Atlanta Caribbean Carnival Pt 2

Though the Atlanta Caribbean Carnival would be viewed is a major Caribbean cultural event Atlanta, I was surprised to discover that the majority of the Afro-Caribbeans that I spoke to had either not attended or never heard of it. Ashley, a migrant of Jamaican descent in her forties who moved to the area from Boston with her husband and kids in 2007, expressed to me a desire for Caribbean events to take her kids to so they could stay connected to their Caribbean culture. I asked her if she had taken them to the Atlanta Carnival. She replied that she didn’t know when the carnival took place but she would love to go. She promptly asked me for information about the carnival. She told me that she went to Boston Carnival a few times in years past and would love to take her kids to Atlanta’s carnival one year.

During my interviews with Afro-Caribbeans in Atlanta, I found that the Afro-Caribbean migrants in this study had varying degrees of knowledge about the Caribbean community, events, and spaces in the Atlanta area. It is possible for a Caribbean person to live in Atlanta and not know about the Caribbean events occurring in the area, especially if they are not around Stone Mountain, or live in DeKalb County, which are typically where Caribbean events take place in the Atlanta area. Most of the Afro-Caribbeans that I interviewed for this study, unless they were actively involved in a Caribbean organization in the area, or a close to someone who was involved in these organizations, did not know about the local Caribbean events, including the largest Caribbean event in the Atlanta area—the Atlanta Caribbean Carnival. This was surprising, given that there were a large variety of Caribbean media in Atlanta in 2009 and 2010, while I was conducting this study, that migrants could use to find out about Caribbean events in the area.

There are a few websites where Afro-Caribbeans in Atlanta are able to learn about events, such as www.atlantareggae.com and www.gacaribbeanamericanheritge.org. Most of these sites, however, appeal to younger Afro-Caribbeans or the “party” crowd advertising mostly parties, especially parties during Atlanta Caribbean Carnival weekend, and do not advertise cultural events that are likely to attract families and the older generation of Afro-Caribbeans in the area. Though the website of the Georgia Caribbean American Heritage Coalition does advertise cultural events, such as cook-offs, workshops, plays, receptions, and award ceremonies, it focuses mainly on listing the calendar of events for June’s Caribbean American Heritage Month. Events are also advertised on flyers distributed at Caribbean restaurants and shops, as discussed earlier in the chapter. But, obviously migrants have to frequent these Caribbean businesses to get the flyers and learn about the events. For the most part, since Caribbean events in Atlanta are not commonly covered in the local news or in the local newspapers, an event can come and go with little awareness that it ever had happened, unless you are actively looking for an event. I learned late into my study from two of my respondents that there were two long-running Caribbean radio programs that played Caribbean music and discussed Caribbean current events in the region and in the Atlanta area--WFRG 89.3 and Clark Atlanta University’s WLCK 91.9. But, very few of the Afro-Caribbean migrants in my study knew about the radio programs or listened to them. Again, those who knew about the Caribbean radio programs were actively involved in Atlanta Caribbean community and frequently attended and/or organized Caribbean events in the area. I found that the way most Afro-Caribbeans in Atlanta found out about Caribbean events was through word of mouth.

Several factors influence how much people knew about Caribbean events and the size and success of events in the southern metropolis. The geography and sprawl of the area has created a situation where the Caribbean spaces in Atlanta are dispersed across the metro area. Those who lived in Caribbean spaces like Stone Mountain tended to be more involved and knew more about Caribbean events in the area than those Afro-Caribbeans who lived farther away. The variation in awareness of Caribbean community’s activities also appears to be linked to the time and area of in-migration to the Atlanta region. The Afro-Caribbean transplants who moved to Atlanta prior to the early 2000s tended to be those who were more socially involved and knew the most about the events, cultural groups, and businesses in the area. They got involved in cultural organizations in the community in the early 1990s, when the Caribbean population in Atlanta was small, in order to meet other Caribbean transplants and learn about local Caribbean events. For those who migrated to Atlanta in the early 2000s, their involvement in and/or connection to the Caribbean community in Atlanta is complicated by their continued ties to the Caribbean communities in the places that the moved from. This was especially for New York-origin migrants. They admitted to traveling back to New York several times a year to retrieve Caribbean products or foods and to attend events for family and friends and Caribbean cultural events, such as New York’s Carnival. I will discuss later in this chapter how this behavior has affected community development among Afro-Caribbean migrants in Atlanta.

There were a number of respondents that knew little about the Caribbean life in Atlanta and had attended very few Caribbean events in the Atlanta area. Those migrants who were not actively involved in the Caribbean community tended to do other activities to stay connected to their culture. They listened to Caribbean music, cooked Caribbean food, and traveled to their Caribbean home countries. People informed me, too, that the date of the carnival was a problem – since it was planned on Memorial Day Weekend, it was a time when many people took the three-day weekend as an opportunity to leave town.