AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE BUMIDOM

This article draws on interviews with people who migrated from the French Caribbean and Réunion in the 1960s to 1980s to offer an oral history of the BUMIDOM. The BUMIDOM (Bureau pour le développement des migrations dans les départements d’outre-mer) operated as a labour recruitment agency from 1963 to 1982, bringing some 160,000 workers from Martinique, Guadeloupe, Réunion and French Guiana to mainland France to work in transportation, health care and domestic service. The interviews provide a more nuanced portrayal of migration than the one often put forward in cultural representations of the Bureau. They reveal that the work offered to BUMIDOM participants was often based on racialized and gendered stereotypes of Antillean men and women which decreased rather than elevated their social status. For others, however, migration through the Bureau did improve their standard of living, enabling them to establish a career and provide for their families. © University of Nottingham.