This week’s guest is Idrees. His parents immigrated from Trinidad and Tobago, and he was born and raised in South Florida. If you know anything about South Florida, you know how culturally diverse it is. Idrees shares the mixture of friends and people he grew up with. He thought that the rest of the US was just as diverse. It wasn’t until he got to college that he realized it wasn’t.
Idrees also shares some history about Trinidad and Tobago and tells us his American Dream.
Life Growing Up For Idrees
As stated above, Idrees grew up with people from all over the Caribbean and South America. He recalls all of his friends wearing little chains with flags from different countries, so it was normal to see and learn about people from different countries. And if you asked someone where they were from, they would always say they were from a different country. For example, if someone asked me where I’m from, I would say, “Dominican,” which is the same concept.
Idrees says it was a privilege growing up in South Florida. When he went to college at UCF, although it wasn’t far—it was in Orlando—there were a lot of students from Jacksonville, FL, so he realized the rest of the US wasn’t as diverse as South Florida. He said, “I remember seeing that black Americans only made up 13% of the population, and I thought, that can’t be, there’s no way.”
Idrees Shares History
He explained that he is Indian by race, but culturally, he is from Trinidad. When the British abolished slavery in the Caribbean, they still needed workers to work the plantation, so they brought Chinese people first. Since that didn’t work out, they put them in charge of the shops. And so the British brought people from India over as indentured servants for a period of five years, and they were paid after—but very minimal payment. Back then, Great Britain owned India. You can read more about this here.
Currently, Trinidad and other surrounding islands are made up of about 30% blacks, 30% Indians, and the rest are mixed, like Chinese, Syrian, and most recently, Venezuelan. Idrees’s great-grandmother was from India. His grandmother actually grew up on a plantation and spoke Hindi. However, Hindi was lost after his mom’s generation, so they only spoke English.
Because of the slave trade, the Caribbean is mixed with different cultures, but those cultures are influenced by Africa, India, and Asia.
Idrees’s American Dream
As always, I love asking my guests what the American Dream means to them, and this was Indree’s answer:
“I would say it’s the opportunities here that people in Trinidad don’t have. Like the, crime in Trinidad has surged recently, and a lot of gang violence like kidnapping and stuff. It makes me feel like I live in America, relatively safe for the most part. I don’t have that fear of waking up and seeing murders or how many murders were last night and stuff like that.”
Listen Now
You can watch and listen to Idree’s full episode on YouTube
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