RUM AND COCA-COLA
This chapter explores the steel band movement in its im/migrant incarnation in New York. Like the main story told by this book, the history of the steel drum involves the transnational circulation of capital, culture, and people. As Caribbean im/migrants came north after World War II in search of economic opportunity, they brought their cultural practices with them, often discovering that some forms, such as calypso, had preceded their arrival in metropolitan centers. Im/migration transforms the meaning of a social art such as the steel drum. In this chapter, I look at the steel band in contemporary Brooklyn, and attempt to understand its significance to Caribbean im/migrants, who are hailed by multiple names in their adopted city: as Black people, foreign nationals, “new immigrants,” “the largest ethnic group in New York,”[1] and as members of the African diaspora.
The steel drum, or pan, as the instrument and its music are called in the Caribbean, originated in Port of Spain, Trinidad, during World War II, when residents of Laventille, a working-class neighborhood, began to use the oil drums left at the U.S. refueling station in Trinidad to make percussive instruments. The steel drum was a direct descendant of Afro-Trinidadian percussive forms such as Shango drumming and the tamboo–bamboo stick band. The music of both Afro- and Indo-Trinidadian Carnival had invariably been at odds with colonial power throughout Trinidadian history. Along with parading, it was often banned as a threat
The history of the steel drum begins at j'ouvert at the turn of the twentieth century, when the controversial tamboo-bamboo bands began to integrate tin pans and kitchen utensils. During the 1930s, bands such as Alexander's Ragtime Band added brake drums and metal containers, as well as pieces of umbrellas to keep time during their marching. Members of the “saga boy” subculture in Port of Spain transformed oil drums during the 1940s into the only acoustic instrument invented in the twentieth century. Early steel bands such as Desperados were a key part of this subculture. Their predominantly male members wore zoot suits, listened to American jazz, and were often supported by women who, like the mother and daughter in “Rum and Coca-Cola,” got their cash by “working for the Yankee dollar”—entertaining GIs stationed at the base in Port of Spain. The steel drum, then, developed alongside the transnational migrations of both capital and workers.[5] And, as the song points out, such migrations transform not only the geographic but the gendered location of culture.
Steel band music came to North America as a result of the circulation of capital, workers, and culture around the Western Hemisphere during the postwar period. Changes in U.S. immigration policy after 1965 favored increased immigration from the Caribbean, Asia, and Latin America to fill largely service-sector jobs. Unlike economic development during the “great wave” of immigration at the turn of the century, postindustrial employment in retail, domestic labor, and light industrial work favored the employment of women as a potentially docile labor force.[6] As U.S.-dominated corporations and development agencies extended their reach south and east to newly decolonized Caribbean islands, citizens of these new nations fled the economic ravages of neocolonialism, migrating north in search of work.[7]
At the same time that steel band music was traveling north, popularized by tourism and the increasingly multinational configuration of both capital and culture, Caribbean im/migrants in New York were figuring out how to implement their cultural practices in a new social geography. Panman Rudy King recalled going from his new home in New York to the oil refineries in Newark to find steel drums.[8] Once they had made the drums and learned the tunes, early New York pan players strung the drums around their necks and marched in Harlem Carnival, and organized themselves into small ensembles to perform at parties and weddings. Just as the migration of working-class Afro-Trinidadians from rural to urban areas had triggered transformations in the social arts of Carnival during the 1870s and 1940s,[9] international migration between the United States and Trinidad would bring changes to the meaning and practice of the steel band movement.
Im/migrants from the eastern Caribbean, where the steel drum had become a crucial element of Carnival by the 1950s, celebrated Carnival in Harlem during the 1940s and 1950s as a marker of their longing for an increasingly commonly imagined Caribbean homeland. At the same time, they were also seen, by native whites and African-Americans, as Black people. For im/migrants from the Caribbean, issues of class and color are more complex than the solidly enforced line separating Black and white in this country. Jim Crow, then, was a striking, sometimes confusing social fact.[10] King told of his experiences on tour on the college circuit in the 1950s:
Those were some rough days, because you couldn't go in restaurants to eat and all this. There were a lot of problems on the road with this Black and white business, you know. Anyway, we didn't have too much problem, because I didn't know the difference, I used to just walk anyplace and if then they tell me that, then I say I didn't know any better. But I figure what happen is that I'm spending money, so I just used to walk into a place and get whatever. I didn't realize how serious it was.
Caribbean im/migrants entered a charged arena of negotiations about the social meaning of race in this period.
In Trinidad, along with other Carnival forms such as masquerade and calypso, the steel band is a component of diverse narratives of race and national pride, ethnic solidarity, and memories of a variously imagined homeland. During decolonization, Eric Williams's People's National Movement appropriated the steel band as a symbol of cultural autonomy to mobilize Afro-Trinidadian grass-roots political backing.[11] During the
The steel band accompanied Trinidadians and other im/migrants from the eastern Caribbean north in their postcolonial diaspora. Just as the steel band movement in Trinidad developed in relation to issues of decolonization and national identity, the steel band movement in Brooklyn negotiates both the conflicts of cultural formation in diaspora and those of local urban politics.[14] A form fraught with national symbolism for Trinidadians, the steel band has nevertheless begun to attract players in Brooklyn from Caribbean nations without a steel band tradition, as well as some young African-American players. To some degree, steel bands and other Carnival forms in New York may become more Africanized, more of a “Black thing,” as Indo- and Afro-Trinidadians move to separate neighborhoods.[15]
In the urban metropolitan context, the ongoing im/migrant production of identity and place proposes some alternatives to the ways U.S. cities have traditionally dealt with im/migrant communities. Ethnicity theory, as scholarly theory and municipal practice, has failed to take into account the centrality of race. But North American ideas of race have often failed to encompass complex formation of identities within constructs of “Blackness” and “whiteness.” This has prevented our understanding of urban, as well as international, politics.
Caribbean im/migrants are pulled between a model of ethnic empowerment that is offered to them as a “model minority” and the equally cogent demands of their position as Black im/migrants in a two-tiered racial hierarchy with an increasingly anti-immigrant bias. As im/migrants, they are confronted with a model of assimilation that offers to swap economic success for cultural identity. As Afro-diasporic people,
This chapter, along with the one that follows, focuses on the “changing same” of im/migrant popular cultures as a way to understand the inner history of im/migration. In both chapters, I explore incidents that embody the tensions between cultural memory and social change. The experience of im/migration generates its aftershocks: the dreams and visions of urban diaspora. These visions suggest new interpretations of identity, citizenship, nation. Adapting to im/migration means that people have an acute sense of what is being lost and created; what can be salvaged, whether meaning inheres in form, or whether meaning continues to speak through the voices of invented traditions. Very often, I found, these issues are expressed in social conflicts that take place over gender and generation.
My focus on gender and generation in these chapters comes out of my increasing conviction that these are the terrains on which im/migrants struggle for their right to be citizens and denizens: to be entitled with respect to the dominant nation, as well as to their stake in narratives of homeland, exile, and return. Tradition and cultural survival are intimately involved with and implicated in the category of youth and the practices of young people. Because of their dual socialization, young people are particularly important in the cultural process of im/migration. Gender roles, similarly, are one of the charged spaces in which culture is both transformed and reproduced.
Notions of respectability and reputation have informed approaches to the study of Caribbean culture since Peter Wilson's influential article was published in 1969. Respectability is the domain of women and older or married men, and covers socially sanctioned notions of success: performance in church, home, and workplace. Reputation, on the other hand, is the domain of younger, unmarried men and covers often forbidden or disdained innovations in grass-roots culture, such as the steel drum.[16] The steel band movement developed in Trinidad during the 1940s among young men involved in the kinds of activities that engender reputation in the peer group and wider society, but not respectability in terms of dominant ideas of success. Much like African- and Mexican-American zootsuiters of the same period, panmen flourished in the half-light of the cultural underground, flaunting respectability and officially imposed wartime restrictions.[17] Stephen Stuempfle writes: “Playing on the streets during the
One way of explaining the relative absence of women from such subcultures is that their active participation is precluded by the violence of conflicts between representatives of respectability and reputation. Often, as well, there is a gendering of roles within the subculture. The “saga boy” subculture, for instance, was organized around the labor of female prostitutes, who supported their pan-playing boyfriends by “working for the Yankee dollar” at Trinidad's two U.S. bases during the war.[19] Some scholars argue that more women got involved with the steel band movement as it moved into the respectable spheres of Trinidadian middle class life during the 1950s.[20] However, a Trinidadian pan player living in Brooklyn remembered growing up around “rebel” pan yards, where her mother played. She remembered the rebel yards as always having more women in them than respectable, middle-class bands. Nonetheless, the official history of the steel band through the 1950s is almost exclusively male. Women's participation, as in many other grass-roots subcultural forms, seems by all accounts marginal until pan's acceptance as a middle-class, respectable cultural practice.[21]
Im/migration profoundly transforms cultural priorities, among them gender roles. Acts of Americanizing or resisting Americanization, struggling for economic mobility, maintaining family ties and connections to newly distant homelands call on im/migrant men and women to adopt new attitudes and activities.[22] Further, for Afro-Caribbean im/migrants, gender roles in the new society are complicated by changes in the social meaning of race.[23] As the social categories that govern notions of respectability and reputation change, so do established ideas of propriety and deviance. Appropriate actions for “good Trinidadian women” may change in the context of Caribbean neighborhoods in Brooklyn along with developing ideas in the community about social identity, ethnicity, and race. In its im/migrant incarnation in Brooklyn, the steel band movement struggles with these transformations.