A Deeper Look Into Caribbean Region Identity
National, ethnic, linguistic-based, regional, racial, and cultural identities are social constructs. Simply put, that means that these are ideas that has been created by people and over time have come to be accepted in societies. Some of these social-constructed identities get created over the course of hundreds sometimes thousands of years.
Just because a single understanding of a common cultural identity of all Caribbean Region peoples doesn’t exist at this point in time does not mean there is no such thing as Caribbean Region culture.
More than 40 different political entities exist in the Caribbean Region (24 countries, 13 territories, and 5 overseas departments). This makes it the most geopolitically divided area in world.
Because of geography the Caribbean Region, the region was destined to be have an interconnected history and at the same time doomed to be divided into many parts.
Historically the European colonial powers fought bitterly over this blessed land. The fertile land present here was perfect to grow cash crops such as sugar cane, which would later go on to be known as white gold. For hundreds of years, these empires would obtain most of their wealth from their colonies in this region, making the control of each colony very valuable. They fought and contested over areas in the region resulting in the winners of certain territories eventually giving us their language, splitting up the region linguistically. Then they drew up a bunch of arbitrary borders, splitting the region into different separate colonies with separate colonial governments. The education systems implemented would emphasize our connections to our “mother countries”, European countries thousands of miles away who in which we share language (though the languages are spoken with derivative dialects and creoles) and only a limited amount of social or cultural similarities. This education style goes against helping us to truly understand the history of our interconnected region and the reality that at the root of our cultures is a rich 500-year mix of many different ethnic groups and cultures intersecting. The effects of these education systems have penetrated the society and help keep the people in the region ideologically separated, which in turn limits our collaboration with each other, which then in turn keeps the political entities in region from achieving their highest potential.
It’s important to note that before the modern day borders of the region were solidified (and even sometime after) the movement of the Caribbean Region’s people and trade within the region was much more fluid. This is actually what caused the region to be culturally connected in the first place. If we go back in our family trees, few of us will not find that we do not have an ancestor that came from a neighboring or nearby culture. So is it possible that we can consider a Pan-Caribbean Region identity in addition to retaining our distinctive national cultural identities?
We have several dividers holding back the people in the region and it's diaspora from understanding our cultural connections: lack of knowledge about our neighbors, language-based identities, race-based identities, large number of individual nations/political entities, arbitrary subregional-identities, and geography. We want to invite you to take a look at culture as the connecting factor in the region. We want to exhibit to you that common culture is a more powerful concept than all of these things.
When we open our minds and learn about our neighbors we will find that there are a lot of similarities we share.
More about the origin of the brand and what these similarities are in the About the Founder and Why This Brand Was Started section.
