage paid by their future employers in Canada. Back in Guadeloupe, they had signed two-year contracts—with a monthly salary of $5—to work as domestic servants in the homes of wealthy families in Montreal, Canada. For all intents and purposes, they were contract laborers and this was only clearly spelled out after their arrival at Ellis Island.This is a story that has received some attention in scholarly literature, but Sherman's photos have never been directly connected to what's come to be known as the "Caribbean Domestic Scheme." In a recent interdisciplinary study, Sherwood and de B'béri write:

  The Guadeloupe immigration scheme was organized by J.M. Authier, and while it was initially conducted on an experimental basis, it would have consequences for the movement of black West Indian women for decades to follow.  The first two groups of girls arriving in September 1910 and April 1911 were regarded to be of good class, but...sentiments towards the Guadeloupe girls would quickly change. The Guadeloupe girls were paid $5 per month compared with the $12-15 paid to their white counterparts. [i]

  Sherman photographed one of these woman at least three times and she is included in the group photo above.  One of the photographs has been widely reproduced in recent articles about turn-of-the-century immigration at Ellis Island. Another photo, less seen but already publicly available, includes the same individual. Each of the three photos moves successively from spontaneity and candidness to something more staged, but besides offering better framing and composition, in the smaller portraits we also see a more evocative and perhaps even more sympathetic portrayal—albeit a final photo that softly highlights the individual's exoticism and otherness with a more nuanced tonality.
  
  A number of contemporary artists and illustrators, such as Julia Soboleva, have recently transformed Sherman's Guadeloupe portraits into stylized but extremely sensitive works of art.
  
  The individuals that Sherman photographed weren't the first of such groups from the Caribbean, nor the last. In fact, less than a week after the first group's arrival another group of about 50 more Guadeloupean domestics would arrive at Ellis Island before heading to Montreal, each providing a separate, predetermined household address as their final destination to immigration officials. It wasn't an easy trip for some. In both April arrivals, several individuals from each group were detained and deported even before going on to Canada and once they got there, nearly two dozen more were immediately denied entry and deported back to Guadeloupe.
  
  Among the passengers on the S.S. Korona were a handful of Guadeloupean women, also listed as domestics, who were heading to relatives in New York. Annotations on the ship's manifest made years after their arrival by customs and immigration officials needing to verify arrival data indicate that a few went on to becoming naturalized U.S. citizens. It remains unclear whether these immigrants were likewise under contract with employers before making their journey.  If that was the case, they would be violating federal laws forbidding the importation of contract labor and should have been refused entry by Ellis Island officials.  But this is precisely what was going on with the Guadeloupean women in Canada, so who knows if those bound for the U.S. were similarly allowed entry.

  Clean, docile, attentive to their work

  The scheme that brought the Guadeloupean immigrants to Canada was met mostly with satisfaction on the part of their employers but with both support and derision from the Canadian government. One employer who wrote to Canadian officials in support of the scheme is quite telling and highlights the exploitative mechanisms in play as well as the open racism of the time:

  I am happy to reply that the two servants whom I had brought over from Guadeloupe, give me entire satisfaction in every respect; they are clean, docile, attentive to their work, and their moral conduct leaves nothing to be desired. There is a great difference between the service that they give us and that we have from the greater number of the whites who have been in our employ during the last 30 years. The fact is that housework has become almost impossible with regard to the whites, the intelligent girls work in the shops and factories and there remain for us a small number, at exorbitant prices, of prostitutes and imbeciles who spoil everything...The importation of the creoles is a benefit and the Government should favour their importation. [ii]

  Despite Canada's restrictive and discriminatory (read racist) immigration laws, which disallowed the entry of "undesirable immigrants", and people of color from any part of the world had the deck stacked against them in this regard, some exceptions were being made due to a demand for labor "native" Canadians and white European immigrants couldn't fulfill. This extended to professions other than domestic work, but the periodic importation and extended presence of black domestics in Canada (particularly in Montreal and Nova Scotia) would quickly cause debates in the Parliament of Canada as well as incur sensationalist reportage in newspapers and periodicals of the day, much as it did in the U.S. press. The political friction eventually resulted in the Canadian government's deportation of hundreds of Guadeloupean immigrants like the ones Sherman photographed.

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  Notes

  
  [i] Dana Whitney Sherwood and Boulou Ébanda de B'béri, “Unsuitable to Become Canadian: Change and Continuity in Racial Discourse in Canadian Political Consciousness, A Mari Usque Ad Mare, 1850-1965,” in Reid-Maroney, N., Bernard, W. T., & Ébanda, . B. B. Women in the "Promised Land": Essays in African Canadian history (Toronto : Women's Press, 2018), 187.
  
  [ii] PAC, RG 76, File 731832, M.D. to Fortier, 22 May 1911. Quoted in Calliste, Agnes "Race, Gender and Canadian Immigration Policy: Blacks from the Caribbean, 1900–1932", Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d'études canadiennes, Volume 28, Number 4, Winter 1993-1994, pp. 141-142.