African Influence In The Americas

Since its inception in 1976, the Caribbean Cultural Center in Manhattan, along with numerous other black institutions, has been continuing the battle against the centuries-old myth that blacks have had nothing of value culturally or intellectually to offer the New World. The center has been doing this by researching and identifying African continuities and retentions, and showing their impact on general society.

The center, the brainchild of Marta Moreno Vega, a New York-born Puerto Rican and its executive director, grew out of a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship she received in 1975 to find out about various art collections that had been properly identified, as well as find out their location. At that time, Ms. Vega, a former art education teacher in the New York City public school system, was director of El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem and needed the information in order for the art objects to "make any sense."

She had no intention of starting an institution when she got the first of two six-month fellowships. But her difficulties in tracking down and identifying collections made it clear that a center was needed to make these publicly inaccessible artworks available for scholarly examination. It became necessary for her to travel throughout the Caribbean and Bahia, Brazil to see what other institutions were doing so that she could decide what she would do differently. She learned that local institutions focused only on the history and culture of their particular geographic area and that "[n]one of them brought the cultures together and explored their relationship and commonalities and their differences."

It became apparent to Ms. Vega that such a center would be a unique cultural treasure chest to scholars and laymen alike. As it turned out, scholars and researchers were very receptive to the idea because, she said, they "felt there had to be some kind of institutional vehicle that would bring this information to the foreground."

When she was asked how strong the African influence in the Americas has been, Ms. Vega replied: "It's pervasive. You see it in terms of instruments in orchestras, in terms of clothing style, in terms of foods. The Afro-American community is clearly becoming the majority culture. When you have a majority culture, you  have food, clothes, art forms that are expressive of [that] culture. We have to be very clear that the influence and impact is there." Although the African cultural influence in the Americas is "very much intact," she continued, "the media doesn't focus on it and when [the media] does [they present this influence as coming from] primitive cultures. And derogatory terms makes us turn away [from that influence] or say it's not there."

The Caribbean Cultural Center, newly located in a narrow, four-story building near St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital on the West Side of Manhattan receives about 60 to 65 people a day. The support and attendance from the black community, said Ms. Vega, "has been very good. We get increasingly more pleased, more committed to what we're doing because the audience represents black people from all cultures."

The center plans to have an enclosed tropical garden in the backyard so that children can see the various kinds of "plants and vegetation that grows in the Caribbean." Also planned is the completion of fourth-floor remodeling work. This is where all audio-visual documentation of center activities will be made accessible to students and researchers.

When storage space for the audio-visual materials runs out, the center will donate to the New York Public Library's Schomburg Collection or some other library those materials no longer needed.

According to Ms. Vega, the center has developed a five-year plan and is "looking for those kinds of activities and art forms that [will] fit into the development of that plan," a sort of blueprint detailing the center's direction and aesthetic definition. She pointed out that in the search for "the broader impact of African cultures in the Americas," they would like to "move into Panama and Colombia and other areas where black continuities are."

This article was originally published in the Harlem Weekly newspaper in 1983.

Note: The Caribbean Cultural Center, in 2012 or 2013, plans to leave its 58th Street location and move to its new home, an abandoned firehouse on 125th Street in East Harlem, just steps from the Metro North and Lexington Avenue train stations.