Guinevere Wolski
Guinevere Wolski is a 16-year-old student at Brooklyn Technical High School who is majoring in Law and Society. Growing up in the NYC public school system, she noticed the lack of Indo-Caribbean representation in the school curriculum. This prompted her interest in the Localized History Project and contributing to NYC’s first AAPI curriculum as a Youth Researcher. Her research focuses on analyzing how Indo-Trinidadian music has evolved throughout the Indo-Caribbean diaspora and migration to NYC. Outside of school, she spends her time playing the harp for Brooklyn Tech’s orchestra, which sparked her interest in the role that music has played throughout history across various communities.
This project follows the evolution of Indo-Caribbean music in the diaspora with a specific focus on New York City and Indo-Trinidadian influences, centering artists like Drupatee Ramgoonai and cultural hubs like South Ozone Park and Richmond Hill. It examines the long-term impact of systems like indenture by focusing on music's utility as a psychological tool for cultural expression and forms of resistance against assimilation, colonial, and post-colonial pressures. This project contains oral histories from second-, third-, and fourth-generation Indo-Trinidadians, describing the role that music has played in each of their lives and highlighting the uniqueness of their experiences. It begins by following Bhojpuri folk music that Indian laborers brought to the Caribbean, specifically Trinidad, and discussing how it transformed with local blends like calypso and soca to create Indo-Triniadian chutney music. By analyzing lyrics of artists like Lata Mangeshkar and Drupatee Ramgoonai, it recognizes the complexity of the Indo-Trinidadian experience and uplifts female voices. This project also observes how migration, primarily in the 1960s and accelerating later, has impacted the popularization and expansion of chutney-soca music. It centers the significance of Liberty Avenue and the East Indian Music Academy to sustaining Indo-Caribbean culture.
This then raises the question: How has the Indo-Caribbean diaspora as well as migration to NYC contributed to the evolution of chutney-soca music, and what new musical forms or themes have emerged from this transnational context?