It means a lot of things to be West Indian. As the class-privileged American born daughter of a West Indian mother who came to the United States at the age of 19, frustrated because her mother had used her “college education fund” to save their house, I think that I have a very different perspective on the matter than my non-West Indian friends. At the age of 25, I intentionally chose to live in gentrifying Crown Heights. As I made this decision as a relatively wealthy transplant, in an era when the neighborhood is on the radar of several young, urban, professionals, who would never have deigned to travel here as recently as five years ago, I have done so as part of gentrification. However, as a first generation Guyanese American, moving to Crown Heights is a far more layered experience than it is for my non-West Indian gentrifying peers.
My family has a diverse history in their neighborhood. My grandmother lived here in the 1950s, when she left her young daughter with trusted family friends and distant relatives, and came here to learn the trade of hairdressing. She then took her hard earned skills and rose from the impoverished orphaned eldest of five children to the foremost hairdresser in Guyana in the era of bee-hives and flips. My grandmother was an astute, hard working, graceful, self-made businesswoman, but while my mother grew up better off than her peers in shacks, they remained relatively poor, and in the end, my grandmother had to utilize her daughter’s education fund to save her business and her home.
My mother, who was brilliant and hard working in and of herself, having graduated high school at the age of 16, completed her Bachelors at the University of Guyana in three years, paying her own way by working for the university. She then took it upon herself to immigrate to the United States. She moved here at a time when the political climate in Guyana was particularly hostile to intelligent minds and she came in good company with many of the most brilliant minds of her generation. She lived in several less than perfect basements and rooms for rent, and in the mid-seventies, around my age, she lived in Crown Heights, about three blocks from where I currently live. She survived the violence surrounding the great black out, several burglaries, and eventually traveled to the United Kingdom to build a relationship with her father who left to try the family’s fortune there when she was a toddler. (Sidenote: in the 1950s, my grandmother had the balls to tell her husband that she refused to move to a foreign country and struggle with their young daughter, when she was perfectly capable of bringing her up comfortably in Guyana.) While in England, my mother completed her CPA, and returned to her job at the United Nations in New York, using her new qualification to advance a pay grade. She lived in an incredibly crappy studio apartment with a crock pot in Tudor City, until she intentionally got pregnant, at the age of 34, and chose to live in the uniquely diverse middle class part of Flatbush now known to gentrifiers as Ditmas Park.
The choices of my grandmother allowed my mother a Middle Class upbringing and the choices of my mother allowed me to grow up wanting for nothing. To me, this experience of hard work and advancement is part of my West Indian heritage. To be sure, there are several West Indians who remain poor, both abroad and in their own countries, and not everyone who is poor is poor because they haven’t tried to advance, but useless as I’ve proven to be, I cannot and will not shun my class privilege. It is my mother’s hard earned legacy.
Likewise, while the process of gentrification is particularly difficult for the people who are ousted, I will note two things. Firstly, my mother and her peers, left Guyana for the United States with little more than their airfare, wits, and will. They largely settled in Crown Heights upon arrival. They were the immigrants you see scurrying about Nostrand, picking up cow foot and oxtail at West Indian grocers, riding the 3 train to practical administrative jobs in this and that. My mother’s friends worked hard, advanced, and left. They are almost exclusively homeowners now with real estate ranging from Canarsie to Jamaica Estates and Jamaica Estates to the Upper East Side. As is the case with everyone, the recession has tried some of their wits, but they, for the most part, chose to leave Crown Heights years ago.
My mother chose to raise me outside of Crown Heights. Actually, my mother chose to raise me as far away from the Crown Heights of my youth as she possibly could, and she had very real reasons for doing so. A while ago, riding the 3 train, I overheard mothers bragging about how hard their elementary school daughters were. They were bragging about how their children were popping off on each other and this and that. They took pride in raising bullies. The culture of violence they are a part of is something that I would have invariably had to deal with had my mother chosen to raise me in Crown Heights. Another day, a teenager killed herself on the 4 line, and I overheard very different mothers talking about how they had to raise their children to be tough, but humble. Again, that is part of the reality of raising children, pretty much anywhere, but listening to mothers in Crown Heights, with children in schools in Crown Heights, it’s incredibly clear to me that my mother chose not to raise me in Crown Heights for a reason. Likewise, one of my neighbors, who will soon be written off as a victim of gentrification for leaving my building, explained to me that the reason that she dresses very much like a homeless person is because she is saving every penny she can to ensure that her daughter’s education is covered. She’s Ethiopian, but the pattern holds.
Ultimately, many immigrant mothers will do everything in their power to ensure that their children have access to as many opportunities as possible. If that means dressing like a homeless person, or jumping ship when their neighborhood gets written up in New York Magazine, that is just what they’re going to do. My mother opted to spend the bulk of my childhood working in the field with the United Nations Development Program. The pay was far better, the cost of living was low, and as such, she was able to send me to some of the best schools in the world, allowing me to graduate from New York University, free of debt. An unfortunate side effect of this education was that I grew up, primarily in boarding schools, feeling totally distant from my roots. I wasn’t exactly raised by wolves, but I was largely raised by well-intentioned white people who did not really understand my experience at all, and as such, I didn’t really fully understand the shades of my experience either. Totally ironically, this is what has brought me back to Crown Heights.
So, here I am, a Crown Heights gentrifier, with an army of gentrifying queer friends and acquaintances as neighbors, my family settled in South Africa, and West Indian comfort food and African hair braiding salons at my corner. Contrary to popular belief, I am actually not white. It does mean something distinct for me to live here, and as things are evolving, the unique blend of queers and West Indian delicacies are probably the closest thing I will ever have to a neighborhood that feels mine.
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