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In 1984, the year I graduated from high school, my parents and other members of my family spent several days together in a resort on a Jamaican beach. Photographs of our vacation show me in various locations: lying on palm fronds on a sparsely grassed area; frolicking with my cousin in the ocean on the resort’s beach dotted with thatched cabanas; walking in a bathing suit and towel alongside a young hotel employee carrying a tray of food; and standing with a craftswoman who is wearing a brightly colored dress while balancing dozens of woven straw sun visors on her head. In looking back on these photos now, I am struck by my somberness. Indeed, my most vivid memories independent of the photographic record are of watching young children enthusiastically, even relentlessly, but not happily selling gum, T-shirts, and colorful jewelry to us as we exited the minibus in the town outside the gated, walled-in resort. I also remember the battle to remove/contain the abundance of tropical wildlife—particularly the bugs—from our hotel room. In retrospect, I believe our efforts to be tourists and connoisseurs of the tropical “other” failed. In thinking of these snapshots1—both real and imagined—I am also struck by the way in which the “other” is also not fulfilling its expected role as pleasant, happy purveyor of the Jamaican experience. I recognize, from this vantage point, the uneasy relationship across and within race—how do we articulate ourselves at this meeting: the black American middle-class tourist and the Afro-Jamaican tourist attraction?2
Given this earlier experience, I find it ironic that in 1991, as a first-year graduate student in sociology, I began a series of journeys into the Caribbean to do research. In June and July of that year, I participated in a six-week study-abroad program coorganized by my advisor. The group of undergraduate and graduate students from my home university in California and another large research-oriented university in the Midwest were to spend the month and a half learning about Jamaican culture, politics, and social life. There were about 25 of us, a fairly equal number of graduate and undergraduate students, who approached the trip with varying motivations, desires, and expectations. Most of the undergraduates seemed primarily interested in sampling the culture and the nightlife of Guyana. Several of the graduate students went on to pursue research focused on the Caribbean or Caribbean people in the United States. My journey there extended from my membership in a community of black graduate students who had been assigned to the same faculty advisor.
In addition to sharing a faculty advisor my involvement in this community of students was personal. I had become linked romantically with a fellow, although more advanced, graduate student. He was a displaced grandson of the Caribbean—a tall, beautiful, dark-brown-skinned man who had laid claim to me almost immediately upon my arrival on the campus.3 Through him, I became a part of a community that as a displaced granddaughter of the American South I felt I had been missing my whole life.4 My parents had migrated from Alabama to Los Angeles, California, in the late 1950s. They were part of the massive influx of African Americans to California, especially Los Angeles, during the Civil Rights movement.5 My parents were in search of greater freedoms and economic opportunities not available in the southern states. Although they maintain a sense of the South, of Alabama, as “home,” my connection to that sense of place has been tenuous. So, as a graduate student and in my relationship with this man, I engaged in forming an intellectual and social life that nurtured a sense of belonging and connectedness to black people locally and globally. As part of his group, my identity as a black person seemed paramount. Traveling to Jamaica with him and the other black students as burgeoning scholars felt immense and important.
Paradoxically, what I remember now about that first research journey into the Caribbean is my silence. Almost from the moment we landed in Jamaica and made our way from the airport to our Kingston residence my ability to speak diminished. The man that I was with, this man, with whom I had entrusted my person, became a larger-than-life figure. His presentation of self eclipsed my own. Whereas once he had spoken, as I had, of the difficulty living within the interstices of race and class in the United States and understanding himself as an educated black man in America, upon landing on Jamaican soil he became neo-Caribbean. He affected a pan-Caribbean accent that closed off our communication and left me feeling uncertain about my place in this new terrain. My silence reached epic proportions. On a bus trip to another part of the island, one of our coparticipants joked that he did not know what my voice sounded like because he had never heard me speak.
While my companion exhibited a fluidity of identity, an ability to “fit in” or to “code switch” from one context to another—from one world to another trading on a blackness that was not bound by nation6—I could not engage in this kind of movement. I was unable to articulate my self. This experience led me inward. While my public voice was silent in our group and I struggled to maintain that feeling of connection to him and our life together in California, I also reconnected with the reasons I went to graduate school in the first place: to think and write about black women’s activism, black women’s relationship to feminist thought, and the ways in which to improve the social status and daily lives of women of color.7
This interest in black women’s collective work in opposition to dominant society was rekindled during one of our field trips. During our study abroad we spent one week focused on Caribbean women and, in particular, on Afro-Jamaican women’s experiences. We had a series of lectures by the Caribbean feminist scholar Dr. Lucille Mathurin Mair. We also visited Sistren Theatre Collective and spent the day learning about their work. We participated in some of the activities Sistren used to open up the lines of communication among women and men in the local communities. The photographic record I retain of this experience is striking. Over 90% of the nearly 65 images I collected from our journey to Jamaica are in black and white. Two pictures, however, stand out—color photographs taken during our visit with Sistren. In these photos, the women in our group are standing in a large circle and holding hands. In the first one, I am in the center of the circle as the women around me are singing. The next photo shows me having broken through the circle, and all of us are laughing together. While I clearly did not take these photos and actually cannot recall the specifics of the activity, I do remember that this coming together of the women had a profound effect on me. I seem animated and engaged in ways that had eluded me throughout the journey. Our time with Sistren helped me to break through my own silence. Indeed, as I read through Sistren’s book Lionheart Gal: Life Stories of Jamaican Women (1987) on the plane ride back to the United States, I was inspired by the collection of first-person narratives of the black working-class women. Their courage to tell their own stories planted a seed that I would later germinate in my own work.
On our return to California, my relationship with the man ended. My membership in the community of black graduate students also shifted. I continued my involvement in the politics of gender in our department and became more active in the women’s studies program on campus. Through a series of oppositional activities,8 I developed an informal support group of women-of-color graduate students from my cohort, and we met regularly to have dinner, go dancing, celebrate one another’s birthdays, complain or rejoice about the men in our lives, and read and comment on one another’s academic work. It was within this multiracial, multiethnic group of women that we enacted a powerful sisterhood.

Why Me? Why Guyana?

During these early years of graduate school, my research interests also solidified.9 Through my advisor, I had been given access to some household-level data on the sexual division of labor in Georgetown, Guyana. Although much of this work entailed spending long and lonely hours running statistical models, I was also reading about the history of Guyana, of the racial/ethnic divides, and of the differential experiences of Afro- and Indo-Guyanese women. I developed hypotheses about the sexual division of labor in the household from this reading and tested them again and again in the computer lab of the basement of the building that housed the sociology department. Late one night, after hours underneath the fluorescent lights of the lab, I called Gina.10 She was a more advanced graduate student who, as part of the community of black graduate students, had been a close friend and mentor. I was in the final stages of producing the statistical analysis of the data for my master’s thesis, but I was exhausted and stuck and ready to just toss it all away. I needed Gina, who was training to become a demographer, to talk me through the current dilemma.
“You just have to get over your math phobia. Just keep going,” Gina replied to my litany of complaints. But my complaints were not about the math, per se. I had always actually been good at math; liked it even. In fact, one of my favorite teachers in high school was our algebra instructor, whose unorthodox methods were engaging within the confines of a Catholic high school education. No, it wasn’t the math. My unease was more about the isolation, the solitariness of the endeavor. The removal of the work from my daily lived experiences and those of the women I was analyzing in my project was distinct. I did not know who these women were. I could not know who they were. But I was expected to prove (or disprove) hypotheses about their actions based on their answers to a survey conducted by a battery of researchers going door-to-door in various Guyanese villages and neighborhoods.11 This was not the kind of work that I wanted to do. I was neither asking the questions I wanted to answer nor hearing the responses from the women themselves.
So, when developing the proposal for my next project, I began with the assumption that I would engage in qualitative, interview-based research with women. Returning to formative texts by the black and Chicana feminist scholars I read as an undergraduate and early graduate student, I knew I wanted the women to be women of color and to be involved in some kind of collective action toward the empowerment of women. At the time, I was reading and teaching from the writings of feminists such as Gloria AnzaldĂșa (1999), Patricia Hill Collins (1986, 1990), KimberlĂ© Crenshaw (1989, 1991, 1992), bell hooks (1989, 1990, 1993), Cherrie Moraga (1981, with AnzaldĂșa), and Barbara Smith (Hull, Scott, and Smith 1982). Within these texts I found a language, a place, a space. These authors’ writings spoke volumes about my own experiences and helped me to understand the experiences of my mother, my aunt, my grandmother, and other womenfolk with whom I felt kinship. These texts were also powerful records of women’s political and consciousness-raising work within the interstices of race, class, gender, and sexuality. These were the texts that I exchanged and discussed ...