Guyana Cultural Association of New York, Inc
2013 SYMPOSIUM
Empire State College/State University of New York
177 Livingston Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201-5875
OCTOBER 26, 2013
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
“These two dominant influences should not be allowed to overwhelm our identity
or diminish its complexity” (from editorial mentioned below)
A recent Sunday Stabroek News editorial posed the question, “Who are we?” and
directed attention to a contemporary ripple in the peopling of Guyana—the new
immigrants from Brazil and China. The editorial also insinuated some of the societal
anxieties associated with this contemporary development. For more than
5,000 years, the contemporary nation has had close and intimate relations with
the churn of the pushes and pulls of the human migration drama. Continue reading
My parents, Arthur and Elaine Thomas, created a happy home in Vryheid in which there was the discipline of Saturday lessons in Arithmetic and Grammar; a strict insistence on fair play and respect for my six sisters and everybody else in the village, because my father didn’t want me to become an “educated rascal”; and the responsibility, from age 7 or 8, to ride into New Amsterdam to pay bills – $6.36 at Wrefords, $10.17 at Mr. Chapman, $3.33 at Davson’s, etc. – and then to return home with exact change! 