In 1993, Louis Kushnick, an American Sociologist wrote, We are here because you were there. The existence of a black population is the result of British imperial policy…The creation of African American and African Caribbean peoples are examples of this phenomenon. Jamaicans In New York is a collection of stories of Jamaicans who now call New York home. Sociologists would refer to this book as an ethnographic study. I prefer to call it a collection of stories by amazing storytellers. I was simply the facilitator. These thirty plus storytellers are emblematic of Jamaica’s national motto: Out Of Many, One People – a melting pot of ethnicities and cultures.

 

These are stories by real people in the real world, performing their daily activities in their new social universe. And like Jamaicans elsewhere on this planet – some three million, as many as those who live at home – together we exemplify that Jamaican phrase – We licke but we tallawah. We are small, but we are strong, determined and resilient. Or, as Professor Orlando Patterson, himself a migrant and the John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University argues in his 2019 publication, The Confounding Island…Jamaica and the Postcolonial Experiment – We are a great, if perplexing people.