Indo-Caribbeans in New York City: Negotiating Identity at the Black/Asian Boundary

This dissertation utilizes a case study of a highly ethno-racially ambiguous group to test prevailing theories about the transformation of race in 21st Century America and to generate new theoretical insights on processes of racial formation. Indo-Caribbeans are West Indians of South Asian descent. As racially Indian, but ethnically both Indian and West Indian, Indo-Caribbeans in the U.S. have what Mary Waters (1990) calls "ethnic options". They can choose to align with either South Asians or Afro-West Indians, who occupy contrasting positions of relative privilege and disadvantage in the American racial landscape. Prevailing theories predict that immigrants will distance themselves from Blackness and will express identities that maximize their racial privilege. Yet, I find that many Indo-Caribbeans reject South Asian "model minority" identities for Black affiliation. Drawing on interviews and field observations of Indo-Caribbeans, Afro-Caribbeans, South Asians, African Americans, and Latinx communities in New York City, I investigate the forces that shape Indo-Caribbeans' surprising identity choice. By tracing how an ethno-racially liminal group like Indo-Caribbeans carve out identities between New York City's Black and South Asian communities, I dramatize the cross-racial fluidities and intra-racial fractures that are emerging in the 21st Century U.S. racial landscape characterized by growing phenotypic ambiguity, cultural hybridity, class fragmentation, inter-cultural mixing, and mass migration from the Global South.