After the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, large numbers of black immigrants from Trinidad and Tobago emigrated to Los Angeles, established a community with networks of kinship, friendship and marriage, and laid down roots. The roots proved to be a very shallow system, however, with relationships restricted to fellow Trinidadians - a process encouraged by race considerations in the US. The author challenges the assumptions of the assimilation school by defining the communities under study not in territorial terms but in terms of interaction.

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