Finance Minister Ashni Singh paid a visit to the Guyanese community in Schenectady, upstate NY – and it was given wide publicity back here in ole Mudland. Some folks might’ve been surprised at the numbers who showed up at the event in their Central Park. We know we’re EVERYWHERE – but gosh! that many in upstate NY? Yep, they’re THAT many!! We know there are hundreds of thousands of us in New York City and…well…these are the spillovers – as your Eyewitness gonna explain!!
The fact of the matter is when we – along with other West Indians – first started trekking up to the States to escape the ravages of their exported Great Depression, we ended up in Brooklyn. Interestingly, our emigrants were overwhelmingly African Guyanese – you could count Indos on one hand!! And as usual with new immigrants, we had to find lodgings in the slums – no Park Ave in Manhattan for us!! But what made us different from the Americans was that we started to purchase and “fix up” the run-down houses and pretty soon, whole neighbourhoods were lifted up!! For example, the “Crown Heights” that we hear about – where Hakeem Jeffries lives – was “gentrified” by we West Indians even before folks knew about “gentrification”!!
Interestingly, our local divisive politics even affected our residence patterns in NYC: when Indian Guyanese started their trek up north to America, they ended up in sections of Queens – Richmond Hill, Jamaica and Ozone Park – where the Italians and Jews were leaving for the suburbs. So our fractures are reflected in NYC – with African Guyanese in the west (Brooklyn) and Indian Guyanese in the east (Queens) – and “the twain shall never meet”! Anyhow, the Indo arrivals in Queens became so fast and furious that they soon created a real estate bubble – pushing up house prices by the late 1980s to levels the newer arrivals couldn’t even think about!!
What to do?? Enter the Mayor of Schenectady who’d married an Indian Guyanese lady!! Schenectady was your typical “company town” on which America reached its world supremacy in manufacturing. THEIR contribution were turbines produced by a massive General Electric plant that supplied electricity for whatever use there was – commercial or household use. But as US businesses sought greater profits by moving to cheap Chinese labour, Schenectady – like so many other towns in the Midwest – became part of their “Rust Belt” with abandoned homes. Observing the success of Indian Guyanese rehabilitating Richmond Hill – the Mayor offered homes in his town for token amounts – sometimes even $1!!
So we have a whole town in upstate NY stabilised by Guyanese homeowners – who turned out to meet and greet Min Singh and his team!!
Can they help build Guyana?
…political support
It ain’t easy being in politics in Guyana nowadays. Used to be you told the folks what they wanted to hear – meaning, promise them the sun and moon! – buy some liquor in the rum shops; deliver your private (racial) spiels under the bottom houses – and that was it!! Since folks voted mostly racially, it was already a foregone conclusion as to who’d win – just check the colour of the various noses!!
But now things are different: the noses are almost equal in number – which creates a dilemma to the old order. Suddenly, you gotta be nice to everybody since the least misstep could cost you those crucial fence-sitters’ noses!! Problem is the new “bottom houses” where folks engage in the race talk – social media. Here it’s a case of everything hanging out and since the content’s available to everyone with a smartphone – meaning EVERYBODY – it means everyone’s riled up!!
And politicians have to be “outing” fires every minute of the day!!
…controls
All innovations bring challenges that must be controlled. While vehicles improved transportation, did you know road accidents take 1.19 million lives annually?? Controls are accepted.
Social media has amplified everyone’s voice…but that must be controlled, no? We just gotta be careful.
