ABSTRACT
It has become something of a cliché to declare that New York, and specifically Brooklyn, is both the largest city and the cultural capital of the anglophone Caribbean. Like most clichés, this is in some ways true and in some ways misleading. West Indians and their US-born children now number over one million in the New York metropolitan area (Vickerman and Kasinitz 1999). If West Indians from the various new nations that constituted the British West Indies before 1962 are considered together, they are the largest immigrant group in New York – comprising roughly 24 percent of New York's immigrant and second-generation population and almost half of the Black population (Waters 1999).2
