I had already made several research trips to Haiti, but the brief drive to Mama Lola's house was my introduction to the Brooklyn outpost of the Caribbean … Animated conversations could be heard in Haitian, French Creole, Spanish, and more than one lyrical dialect of English. The street was a crazy quilt of shops: Chicka-Licka, the Ashanti Bazaar, a storefront Christian church with an improbably long and specific name, a Haitian restaurant, and Botanica Shango … I was no more than a few miles from my home in lower Manhattan, but I felt as I had taken a wrong turn, slipped through a crack between worlds, and emerged on the main street of a tropical city.

Brooklyn 1974. ‘Sassy Antiguan’ Jamaica Kincaid visits the West Indian Day Parade, and finds herself, like anthropologist Karen McCarthy Brown, in a ‘tropical city’ in Brooklyn. After racing across the Manhattan Bridge in a taxi, she wanders the parade route on Eastern Parkway, one of Brooklyn's two grand boulevards, designed by Central Park architects Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux in 1866. Framed by stately apartment buildings and a tree-lined median that separates the main roadway from a narrow outlet, Eastern Parkway stretches from Evergreen Cemetery in Queens, past Ralph Avenue, the boundary between Brooklyn and Queens. It continues by the imposing Beaux-Arts Brooklyn Museum and meets Grand Army Plaza, a large oval plaza that is home to Brooklyn's own Arc de Triomphe, the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Arch, a monument built in the late nineteenth century in honor of the Union soldiers that died during the Civil War.

Once per year, on Labor Day in early September, roughly on the anniversary of Trinidadian independence, Eastern Parkway is the site of New York City's version of Carnival, the West Indian Day Parade. Thousands line the streets to take in the brightly coloured, extravagant costumes of the bands that dance past them. Vendors hawk the food and flags of the many islands whose populations are represented at the event. And politicians and community leaders campaign and network among their constituents.