Second Ingredient: Identity and Ethnicity

Ingredient Two: Identity and Ethnicity in the Caribbean

Miss callaloo here, adding another ingredient to this callaloo

Have you ever wondered where do we all come from? In the Caribbean that is. We all have identities, and backgrounds that make up for our identity.

Caribbean people before us were able to design an identity that they can call their own.

An ‘ethno-local’ identity pervaded all parts of the Caribbean conferring not only uniqueness to the region but to separate clusters of settlement, all constructed on a familiar landscape and history of slavery, indenture, and plantations. Caribbean identity has now been forged by both residents in the Caribbean and those overseas attesting to the truism that to survive in the global present requires simultaneity in several spaces. While this schizophrenic split at one time described only a small Caribbean group overseas, today it applies with few exceptions to practically every home, village, and township throughout the Caribbean. In whatever combinations of race, religion, language, and culture they cohere and co-exist, they dwell on small islands and large, some poorly endowed with natural resources, others abundantly so. Perhaps, no other region of the world is so richly varied

(Lewis,2011)

Now from all that we can gather that the Caribbean is very rich with many varieties of ethnicity. Although it brings us together as a whole, we are somehow divided into each unique parts which can create something beautiful. Whether you have some background of Chinese, French, Syrian, Lebanese, Indian, African or Spanish, this is what makes up this lovely pot, callaloo, The Caribbean.

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