EDITOR'S NOTE: For Jamaicans across the world, sending money home has always been about far more than money. In Part One of this two-part series, we trace the deep human and historical roots of Jamaica’s remittance story, from the Panama canal workers of the early twentieth century, through the Windrush generation, to the formalisation of a lifeline that today amounts to more than 15 per cent of the island’s GDP. These flows sustain households, keep children in school, and honour the dead. They are, as one executive puts it, the monthly affidavit of belonging. Part Two will examine how the digital revolution is transforming the way that obligation is fulfilled, and what may be gained, or quietly lost, in the shift.

For Jamaicans abroad, sending money home has never been just about money.

In a living room in May Pen, Clarendon, one December evening not so long ago, Miss Mavis sat forward on her settee while the television cast a blue glow across the walls. On the screen, her brother, greyer now, thicker around the middle, waved from a studio somewhere in Brooklyn and launched into an off-key rendition of ‘Jingle Bells’. She had not seen his face in 30 years. The monthly transfers he sent kept the lights on and the children in school, but this moment was different. The programme was called Greetings Across the World, and for families like hers, it had become a Christmas ritual as reliable as the postman or the sound of rain on a zinc roof.