In their 2020 article “Con-Federating the Archipelago,” Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann discuss the ancestry of this persistent quest in the Caribbean experience. They highlighted two formulations in their exploration of the idea of self-determination, regional unity, and sovereignty in the wide, multilingual Caribbean space: the Confederación Antillana [1850] and the West Indies Federation [1958–1962].[1]

Martínez-San Miguel and Gonzalez Seligmann explain how the goal of a multiracial, multistate federation became a central symbolic and political project for West Indian intellectuals across the diaspora. This was especially resonant for New York- and London-based Pan-Africanists who saw Caribbean federation as a means to achieve self-determination and political autonomy in an otherwise colonial world order. As quoted by Martínez-San Miguel and Gonzalez Seligmann, Marcus Garvey stated in the Blackman in May 1929, “Federation of the West Indies with Dominion Status is the consummation of Negro aspirations in this Archipelago.”

Recognizing and Celebrating the New York Roots/Routes

The theme of the 2023 Symposium provides an opportunity to explore the deep histories and ongoing connections between the Caribbean and New York. The Guyana Cultural Association of New York and the Prospect Park Alliance’s ReImagine Lefferts initiative are pleased to be partners in this celebration. The Lefferts Historic House is an 18^th-century Flatbush farmhouse and New York City landmark. The ReImagine Lefferts initiative focuses the museum’s interpretation and programming on the resistance and resilience of (a) the Indigenous people of Lenapehoking upon whose unceded lands this 200-year-old house museum sits and (b) the Africans enslaved by the Lefferts family. This 50^th anniversary of CARICOM provides an opportunity to highlight the long interconnected and multidimensional Caribbean presence in New York.

Built in 1783, the Lefferts Historic House provides a window into the colonization of New York and Long Island as part of the broader history of trans-Atlantic plantation economies characterized by extractive dispossession and enslavement. Colonial records show that in the 17^th century, Indigenous New Yorkers were kidnapped to work in the Caribbean, and Indigenous Caribbean people were kidnapped to work in New York. A majority of the African peoples sold into slavery in New York were brought from the Caribbean. When enslaved Africans rebelled in New York, they were often sold to the Caribbean.[2]

The Africans enslaved at the Lefferts Historic House, as well as their immediate descendants, participated in the emancipatory movements that reshaped the hemisphere. Like Africans enslaved in the Caribbean, Africans enslaved in Brooklyn and New York also rebelled repeatedly in the 18^th century. They harnessed the American Revolution as a vehicle for their own dreams of liberation. When independence from Britain in 1783 did not deliver the promised freedoms, enslaved and free New Yorkers of color in New York, inspired and assisted by Haitian emigrees, pressured the White power structure to enact a gradual emancipation process. These New Yorkers of color also built powerful community organizations for mutual aid and education.[3]

New York activists expanded their fight to end slavery and to secure equal rights across the entire U.S. These efforts were ultimately supported by more than 4,000 New Yorkers of color who volunteered to help liberate their Southern brethren in the U.S. Civil War. In the post-Civil War years, New Yorkers of color continued to build community organizations that aided migrants from both the U.S. South and the Caribbean as they sought to escape the White supremacy of Jim Crow segregation and European colonialism.

These late 19^th– and early 20^th-century encounters and interactions in New York were transformative for American life. They also had global significance, particularly in the Caribbean. Indeed, New York was one of the locations that made the possibility of Caribbean collaboration visible. According to Eric Duke, it was home to early demonstrations of “a collective sense of West Indianness” during the early 20^th century.[4]

The Caribbean political leaders who led their countries to political independence during the 1960s and 1970s depended on the Caribbean community in New York for a range of resources, including access to U.S. political and economic institutions. In 2023, the Caribbean in New York is multiethnic, multi-religious, and transnational. This community has been an important variable in the operationalization of the CARICOM idea over the past 50 years.

[1] Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann, Con-Federating the Archipelago: Introduction. Small Axe, Volume 24, Number 1, March 2020 (No. 61), pp. 37–43.
[2] Thelma Wills Foote, Black and White Manhattan: The History of Racial Formation in Colonial New York City (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
[3] Craig Steven Wilder, In the Company of Black Men: The African Influence on African American Culture in New York City (New York: NYU Press, 2001); Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
[4] “Con-Federating.”