Crawford: Double Displacement of Indo-Caribbean American Opinion.

When I was in elementary school, back when Netflix was known for distributing DVDs, my mom put a series of movies in our queue that I hadn’t seen yet. When it was time for her choice for family movie night, she put a disc in her DVD player and started up what I thought was just another family movie. ‘Kuch Kuch Hota Hai’ filled the screen and I was hooked within the first few minutes.

It was the first time I saw my family on the big screen. Sure, there were Indians and South Asians in bit roles on TV, but this was a Bollywood movie, and the entire cast was brown, not just the main character. Even though we didn’t speak Hindi, this was as close as I got to seeing my own community in a starring role. So began my love for Bollywood movies, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was an outsider looking in.

My family is Indo-Guyanese, and I’ve written before about our affinity for Guyanese food and the closeness of our community. But I feel that one of the fundamental reasons why my Guyanese family seems so close-knit is because we find community in each other. It’s hard to empathize with the South Asian American diaspora, especially if you’re outside of New York City.

Dual migration of Indo-Caribbean Americans begins in the Indian subcontinent. In the 19th century, hundreds of thousands of South Asian indentured servants were sent to other British colonies to replace newly freed African slave laborers.

This makes it difficult to connect with Desi Americans whose families may have directly immigrated to the United States, but my family’s deepest ties to India are to the Caribbean in the early 1900s. Maintaining cultural connections in a new country or environment is difficult. But things become even more difficult when already diasporic communities become diasporic again.

In their initial migration, Indian indentured servants had to assimilate into the highly racialized Caribbean, learning new languages ​​and interacting with other ethnic groups living in the area at the time, including Chinese, blacks, and other ethnic groups. They had to interact with indigenous peoples and Europeans.

Indian culture has left an indelible mark on Guyana, especially in food, music and religion. We eat daal, curry, and roti, some of us practice Hinduism, and Indian-style dances are part of our culture, but with the second forced migration to the United States, these cultural Connections become even more tenuous.

In theory, South Asian Americans have a more direct connection, or single migration, from India. On the other hand, people of Indo-Caribbean descent, after immigrating to the United States, may not understand or practice exactly the same customs as most people here who look like them, but they try to readjust. We must strive to do so.

Yes, I listen to Hindi music from my favorite movies. But I also listen to soca, a genre created by Caribbean people and for Caribbean people, which is a fusion of African and East Indian music. When I was home during the summer, my grandmother would make me an Indian-inspired roasted eggplant and garlic dish called baigan or baranjay chokha. But every year for her Thanksgiving, she also makes Guyanese cooked-up rice, a coconut milk and pigeon pea dish that originated in Africa.

Although these differences seem small, I can’t help but feel isolated from the South Asian community here on campus. That doesn’t mean I felt ostracized or unwelcome. That’s never been my experience. It’s more like self-imposed segregation, and it’s exhausting having to explain my ancestry every time someone finds out I have brown heritage.

The experience of Indo-Caribbean Americans is complex because while they legitimately claim a “homeland” as the Caribbean, they are mediated by ambiguous images of “India” as their ancestral homeland. Things get even more complicated when immigration comes to America, a country meant to put people in boxes.

Double migration is a real phenomenon that affects my community, but I believe it has brought us closer to each other. I think this is why my extended family is so close. I am proud to be Guyanese and proud of my Indian heritage, but as a mixed-race person, I feel the need to prove my “Indianness” in a racially stratified America. there is.

When I watch ‘Kuch Kuch Hota Hai’, I still cry every time I see Anjali’s tears hidden in the rain as she realizes that her first love was not reciprocated. The scene in ‘Jab We Met’ where Geet convinces Aditya to take him back to his home in Bathinda always makes me laugh, but it’s a place that doesn’t really exist and the distance from my community gradually shrinks. I can’t help but feel that you are there. Not really a part.

Colin Crawford is a junior at Medill. He can be reached at (email protected). If you would like to publicly respond to this editorial, please send a letter to the editor to (email protected). The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of the entire Daily Northwestern staff.