Spice Shopping on Liberty Avenue
Growing up in a biracial British-Guyanese household is a complex package of culture, race, language, and religion. This is especially true when the neighborhood where that household lives does not resemble the inner workings of your home. In Hells Kitchen, NYC, where I was born and raised, we never met other Guyanese families, outside of my cousins who also lived about five blocks from us. There were no supermarkets that carried the kinds of Caribbean spices that would feed us, no “green markets” or produce stalls that sold vegetables and fruits that resembled what my parents knew from Georgetown.
This kind of gap in maintaining and preserving the culture led my parents to discover Richmond Hill and Liberty Avenue, Queens, and commuting there every weekend in search of reminders of home. Although at the time, Liberty Avenue in South Richmond Hill was not a haven for fresh fruit and vegetables (we shopped in Manhattan’s Chinatown for that), it was a rescue for other ideas that Caribbeans like Guyanese, Trinidadians, and Surinamese rely on. For a long time, and out of the convenience of already living in Manhattan, my mom bought all of her spices in “Little India” or the Murray Hill section of the city. Although they carried ingredients that felt close enough to what she was used to, the shop we loved the most went out of business just as my mom got comfortable with finding substitute items to use in her dishes. When a Guyanese friend of the family invited my parents over for dinner, at their house near South Richmond Hill, they caught a glimpse of a small Guyanese community peeking through the big homes, and across the avenue with all the bright products on display. A weekend later, my parents were now driving almost an hour away for spices, tonics, soaps, peanut punch, Guyanese bread, pastries, and coconut brooms to sweep our apartment with!
I can remember entering one of the spice shops my mom began to frequent on Liberty Avenue and being met on my face, and across my lips and nose, with a scent of Masala that smelled just like Sundays in our family home. My mom was able to find the right color and texture of the masala that helped her in her from-scratch chicken or fish curry. She was able to buy the right yellow peas for dahl, and my siblings and I were now eating the spiciest and most sour chatney and achar our mouths and stomachs could handle. It was in these very shops that we were able to access other treats well-known to Guyanese homes, like sorrel to make sorrel drink, rum for black cake, Tunnock’s Caramel Wafer Biscuits, and Chinese Cake. Our home was never without its Guyanese staples after Liberty Avenue became our shopping go-to.
Although food, for me, is a primary way to embrace my Guyanese identity at home, there are other ways the South Richmond Hill community also helps to keep the culture alive. Little Guyana, as it became known in the Spring of 2021, is also home to a plethora of Indian clothing. Guyanese and Indian jewelry, Churches, Mandirs, mosques, and temples, along with shops selling religious items. While my childhood story spent a lot of time in South Richmond Hill shopping for spices and groceries, it was also the place, outside of Indian acquaintances and neighbors in Murray Hill, where I saw the most beautiful, colorful saris, silks, and Bollywood paraphernalia available to average, everyday people. My grandmother, who came to live with us for a few years in the early 1990s, relied on some of the shops where she could send my mom to find certain Hindu cards and incense, along with headwraps and other familiar items. In many ways, I imagine that Little Guyana was home away from home for a lot of Guyanese and other Indo-Caribbeans living far away from Georgetown.
Perhaps then it isn’t just the food and the clothing. Cultural production and its preservation are probably one of the most important factors of my personal life and professional work. As such, it is important to mention that Little Guyana is also hugely special for Caribbean celebrations, such as the parties before Labor Day weekend, the actual activities that go on for Labor Day (I would even say, competitive to Brooklyn’s Labor Day parade, just much smaller and confined to particular area), as well as religious holidays and festivals like Paghwah (Holi), Diwali, Christmas, Guyanese Independence Day and Trinidad and Tobago Independence, Ramadan and Eid‑ul‑Fitr and more. The streets are dressed up for every occasion, and the storefronts come out in force to represent whatever holiday or festival they observe or are participating in.
As a mom to half-Guyanese children, Liberty Avenue is still important to me in the ways that it was in my childhood, maybe even moreso now. While many of the shops we once loved are now closed and replaced by the unfamiliar, the ones that still exist, especially the spice shops, are of much value to me. I hope that my adventures in South Richmond Hill are part of what keeps the community’s vibrancy alive and obvious; and I also hope that my work for the culture is what keeps us unerased and always part of the conversation.
