Crafting New Narratives of Diasporic Resistance with Indo-Caribbean Women and Gender-Expansive People across Generations

Abstract

This study used participatory oral history and digital archiving to explore two interrelated questions: How do Indo-Caribbean women and gender-expansive people across generations experience processes of storytelling? What are the challenges and possibilities of oral history and digital archiving for constructing alternative histories and genealogies of resistance? In the first phase of the study, twelve Indo-Caribbean women and gender-expansive people across generations participated in an oral history workshop where they were introduced to oral history methods, co-created an interview guide, conducted oral history interviews of one another, and engaged in collective reflection about processes of storytelling. In the second phase, four co-authors of a community-owned digital archive participated in semi-structured interviews about their work to craft new narratives of diasporic resistance rooted in the everyday stories of Indo-Caribbean women and gender-expansive people. In this paper, I analyze how Indo-Caribbean women and gender-expansive people practice resistance by breaking silences in their communities around gender-based oppression, shift norms through producing analyses of their own stories, and reshape community narratives. Furthermore, I explore how oral history participants and co-authors of a digital archive understand the risks associated with sharing stories, raising the ethical dilemmas associated with conceptualizing storytelling as purely liberatory.

1. Introduction

Memories of the past—people, places, feelings, moments in time—are contested. Individual stories can challenge assumptions and accepted judgements that are reinforced through master narratives, especially the stories that come from the experiences of people who had previously been silenced or voiceless [1]. Oral histories are concerned with how everyday people remember and narrate the past to consider how memories and myths have influenced people’s actions and sense of agency [2]. Early oral history projects beginning in the 1940s focused on memoirs of “those who contributed to society or who were close affiliates of world leaders, what may be called the ‘great men’ approach” ([3] p. 4). Feminist and decolonial approaches to oral history require new archival imaginaries [4] and a re-envisioning of what stories matter in understanding how the past becomes part of the present. The process of archiving stories is not simply about collecting and organizing stories, but about making deliberate choices about what to include, and for what reasons.

Building on the work of intersectional feminist psychologists who argue for the importance of decentering the stories of cisgender, heterosexual men in order to understand systemic oppression [5,6,7,8,9], this paper explores how storytelling between women and gender expansive people interrupts intergenerational silences about gender-based violence and offers new ways of theorizing diasporic resistance. Drawing from oral history interviews of Indo-Caribbean women and gender-expansive people across generations and conversations with co-authors of a community-owned digital archive, I discuss how documenting and preserving the stories of those most impacted by gender oppression allows for narratives of resistance to be written into history, while raising important ethical dilemmas around the risks of storytelling and the dangers of enacting new erasures.

The research questions guiding this inquiry emerged from collaboration with an Indo-Caribbean gender justice organization called Jahajee Sisters, whose mission is to address violence against women and gender-expansive people in the Indo-Caribbean diaspora in New York City through dialogue, healing, the arts, leadership development, and grassroots organizing. In traditional social science research, research questions are shaped by identifying “gaps” in the literature; for community-engaged researchers, questions also emerge through relationships. I was both the primary researcher of the project and a participant; I completed an oral history interview and was a member of the group of co-authors who worked on the creation of the digital archive. In mapping the effects of social injustice, researchers might choose to “study up” (i.e., study those who hold power) or “study down” (i.e., study those who have been disempowered). I chose to “study across” because of my commitments to thinking through how research can be used to support ongoing social justice efforts in the communities I belong to. Starecheski [10] argues that when scholars produce knowledge that can be deployed by a movement with which they are allied, they become engaged in an iterative process of testing and refining that knowledge. In other words, engagement and alliance with a social movement can contribute to scholarly rigor.

This approach also moves away from notions of the “detached researcher” and community members as “ingredients in our research recipes” ([11] p. 663). Women of color scholars critique these notions of detachment from research, asking, “how do we reconfigure ourselves as witnesses when our observations of poverty and oppression include the communities of our families?” ([12] p. 662). Laura’s work on intimate inquiry provides ways of thinking about the role of love in research, beginning research “with the end in mind” ([13] p. 217), and the relationships that ground intimate inquiry “that would exist even if the research did not” ([13] p. 217). This body of work provides a window into the multiple positions I hold in relation to this research, which continue to shape my inquiry into intergenerational storytelling and narrations of resistance in diaspora.

1.1. Literature Review

Silence around trauma is common, serving as a medium through which the effects of experiences get passed down to the next generation. The consequences of these silences within communities are vast, with younger generations unable to see elders as victims of their own trauma [1]. Gender oppression maintains its dominance in the lives of women and gender-expansive people by silencing voices that speak out against patriarchal violence and heteronormativity.

The framework grounding this project borrows from Zinn’s [14] “history from below”, which attempts to account for historical events from everyday people, rather than from those in power. This work is also embedded in activist archiving, which rejects the idea of being archived and instead “positions people as active agents of their own collections and authors of their own accounts” ([15] p. 215). In other words, oral history is not only the product that is created, but perhaps more importantly, the process of building new sources of knowledge out of complex personal histories and experiences. This project considers historical erasure as a form of violence and explores the ways in which archives can be used to promote distributive justice [16], or the potential for material about the past or recent past that was otherwise unknowable to become available, allowing people to connect with historical events that were previously inaccessible.

The act of remembering can be evidence of resilience and a will to survive [2], but can also jeopardize already fragile and tentative coping strategies [17]. The aim of this research is to critically engage with the process of story-sharing across generations, recognizing both its emancipatory potential as well as tensions that can emerge in conceptualizing storytelling as purely liberatory. Speaking one’s truth requires vulnerability, and silence is often used a coping mechanism to repress memories that are too painful to remember. Literature that attends to the functions of silence makes visible the ways in which silence is practiced in order to resist efforts to co-opt and commoditize community stories. Silence can indicate refusal to participate in a process that simplifies complex lives into data [18]. Smith argues that decolonizing methodologies “relates not so much to an idealized remembering of a golden past, but more specifically to the remembering of a painful past, remembering in terms of connecting bodies with place and experience, and importantly, people’s responses to that pain” ([19] p. 146). In other words, a critical approach to remembering facilitates people’s connections to one another, to ancestors who came before them who lived through trauma, and knowledge-sharing so that survivors can see themselves in one another and “learn familiar ways to heal wounds” ([20] p. 199).

The current study explores narratives embedded within the social, historical, and political context of high rates of gender-based violence in Indo-Caribbean communities; rising white supremacist rhetoric which constructs immigrant communities of color as perpetually foreign; and ongoing heteronormative logics which tempt communities under threat to stifle “transgressive” behavior. It is grounded in the stories of Indo-Caribbean women and gender-expansive people in the U.S. who are the descendants of indentured laborers brought from India to the Caribbean to work on sugar plantations beginning in 1838, in the aftermath of the emancipation of slavery. In order to understand patriarchal violence and its manifestations in the present-day, it is important to begin with deconstructing the historical context of indentureship and its gendered legacies.

1.2. The Intersections of Gender and Indentureship

Women who made the journey from India to the colonies were those most vulnerable in their communities: women seeking escape from abusive households, lower-caste women, widows, and sex workers. Women made up less than 30 percent of Indian plantation workers during the period of indenture, and because they were scarce, they were sought after, sometimes taken by force and sometimes leveraged by both Indian and white men [21]. In 1883, the Indian Emigration Act exacerbated the shortage of women with its intention to keep married women from deserting their homes for the colonies [22]. Women who did reach the colonies were able to leverage their scarcity for their own survival, “trading up” in relationships to men with more money or status in either the plantation or caste hierarchy [21,23]. Indo-Caribbean women came to be viewed as “morally loose” on the one hand, or they were dismissed by colonial authorities as passive, non-confrontational, and submissive to rigid Indian patriarchal values [24]. Bahadur argues that who Indo-Caribbean women were, and who their descendants are, is “at its heart a story about the demand for women’s bodies, for labor, for sexual gratification, and for procreation” ([21] p. 55). Indentured laborers who were gender-expansive and gender non-conforming are largely absent from archives and historical narratives, despite a long history in the Indian subcontinent and its diasporas of the existence of more than two genders [25].

Ali argues for the existence of hijra in early 21st century Indo-Guyanese society as a “third gender identity that survived transatlantic separation from India, colonial oppression, and postcolonial suppression” ([26] p. 3), drawing from accounts they have heard from family members and close friends about rituals hijras are known to practice at weddings and births to promote fertility. While the terms “gender queer”, “gender-expansive”, and “gender non-conforming” came into use during the mid-1990s among political activists [27], understandings of gender beyond the binary of “man” and “woman” have existed previous to the use of these terms. As argued by King, adopting the terminology used in North America and Europe to define the diversity of gender identities in the Caribbean “that Caribbean people have neither created nor always identified with” ([28] p. 21) can perpetuate epistemic violence, thus further research must be done to uncover the historical meanings of gender-expansive and gender non-conforming in the Indo-Caribbean context and expressions of gender diversity beyond these terms.

1.3. Current Study

At the time the Immigration and Naturalization Act was passed in the U.S. in 1965, large numbers of Indo-Caribbeans migrated out of the Caribbean fleeing political and economic turmoil as nations in the region struggled to assert their independence from colonial rule. Forming large communities in New York City and Florida (with smaller populations spread out in cities like Minneapolis and Atlanta), Indo-Caribbeans in the U.S. migrated primarily from Trinidad and Guyana, but also from Jamaica, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and at least 18 other Caribbean nations. Today, over 50 years later, the first wave of Indo-Caribbeans migrants are aging, and their stories are disappearing with them. These stories hold memories of growing up in the Caribbean during the Cold War, witnessing the optimism and violence that comes with nation-building, and experiences of migrating across waters to the U.S. The stories of women and gender-expansive people, in particular, rarely get told, especially those stories that subvert dominant discourse about their roles in resisting historical oppression. The second-generation hold their own stories about growing up in the U.S., navigating racial and gender inequality in a new place while working to piece together the histories that brought them here.

This research takes a critical aging lens [15] and anti-teleological approach to resistance, frameworks which take seriously the knowledge that both youth and elders hold about their experiences. A critical aging lens recognizes the ways in which intergenerational dynamics are often only intelligible within a framework of heteronormative familial scripts, which dictate rigid generational and gender roles [29]. American society is highly stratified by age [30], so it is rare for people across generations to get to know one another, learn alongside each other, or work together for similar causes. A critical aging lens considers the ways that aging and intergenerationality implicate our subjectivities and relationships, while resisting linear notions of development across the lifespan.

Like other intergenerational projects, this research refuses a unidirectional version of knowledge transmission and instead frames intergenerational memory as complex and multidirectional, with women and gender-expansive people across ages nurturing each other as co-creators of their community stories. This work provides important justification for new ways of challenging normative scripts or dominant ways of understanding and performing relationships across generations to imagine new possibilities for intergenerational healing. This research asks, how do Indo-Caribbean women and gender-expansive people across generations experience processes of storytelling? What are the challenges and possibilities of oral history and digital archiving for constructing alternative histories and genealogies? These questions, among others, guide my inquiry.

2. Materials and Methods

For the first stage of the research, I partnered with Jahajee Sisters to design a methodology combining elements of participatory action research (PAR) with oral history. PAR is a collaborative approach to research that centers lived experience as a starting point for inquiry and asserts that those who have experienced historical oppression hold the most knowledge about solutions [31]. The second stage brought together nine community members, including myself, to co-create a digital archive. Four of co-authors engaged in a reflective process about questions of access, privacy, and accountability through semi-structured interviews.

2.1. Participants

In the first stage of the research, twelve Indo-Caribbean women and gender-expansive people participated in a three-part workshop on the foundations of oral history: deep listening, trust-building, and storytelling. The participants for the oral history series were recruited through the partnering organization. The study was publicized via email outreach, social media, and in-person at community events and was articulated as an opportunity for Indo-Caribbean women and gender-expansive people across generations interested in oral history and storytelling. It was also framed as an opportunity for community members to build their deep listening skills and identify some of the barriers they face in their own lives in telling their stories. Participants were informed that there would be an opportunity for them to record their oral histories to be included in the creation of a digital archive of stories from Indo-Caribbean women and gender-expansive people in the U.S. Interested participants were given information about the location and dates of the oral history series to share with their networks. They were also informed that childcare would be available and that they would be compensated with a $25 (USD) prepaid visa gift card for their participation in the oral history interviews.

Twelve people who attended the oral history series participated in oral history interviews at a local community organization in Queens, New York. Seven of the women were between the ages of 19–25 and identified as second-generation, while five of the women were between the ages of 38 and 69 and identified as first-generation. All participants resided in the New York area, with four participants residing in Queens, three participants residing in Bronx, two participants residing Manhattan, two participants residing in Long Island, and one participant residing in Brooklyn. Ten participants identified as cisgender women, and two participants identified as gender-expansive. All participants identified as Indo-Caribbean, with two participants coming from an Indo-Trinidadian background, one from an Indo-Surinamese background, and the remaining participants from Indo-Guyanese backgrounds. Seven participants were born in the U.S., while five were born in Trinidad, Guyana, or Suriname.

Eight community members were recruited to join the project as co-authors of the digital archive, for a total of nine co-authors. All of the co-authors were invited to participate in semi-structured interviews about the process of creating a community-owned digital archive. Of the four co-authors who participated in the interviews, three identified as cisgender women and one identified as gender-expansive. The age range of the participating co-authors was between 22 and 28. One of the participating co-authors resided in Queens, New York at the time of the interview, and the other three resided in Boston, Massachusetts, Miami, Florida, and Washington, D.C.

2.2. Oral History Series

The oral history series was held at a local community space in Queens, New York. The first session introduced participants to the community organization and to the oral history series. Community members engaged in dialogue about the value of oral history and were invited to share their hopes and expectations for participating in the series. As a group, we decided on community agreements and engaged in three exercises to build their interview skills: a toning exercise, a writing exercise, and a deep-listening exercise. Participants were then invited to be matched with 1–2 people for an oral history interview in one of the next two sessions and engaged in discussion about the structure of the interviews and the guiding questions, which focused on personal history, gender socialization and experiences of discrimination, resistance to systemic oppression, and solidarity across generations of Indo-Caribbean women and gender-expansive people. Together, we created an interview guide and ended the session with each person writing down one personal goal for the interview.

In the second and third sessions, participants interviewed each other in their previously selected pairs/groups ranging from 1 h to 1.5 h long. While interviews were being conducted, the larger group participated in reflective exercises related to their personal and community histories, which included creating family trees and drawing self-portraits. At the end of each interview, participants had 10–15 min to debrief, respond to each other, and reflect more generally on their experiences as both listeners and storytellers in the interviews. During this part of the interview, participants were asked: How did it feel to participate in the oral history interview? Were there particular stories your partner shared with you that resonated? What was it like to hear those stories? Even after participating in the oral history series, were there topics that you struggled to talk about?

At the end, participants filled out consent forms where they were asked whether they consented to the interviews being analyzed for the purposes of this research project, and whether they consented to storing and sharing their interviews for the creation of a digital archive. If they consented to storing and sharing their interviews, they were asked to choose from a list of audiences they wanted to share their stories with, or to write in specific audiences that they would like their stories to reach. The options they were given to choose from were: public, anyone who identifies as Indo-Caribbean, only Indo-Caribbean women and gender-expansive people, and only other participants of the project. Participants were given these options to honor that some participants were not ready to share their stories publicly but wanted community members who were experiencing similar struggles as they had in their lives to be able to access their stories as a resource. The group of co-authors were able to identify a content management software called Mukurtu, built by and for indigenous communities seeking to preserve cultural heritage, which allowed for us to manage privacy settings on each of the interviews so that we could honor participants’ boundaries around access. Transcription along with the original audio was shared back to participants to confirm accuracy.

2.3. Building a Community-Owned Digital Archive

Recruitment for co-authors of the digital archive began in January of 2019, right before the first oral history session was held. Interested participants were invited to participate both in the oral history series and as co-authors of the digital archive if they wished. Three of the nine co-authors participated in the oral history series, while the remaining were recruited only for participation in the creation of the digital archive. Interested participants filled out a Google form asking for demographic and contact information, experience working on digital projects, and interest in joining a group of Indo-Caribbean women and gender-expansive people in creating a community-owned digital archive. I spoke to all interested participants before inviting them to join the project as co-authors. 19 people filled out the Google Form; five people could not be reached after they submitted the form, and six people were unable to participate because they were not based in the U.S. but were invited to keep in touch for future opportunities to be involved.

From January to March, the group met over video conference monthly to build a collaborative process for creating a community-owned digital archive. From April to November, the group met bi-weekly to identify and distribute tasks in four areas: audio, website, research, and communications. The audio team was responsible for editing and transcribing audio and writing up short descriptions and key words for the interviews. The website team was responsible for developing and designing each element of the website, including a mission statement, a glossary of terms, and a “resources” document on further reading about the lives of Indo-Caribbean women and gender-expansive people. The research team was responsible for creating a collection development policy, guidelines for interacting with the oral history interviews, and developing a process for obtaining virtual consent from community members interested in submitting their oral history interviews to the archive in the future. Finally, the communications team was responsible for designing the logo, creating social media pages and a social media calendar, and planning a launch event for November of 2019 to publicize the digital archive and engage community members in dialogue around how the archive can be used to support ongoing social justice efforts in the community.

In June of 2019, the co-authors were invited to participate in a semi-structured interview about the possibilities and challenges of creating a community-owned digital archive for constructing alternative histories and genealogies. Four interviews were conducted, each lasting approximately 60 min. Each interview was transcribed immediately after collection.

2.4. Analytic Frameworks

In analyzing the data from the oral history interviews and semi-structured interviews with the co-authors of the digital archive, I used thematic analysis as defined by Braun and Clarke [32] to find themes that emerged specifically in relation to the emancipatory potential of storytelling and the risks associated with it. I also looked for how the co-authors articulated the possibilities and challenges of creating a community-owned digital archive to work against historical erasure and promote distributive justice. Below, I organize the data into three themes: the emancipatory power of storytelling, the risks of storytelling, and the possibilities and challenges of community archiving.

3. Results

3.1. The Emancipatory Power of Storytelling

The Indo-Caribbean women and gender-expansive people who participated in the oral history interviews shared their experiences of the process, reflected on the power of witnessing and being witnessed, and communicated their desires for more spaces to share stories across generations in their communities. In reflecting on her interview, 37-year-old Shama (she/her) shared that even though her interview partner, 69-year-old Irene (she/her), has been in her life for a long time, they never had the chance to connect as women with similar experiences. Shama shared:

“We connected as being women, not as being auntie and daughter or niece or whatever. But actually like, we’re both women with these experiences, right? And, I don’t know, I felt like an adult talking with her in this way because I always see myself with elders as sort of being, even though I’m not really a young person anymore, I always see this hierarchy in the relationship, it’s kind of set already. And because I grew up with her, I don’t necessarily see myself as a woman in these relationships. I always think of myself as a daughter or as a niece. And it’s very different to talk with her about these things like marriage and the difficulties of things that women experience that I wouldn’t have normally.”

Here, Shama highlights how it has been difficult for her to connect with elder women in her life because of how her relationships to them have been organized through their roles in the family (i.e., daughter, niece, mother, wife). Irene similarly shared, “being in this intergenerational space, it makes me forget how old I am. I just think, well, I’m one of you”. Irene also shared that while she thought she knew a lot about Shama, the interview made her realize how much more they had to learn about each other. Shama went on to say:

“I actually hadn’t thought about prepping for the interview, but once you start talking, and if you have a partner who you feel connected to, it actually just comes out. And I think I was surprised at the amount of things that we talked about and I guess to think about things I hadn’t really thought about, which the questions help to bring out, or maybe I had thought about but never vocalized. I think the space and in addition to connecting, I appreciated being able to reflect, and in the interview particularly in such a focused way. Cause I think about my life this-- there are years that I can’t account for what happened during those years.”

In her reflection, Shama notes the importance of having a partner who made her feel like they wanted to know more about her life and that her story was worth sharing, and appreciates the interview format as a structured, focus way to enter into her story. Other participants shared the importance of being witnessed and the need for spaces to be able to connect in new ways that they were not able to in everyday life. In her interview, Sarah (19 years-old, she/her) suggested that storytelling can help women across generations connect from their shared lived experiences. She said:

“I always spend a lot of time with my grandma and grandfather. I even talk to my great-grandma. And I guess storytelling, it’s really important because are certain terms like racism or sexism, they might not know what racism and sexism are, but if you’re able to tell a story you’re able to show your opinions on something, in a way you can provide answers for how you should deal with a certain situation.”

Sarah shares here that while terms like “racism” and “sexism” might not resonate with her elders, storytelling can give community members the opportunity to share their opinions on their life experiences and pass knowledge on to future generations. Irene shared some of the messages that she and other women of her generation were told growing up that shape how she thinks about storytelling today. She said:

“We were taught that women should not speak out and not come out. You know, we were always being suppressed and the males were more dominant and they could go out and do whatever they want while we were kept in the house to help with chores and never could speak freely what we thought or what we wanted to do. And I taught my daughters them differently, that they should always be able to speak their truth and express themselves and don’t be suppressed by anyone.”

Here, Irene shares the importance of teaching future generations that their voices matter and should not be silenced. In their interviews, many of the participants spoke directly to the listeners they imagined would be hearing their stories. In speaking about her childhood and feelings of loneliness and disconnection she experienced, 42 year-old Liloutie (she/her) says, “For anyone who listens to this, they must know that they’re not alone. And if they don’t feel loved, know that you haven’t found your people yet. Keep looking. We’re out here, and we’re waiting for you”.

Later in her interview after sharing her anger about how normalized childhood sexual abuse is in the community, she said, “I urge you, if you’re a listener and you’re hearing anything, anyone below the age of seventeen, it is illegal for you to engage in any sex with them or any sexual behavior. It is illegal. Go to the cops. Don’t even finish listening to this recording, just go straight to the police”. She went on to say that she wants to figure out how to intervene into what she considers a “culture of complicity of well, it didn’t happen to me” where the sexual abuse of girls is seen as acceptable. She addresses her imagined audience directly, urging them to identify if harm is being enacted and to seek out resources based on her understanding of how to intervene into cycles of abuse.

Made (22 years-old, they/she) also thinks that for future generations, it is important to communicate openly about systemic and historical oppression rather than normalize it. They said, “even though my hope is that they never have to experience that, I want them to be prepared for the reality of it”. They went on to say:

“Especially if I were to have daughters or if I were to be an aunt for any nieces, I want them to be fully aware of how rape and sexual assault happen and the fact that it is never their fault, but there are ways that unfortunately you need to defend yourself as a woman in this world. Even though, like I said, I hope that none of them ever have to go through this, I think it’s so important to talk about, though. And I would be comfortable talking from my own personal experiences and being like, ‘This happened to me’. Because then also, I want them to feel comfortable that if any of that were to happen to them, that they can come talk to me about it, because I will understand.”

Here, Made shares the importance of talking to younger generations of women and gender-expansive people about sexual violence and equipping them with the tools to defend themselves. In their reflection, they recognize that sexual violence is never the fault of the survivor, acknowledging the importance of survivors coming out so that those who are looking for resources know where to find them. Irene reflected on both the joy and sadness that she has experienced in storytelling spaces with women across generations. She said:

“Telling my story and listening to their stories, even though they’re young, they’re like 30, 40 years younger than I am, they still had exciting stories and sad stories to tell about being oppressed by the male sex and abusive fathers and partners. They should not keep anything secret. They should come out to organizations or friends and share their stories and get help.”

Similarly, 28-year-old Rita (she/her) shared, “We’re suffering in silence and don’t see people like us coming out with stories”, which she believes reinforces cycles of violence and prevents community-wide conversations about trauma that has plagued generations of women and gender-expansive people. Many participants noted that story-sharing is a necessary part of breaking intergenerational cycles of violence, with stories serving as a resource for women to make sense of the trauma they have experienced in their own lives and the lives of people close to them. In her interview of 27-year-old Kushri (she/they), 22-year-old Rani (she/her) asked Kushri if she thinks any stories from the past should be hidden from future generations. Kushri said:

“I don’t think any story should be hidden, I think that in fact, how we know that history, the most tragic parts of history, our future should know about it. What they should also learn is how we were resilient through it, how our ancestors were also resilient through it. I think that the major problem is suppressing stories and not airing them out. What I think should be hidden from society is certain religious scriptures or the male perspective or point of view it was written from. Somebody needs to go and rewrite these scriptures and absolutely take out those ideas of non-inclusion, of patriarchy, just suppressing the masses.”

In her interview, Kushri shares the importance of sharing even the “most tragic parts of history” so that future generations will know how their ancestors practiced resilience. She also wants to see patriarchal narratives that have worked to exclude and suppress to be transformed and rewritten. Shama similarly discussed how she wishes she had more access to stories from previous generations of women in her family. She says:

“There are actually so many stories that I don’t know from previous generations, from the women in my family that I wish I knew and I feel like if they had told me, especially if they had told me from when I was a little girl, those stories might have helped me to navigate some of the situations I have encountered. There’s so many things I wish I had known about my grandmother and I can’t ask her now because she’s not here. She died, right. So I think that we don’t really get to ask questions and we don’t really get to talk. And I think that stays with us and it affects the way we communicate with each other. It’s really hard for me to talk to my mom about her life and sometimes I feel like she doesn’t want to talk about it. Not because she doesn’t necessarily want me to know, but because it’s just really hard for her and she’s just kind of locked away a lot of her stories. But I wish that I knew them.”

Here, Shama reflects on how hearing the stories from previous generations of women in her family, especially as a young girl, would have helped her navigate situations in her own life. She also points out how quickly stories disappear if they are not shared, and how she can no longer access the stories of her grandmother because she has passed. Shama discusses how the expectation that women should stay silent and not ask questions of one another affects how women communicate with one another, sharing how her mother has “locked away” her stories as a result. Sarah also shares that it is important to hear the stories of those who we disagree with and those who have enacted harm. She says, “If you’re unable to see the other side and why someone is thinking that way…you need to understand why an abuser would think the way he does in order to tell him that he’s wrong, in order to enact some sort of structural change”. Here, Sarah shares her perspective on how to intervene into gender-based violence: understanding what might bring a perpetrator to enact violence and shifting the conditions that produce violence.

3.2. The Risks of Storytelling: Navigating Responsibility, Honoring Privacy

While participants shared the emancipatory power of storytelling, they also recognized the risks associated with sharing stories. Anonymity remained important for participants, and all but two chose for their stories to remain anonymous for inclusion in the digital archive. Nine participants chose to have their stories shared publicly with pseudonyms, one participant chose to use a pseudonym and to share only with other Indo-Caribbean women and gender-expansive people, and one participant chose to share only with other participants of the project with a pseudonym, but later decided she could not include her interview in the archive because of sensitive material she shared about her parents that might put her at risk if her anonymity was compromised. One participant chose to include her full name and asked that her story be shared publicly. She shared that because so many of the stories from the past are anonymized, she wants future generations to be able to search for her story and know that it is hers. Finally, one participant chose to use her first name, but requested that only other Indo-Caribbean women and gender-expansive people have access to her interview because she felt that the content of her interview could easily identify her.

After the recordings were completed, they were sent to the participants for review. Participants were asked whether there were any edits they wanted to make to their interviews before agreeing to submit them to the archive. In reflecting on her interview, Sarah noted that she got nervous at a certain point and her interview partner, 24-year-old Karen (she/her) responded, “Even though I saw you got nervous, you pushed through it. Even if you paused, even if you had a mental breakdown, it would be okay, just know. It’s comforting…we can edit it out, it’s okay”. Here, Karen reassures her that no story is final, and that they can always be rewritten.

Irene also shared that the interview process was difficult for her. At the end of her interview, she says, “I still have to decide if I want my story to be out there. You can listen and let me know what you think, cause I got emotional and stammered a little and lost”. In this statement, Irene illustrates the vulnerability it took to tell her story and her hesitation to have her story shared in its raw form. Liloutie also struggled with her decision to ultimately remain anonymous because of her parents being on social media and her fear of them finding her interview. While participants shared the importance of breaking silences in their community, they were immediately faced with the potential consequences of speaking out.

In her interview, Karen noted that we have to continue to be critical of stories. In reflecting on the role technology has played in changing the ways that women interact with one another, she said that social media and the internet can “help us build amazing platforms or it can help us break each other down”. She went on to say, “They are able to see like, I feel this way, and you do too, and you’re experiencing it there. There are methods of helping myself and you”, but also shares that violence against women can be reinforced through storytelling depending on how stories are told or how advice is shared. Here, she raises the importance of not only nurturing bravery in women to share their stories, but also building spaces where women are able to find appropriate support in return. Jayasri also shared the ways in which she has navigated sharing stories of abuse with her daughter given the emotional weight that stories can carry. She said:

“Sometimes we protect a young person. For instance, my mother’s mother abandoned her when she was a baby. But she didn’t know that, she got a whole different crooked story that they told her so that she wouldn’t feel abandoned or you know, not loved. And it wasn’t until her mother was gone, my grandmother died in her nineties, that she came to understand her mother gave her up. My mother, for part of her life grew up in an orphanage. Her dad was an alcoholic as well but he wasn’t abusive, but he couldn’t take care of her. They don’t tell you until you reach a certain age where they feel you can handle it. So it’s not a matter of hiding, but a matter of appropriateness as to, when do you reveal this? When should this person know, or a community know?”

In reflecting on silences within her family generations before her, Jayasri distinguished between hiding stories and waiting for the appropriate time to share something depending on a person’s judgement of what the listener can or cannot handle at the time. She explains that stories are shared once there is an awareness that another person might be able to benefit from them, but it is up to the judgement of the holder of the story to decide when the story should be shared.

In their interview, 22-year-old Lotus (they/them) revealed how the act of breaking silences is not as simple as having the courage to speak, but to speak knowing that others might not hear you, that those who do hear you might not be able to accept your truth, and that often, a consequence of speaking out is rejection. They talk about the material consequences they might face as a result of being rejected by their families (i.e., having to find housing because they live with their parents), saying:

“I want to sit here and say, “Somebody told me that it was okay for me to be myself and I just listened to them”, but I didn’t, because that fear of being rejected from my community or that fear of being rejected from my family was so strong that anyone could really tell me anything and I would just see it as, “Oh you can say that because you’re not me”, “You can say that because you’re older”, “You can say that because you’re not Indo-Caribbean”, or “You can say that because you don’t live with your parents anymore.”

Here, Lotus lifts up the importance of understanding the risks associated with speaking out and the different positions people might hold which place them at greater or less risk. At the same time, sharing stories was considered an act of resistance and a healing practice despite the risks and in some cases, because of the risks. Often, rejection led participants to find communities that did accept them and allowed them to be their full selves, yet questions of safety remained a central theme in participant narratives.

3.3. The Possibilities and Challenges of Community Archiving

Four of the nine co-authors who participated in the process of creating a community-owned digital archive of the oral history interviews spoke of their experiences building both process and product: a process rooted in collaboration and the desires of the participants of the oral history project, and a physical website where community members could access a digital archive of the interviews. The co-authors met once every two weeks over a period of nine months to define the values grounding the project, identify the purposes of the archive, and create objectives that would help fulfill the goals articulated. The co-authors met in-person for a day-long retreat in August of 2019 and again in November 2019 for the launch event of the archive where community members were invited to listen to the oral history interviews, share their own stories and hopes for the project, provide feedback on the website, and offer questions to the co-authors about the archive and its creation. Below, I draw on interviews with four of the co-authors to understand both the challenges and possibilities of community archiving for working against historical erasure and crafting new narratives of resistance.

In their interviews, the co-authors were asked to share their hopes and expectations for joining the project. Dharani (23 years-old, they/them) spoke of their desire to join the project, saying “My hope was to gather stories from women and gender non-conforming folks, Indo-Caribbean folks who are living in the States, to have those stories recorded. I think that’s part of my own family research and stuff, but also because I feel like there’s so much misogyny that gets normalized. We don’t even realize that it’s happening because the stories get systematically erased so you don’t even know they got erased in the first place”. Here, they connect the systematic erasure of stories from women and gender-expansive people directly to the perpetuation of misogyny. They go on to say, “I was also excited about the idea of working with a bunch of Indo-Caribbean women and gender non-conforming people because my own community, at least in Boston, is pretty siloed. It’s been really cool to meet so many other people with different backgrounds but with sort of a shared history, because I’m so used to interacting with South Asians who are not of indentured backgrounds”. In their reflection, Dharani points to how the community built around the archive allows them to feel connected to their Indo-Caribbean identity, despite other ways of feeling isolated based on geography. They went on to say, “I think as a new project, it might have been easier if we were all in the same place, but I think it’s also nice that we’re not all in the same place, cause we’re kind of creating a different, virtual-ish community”. The benefits and consequences of the virtual/digital aspects of this project are lifted up here, as Dharani reflects on how trust-building is important for this type of work, particularly as the co-authors were meeting for the first time through this project.

Tarika (24 years-old, she/her) shared similar concerns, but was also impressed by how much work had been accomplished despite having “started as essentially strangers”. She says that it has been interesting to see how communication is different in the digital age, and how it is possible to have these types of projects with people located across geographies. She shared, “For me, one of the best things about this project is getting to connect with a group of Indo-Caribbean people of approximately my generation. I didn’t really have that growing up, I didn’t grow up in a big Indo-Caribbean community. I’ve always been accustomed to being the only Indo-Caribbean person in the room, or in my school, or in my community. So suddenly having this group of so many other Indo-Caribbean women and gender-expansive people with shared experiences and a shared cultural background was really amazing. It’s really empowering and affirming”.

She went on to say that it was especially important to be able to connect with people of her cultural background committed to social justice, racial justice, and feminist activism and to “know that impulse exists in the community among our generation”. She said, “I think it’s a little different, even if you share certain values or ideologies or desires to work towards social justice with other people, I think it’s different when people are coming from a shared background and history as you, because then they tend to share more of the same concerns. Because I feel like the issues that face Indo-Caribbean women in terms of equality and justice are really unique and specific and not always represented in broader mainstream movements towards social justice”.

Kimmi (28 year-old, she/her) also spoke of her desire to build community through her involvement with the project. She said:

“I’m always really, really hungry for community space with other Indo-Caribbean folks. And it’s not something I get a lot or have been around. I never felt like I had a community of people, and just where, I don’t know, where I could be in a different place where when I go home to Trinidad that kind of sigh and lifting off of something to be able to experience that also while I’m here. So I just think my hunger for that kind of connection is what made me really excited about it and was my expectation going into this, this space where I can connect and work with other folks who care deeply about the Caribbean, care deeply about stories.”

As a Trinidadian immigrant, Kimmi shared her desire to experience the sense of relief or “lifting off” in her home in the U.S. that she experiences when she returns home to Trinidad. She also shared her hope to connect with people who not only have a shared experience as her, but a shared commitment and care for the Caribbean and the stories of those descended from the Caribbean. Kimmi went on to share why her experiences working in archives led her to this project:

“The part of archives that has always interested me has been community created archives, so the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn, I remember when I first went to that and I was just blown away and was like, wow. It resonated so deeply in ways that other museums or spaces hadn’t. And then I did some work at my undergrad archives, but never really saw myself working in archives because I don’t really love the big institutional archives. They feel a little removed from the importance of why these things are worth collecting.”

Here, Kimmi reflects on the importance of connecting archival work to a larger purpose that extends beyond simply collecting stories/materials. With a desire for community also came anxieties around the hierarchies that exist within Indo-Caribbean spaces. Kimmi shared her experiences of Indo-Caribbean spaces in the U.S. being Hindu-centric, reifying notions of belonging to India, and focusing on the experiences of those who grew up in the U.S. vs. those who migrated here at a later age. She also spoke about the class privilege that comes with being able to do non-paid work, sharing, “I feel like a lot of the folks who are in spaces, I feel like we all because we have the time to do it, tend to have some class privilege in ways that aren’t discussed”. Finally, Kimmi spoke about the tensions around being part of an Indo-Caribbean American space having been born and raised in the Caribbean. She said:

“Knowing that the oral histories that were being done were being done by folks who have migrated to the U.S. and that it was Caribbean American stories, I think something I felt tension about in myself. Like how would I say something about that if we were representing ourselves to be an Indo-Caribbean archive, but we don’t really have folks who are currently living in the Caribbean being part of it?”

The interviews served as intervention into the process of co-creating the archive, as what was discussed in the interviews were part of developing a praxis of ongoing reflection about how our decisions aligned with the original mission of the archive, to lift up the voices of Indo-Caribbean women and gender-expansive people at various intersections of identity. Kimmi’s contributions, for example, sparked discussion about expanding the archive to include in the voices of Indo-Caribbeans outside of the U.S., including those who remain in the Caribbean.

The co-authors shared other challenges that had come up in the work, particularly around the language used to represent the stories the archive seeks to lift up and mindfulness around the ways in which language can enact implicit erasures. For example, Dharani emphasized the importance of using gender-expansive language to avoid reifying bio-essentialist notions of womanhood. Dharani also brought up issues around accessibility, saying, “If my mom can’t read it, I don’t want to write it”, holding the group accountable to using inclusive language. Each of the co-authors brought up the silences that continue to exist among the stories that were collected, including an absence of voices from transgender and queer people, as well as people from different class backgrounds, diverse religious backgrounds, and elders over the age of 70. In reflecting on inclusion and visibility, Tarika shared that our choice to use a content management system that allows for different privacy settings allows us to “lift up people’s voices but also respect conscious silences”, which she sees as important to archival work.

Lissa (22 years-old, she/her) spoke of the challenges of collecting stories and the ways that she has witnessed people be protective and possessive of their stories, making it difficult to bring them to spaces where storytelling is considered a practice of connection and healing. As a mixed-race person with Chinese, Black, Indian, and white ancestry, she shared that a member of her family was against her taking an ancestry test because of their own internalized anti-Blackness, which she pointed to as an example of how shame and erasure is transmitted intergenerationally. She said, “this generation doesn’t even know the stories, but we inherit the trauma from those stories”, and reiterates her commitment to breaking silences in the community and documenting our stories. Having grown up in a community where the only Indo-Caribbean people she knew were members of her family, she shared that she appreciated the opportunity to listen to the interviews and hear different perspectives on how people articulate Indo-Caribbean identity and belonging. Lissa also shared that she appreciated our choice to upload the interviews in their original form, only editing the audio in response to privacy requests from the interviewees. For example, in many of the interviews there is a great deal of background noise (i.e., sirens from the street, music playing from a car parked outside, the sound of children playing in the downstairs area of the interview space), and Lissa shared that she appreciates how these sounds “set the place” and encourages people who submit their recordings to submit them in whatever form is available to them.

These interviews were part of a reflective process to co-create a community-owned digital archive, and after these conversations happened, we returned to the larger group and identified strategies for the challenges we were facing in the moment, but also the challenges we could anticipate emerging in the future. One challenge we spoke about was making sure we would not simply be relying on those typically underrepresented in Indo-Caribbean narratives to submit to our archive, but that we would have to be intentional about building outreach strategies to connect with communities who are underrepresented in broader historical narratives and within the archive. This was an issue we had not yet talked about in the larger group, so the one-on-one interviews allowed for this conversation to emerge and for us to reflect together about building systems to address these tensions, including building a community outreach team.

Participants spoke of the importance of building a structure that has been conducive to reflection, encouraging transparency about our practices, the stories we have been able to collect (and not been able to collect), how we want to grow, and what kind of community we want to build through the archive. In this way, the interviews were a space for both reflection and action, as they informed how the group of co-authors thought about the future of the archive, including the need for a “sunset plan”. Tarika shared her thoughts about information in the digital age, saying, “It’s important to understand that what goes on the internet don’t actually last forever, it can actually be sort of ephemeral, and funding can run out, or the platform can get updated and make yours obsolete, so having that long-term vision in mind and not assuming that what we create will be able to last forever”. Here, Tarika raises the point that while digital archiving is a form of preservation, it is also unpredictable, insecure, and precarious in its own ways.

4. Discussion

This study explored two interrelated questions: How do Indo-Caribbean women and gender-expansive people across generations experience processes of storytelling? What are the challenges and possibilities of oral history and digital archiving for constructing alternative histories and genealogies of resistance? Central to my inquiry is a commitment to understanding the role of storytelling in movements for gender justice in immigrant communities. Romero and Stewart argue that “naming and defining experience, articulating and legitimating new and untold stories, and making space for those stories in the wider culture is crucial work of social transformation” ([33] p. 12). In other words, storytelling is a transformative practice because the stakes are both personal and political.

In analyzing oral history interviews from Indo-Caribbean women and gender-expansive people across generations and conversations with co-authors of a community-owned digital archive, I work to understand how those marginalized by gender-based oppression resist and shift norms through surviving, producing analyses of their own life stories, sharing knowledge with their communities, and offering their visions for a different world. As argued by Chazan, Baldwin, and Madokoro [34], listening can be considered a form of activism, bringing attention to the critical work of reflection that is necessary in resistance efforts to create social change. Furthermore, social change work like educating, advocating, mentoring and record-keeping tend to not be considered activism to the same extent as protesting and rallying [34], yet it is often women who engage in this type of work. This research explores the active contributions of women and gender-expansive people using an intersectional feminist lens, arguing against characterizations of Indo-Caribbean women people as passive and non-confrontational in movements of resistance and speaking back to the absence of gender-expansive voices in archives and historical narratives.

Oral history interview participants and the co-authors of the digital archive who participated in semi-structured interviews shared both the emancipatory power of storytelling and the risks associated with it. More specifically, the Indo-Caribbean women and gender-expansive people who participated as both listeners and speakers in the interviews shared that the experience brought them to realize how little they knew of the women and gender-expansive people in their community. Furthermore, they shared that the interview space provided an opportunity for them to connect with other women and gender-expansive people around their similar experiences, to share knowledge with one another about surviving gender oppression, and to simply be witnessed. Participants shared their struggles in connecting with women and gender-expansive people across generations outside of the interview space whose stories are “locked away”, unable to be processed or shared with others. Participants also shared their desire for more spaces to hear from both survivors of gender-based violence to support their healing and from perpetrators of gender-based violence to understand the root causes of harm in order to enact structural change.

While participants spoke about the emancipatory power of storytelling, they also shared the risks associated with it. Sharing stories can surface difficult emotions for both the speaker and the listener; when a speaker recalls a traumatic event, the story is experienced physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually [35]. Furthermore, when a speaker shares their story, they share with anticipation that the listener might disagree with them, misunderstand them, or experience distress from the content shared. It is also important to note that speakers might share advice that can put a listener’s safety at risk. For example, one participant urged victims of violence to go to the police without warning listeners about the possibility of being retraumatized in seeking justice through the criminal legal system. The importance of building spaces of affirmation and validation for survivors to share their stories and find continued support in their processes of healing was central to participant reflections as they expressed a sense of responsibility for the collective well-being of the group. Nesting the oral history project within a local gender justice organization provided participants with a community of support they could return to long after the interview was over, which speaks to the larger ethical commitments of engaging in collaborative research with marginalized communities.

In addition, most of the participants who agreed to include their oral history interviews in the creation of the digital archive chose to remain anonymous because of the risks associated with coming forward as a survivor of gender-based violence and an advocate for the liberation of women and gender-expansive people in the current sociopolitical climate. Safety continues to be an issue for survivors who speak out about the trauma they have experienced and the ways in which gender inequality is embedded in every aspect of society, beginning with how young people are socialized into their gender roles to reinforce unequal power distribution among genders.

The co-authors who participated in the semi-structured interviews spoke of the importance of creating a community-owned archive that is grounded in the desires of community members and their hopes for the kinds of stories they wish to tell about their lives. They also spoke of the value of the community that was built through the archive and the benefits of building digital communities for those who are geographically isolated. Furthermore, participants spoke of the importance of connecting with people within their racial/ethnic communities who have shared commitments to social justice, particularly when those commitments were not previously thought to exist. At the same time, participants spoke of the dangers of enacting new erasures and identified hierarchies that exist in the Indo-Caribbean community that they worry about replicating, including the centering of upper-middle class voices, cisgender voices, and Hindu voices.

While this project worked to center women and gender-expansive people, there continues to be an overrepresentation of cisgender women’s stories, and further work needs to be done to bring the perspectives of transgender and gender-expansive people into existing scholarship, especially transgender and gender-expansive elders. Participants also recognized that community members can be possessive of their stories and mistrustful of sharing their stories on a digital platform where they have little control over how their stories will be received or replicated. The interviews served as a space to both reflect on the limitations of the project and develop strategies for aligning the work with the mission of the project, to center previously silenced stories from Indo-Caribbean women and gender-expansive people at various intersections of identity to work against historical erasure and promote justice.

5. Future Directions

In recent years, researchers have explored how educators are integrating oral history methods in their classrooms to democratize history and develop historical thinking skills among students [36]. Future studies should consider how digital archives can transform sociopolitical consciousness about gender injustice in communities of color in various educational spaces, including those outside of formal institutions. For example, how might oral history interviews be used for political education within communities? Are there ways that oral history interviews can support the development of solutions to systemic oppression by centering lived experience?

Foundational to participatory action research (PAR) is a commitment to ongoing reflection about whose voices are missing, and whose knowledge remains absent. Future studies should explore how different aspects of identity, including but not limited to sexuality, class background, religious background, and migration status influence the construction of life narratives of Indo-Caribbean women and gender-expansive people. An underlying assumption of activist archiving is that archives are always incomplete, aspirational, and directed towards the future [34,37], which opens up a vast array of possibilities that have yet to be imagined for exploring how participatory oral history and digital archiving can be used to support ongoing movements for justice in diasporic communities.