Indo-Caribbean Community • New York City
Indo-Caribbean Community in New York City
154,381 Guyana-born • 85,559 Trinidad & Tobago-born • Little Guyana on Liberty Avenue • A journey that began in 1838
There are more New Yorkers born in Guyana than born in India — 154,381 against 125,317. Add 85,559 from Trinidad and Tobago and you have one of the largest Indo-Caribbean populations anywhere in the world, concentrated along thirty blocks of Liberty Avenue in Richmond Hill and South Ozone Park. This community descends from Indians taken to the British Caribbean as indentured labourers beginning in 1838, who built a distinct culture over five generations and then migrated again, to Queens. It is not a subset of the Indian community and it is not a footnote to it. It is its own people, with its own mandirs, its own music, its own food and its own history — and New York is its American capital.
Last updated: August 2026 • Full Indian Community guide for New York City →
Who the Indo-Caribbean Community Is
On 5 May 1838, two ships — the Whitby and the Hesperus — landed in British Guiana carrying 396 Indians. Only 22 were women. Slavery had been abolished across the British Empire, and planters wanted a new supply of labour for the sugar estates. The system they built was called indenture: a five-year contract, passage paid, wages set low, and a return ticket that most people never used.
Trinidad followed on 30 May 1845, when the Fatel Razack tied up in Port of Spain after a 96-day voyage from Calcutta with 217 people aboard. Indentureship ran until 1917. Over those eight decades, roughly half a million Indians went to the British Caribbean, most from what are now Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, with smaller numbers from South India.
What happened next is the part that matters for understanding this community. Cut off from India, mixed together on estates regardless of region or language, they built something new. Bhojpuri and Awadhi blended into a Caribbean Hindustani that has now largely given way to English and Creole. Hindu practice reorganised itself around the pandit and the local mandir rather than around a hereditary temple structure. Ramayan recitation became the centre of religious life in a way it is not in most of India. New foods appeared — roti and curry made with Caribbean ingredients, pepper sauce, and dishes that exist nowhere in India.
The word people use for that shared origin is jahaji — ship-mate, from the Hindi jahaj. Jahaji bhai and jahaji bahin, ship-brother and ship-sister, describe the bond formed on the crossing between people who would otherwise have had nothing in common. It is still the word the community uses for itself.
From the 1960s onward, political upheaval and economic decline in Guyana and Trinidad pushed a second migration — this time to New York, Toronto and London. Richmond Hill is what that migration built.
Where the Indo-Caribbean Community Lives
The centre of gravity is unmistakable in the Census data. These are the New York areas with the most Guyana-born residents (ACS 2024):
South Ozone Park & Howard Beach — the core
24,178 Guyana-born and 5,707 Trinidad-born residents. This single area holds roughly a sixth of all Guyana-born New Yorkers. It is also the clearest illustration of why the Indo-Caribbean community is invisible in most Indian-American statistics: 24,115 people here identify as Asian Indian on the Census, but only 3,236 were born in India. Read the India-born number alone and you would conclude almost no Indians live here. Read the Asian Indian number alone and you would assume they came from India. Neither is right.
Richmond Hill, Kew Gardens & Woodhaven
11,507 Guyana-born and 2,436 Trinidad-born residents, plus 6,343 born in India. This is the commercial and cultural heart — Liberty Avenue runs straight through it — and it is the most mixed of the core areas, with a large Punjabi Sikh community sharing the same streets. Richmond Hill has been called both Little Guyana and Little Trinidad.
Queens Village, Bellerose & Rosedale
10,409 Guyana-born and 5,422 Trinidad-born. The suburban step outward — detached houses, more space, the same community. Families who started in Richmond Hill often end up here.
Jamaica, St. Albans & Hollis
22,746 Guyana-born and 6,833 Trinidad-born — the second-largest Guyanese concentration in the state. Note that this area is also home to 17,689 Bangladesh-born residents, so it is genuinely shared ground rather than an Indo-Caribbean enclave.
Beyond the core
The Rockaways (4,675 Guyana-born) and Wakefield, Williamsbridge & Eastchester in the Bronx (4,585) are the significant outposts. There is also a long-established Guyanese presence in Flatbush and Canarsie in Brooklyn, though that community is predominantly Afro-Guyanese rather than Indo-Guyanese.
An important limit on these numbers. The Census records country of birth, not ethnicity. Guyana’s 2012 census put the country at roughly 40% Indo-Guyanese and 29% Afro-Guyanese, with 20% mixed and 10.5% Amerindian, so the 154,381 Guyana-born New Yorkers are not all Indo-Guyanese. What the neighbourhood-level data shows is where the Indo-Caribbean population concentrates — Richmond Hill and South Ozone Park — as distinct from the largely Afro-Guyanese communities in central Brooklyn. Treat the borough-level totals as an upper bound and the neighbourhood pattern as the real signal.
Little Guyana — Liberty Avenue
Liberty Avenue runs roughly thirty blocks through Richmond Hill and Ozone Park, from Woodhaven Boulevard to the Van Wyck Expressway, under the elevated A train. In 2021 the intersection of Liberty Avenue and Lefferts Boulevard was officially co-named Little Guyana Avenue.
What is on it: roti shops and bakeries, sari and jewellery stores, puja supply shops selling deyas and jhandi flags, Caribbean groceries stocking cassava, plantain, wiri wiri peppers and salted cod, Chinese-Guyanese restaurants serving a cuisine that exists because Chinese indentured labourers arrived in Guyana too, remittance agents, travel agents specialising in Georgetown and Port of Spain routes, and music shops.
It is worth being direct about what this strip is for. It is not a tourist district and it has not been curated for visitors. It is a working commercial street that exists because roughly a hundred thousand people needed somewhere to buy their own food, clothes and religious supplies, and it is the single best reason to consider this part of Queens if you are Indo-Caribbean and moving to New York.
Getting there
The A train runs above Liberty Avenue with stops at 111th Street, Lefferts Boulevard and Rockaway Boulevard. The J and Z serve Jamaica Avenue to the north. The LIRR stops at Kew Gardens and Jamaica. JFK is a ten-minute drive, which matters more than it sounds — this is a community that travels back to Georgetown and Port of Spain regularly, and a large number of airport, cargo and taxi jobs are held by people who live within a few miles of the terminals.
Mandirs, Masjids & Churches
Indo-Caribbean religious life is majority Hindu but not exclusively so, and assuming otherwise is a common mistake. Indentured labourers included Muslims, and Christian conversion happened in the Caribbean over five generations. All three communities are present in Queens.
Hindu practice
Indo-Caribbean Hinduism is recognisably Hindu and noticeably different from mainland Indian practice. The Ramayan — specifically Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas — sits at the centre, and weekly satsangh built around its recitation and exposition is the core religious gathering. Services are often in English. The jhandi, a coloured prayer flag on a bamboo pole planted in the yard after a puja, is the most visible marker of an Indo-Caribbean Hindu home, and you will see them all over Richmond Hill and Ozone Park.
Liberty Avenue and its side streets carry a dense concentration of mandirs. Shri Lakshmi Narayan Mandir is among the older Hindu temples in the city. Many congregations began in basements and converted storefronts and grew from there, which is why the mandirs here look nothing like the purpose-built Agama-style temples elsewhere in Queens.
A note if you are Hindu and arriving from India. You will find the Ganesh Temple in Flushing more familiar in form and liturgy than the mandirs on Liberty Avenue, and Indo-Caribbean congregations more English-language and more Ramayan-centred than you may expect. Both are Hindu. Neither is a diluted version of the other. Several Richmond Hill families attend both.
Muslim and Christian communities
Indo-Caribbean Muslims — often called Indian Muslims from Guyana or Trinidad rather than by any single label — maintain masjids in the Richmond Hill and Ozone Park area, with their own Eid and Muharram observances that carry Caribbean inflections. Indo-Caribbean Christians, largely Presbyterian in origin through Canadian missionary work in Trinidad, attend churches across southern Queens.
Phagwah, Divali & the Festival Calendar
Phagwah — the big one
Holi is called Phagwah here, and the Phagwah Parade in Richmond Hill is the largest Indo-Caribbean public event in North America. The 38th annual parade ran on Sunday 29 March 2026, starting at Liberty Avenue and 133rd Street, running west along Liberty, north on 124th Street, east on 97th Avenue and south to 125th Street. Floats, chowtal singing groups, live music, and abeer and powder thrown along the whole route. It is a genuinely mass event and the single best day to understand this community from the outside.
Divali
Divali in Richmond Hill means deyas — small clay oil lamps — lining walls, windows and front steps across whole blocks, motorcades, and mandir programmes running for days. Since 2023 Diwali has been an official New York City public school holiday, which the Indo-Caribbean community campaigned for alongside South Asian organisations.
Indian Arrival Day
Commemorating the first ships — 5 May for Guyana, 30 May for Trinidad. Marked with cultural programmes rather than street parades. It is a day of some complexity within the community: a celebration of survival for many, and for others a reminder that indenture was a coercive system that historians widely regard as a successor to slavery rather than a clean break from it.
Also observed
Navratri, Ram Naumi, Krishna Janmashtami, and Kali puja in the Shakti traditions that are notably strong in Indo-Caribbean practice, particularly among families of South Indian descent whose Madrasi traditions survived the crossing.
Indo-Caribbean Food
This is a distinct cuisine, not Indian food with a Caribbean accent. If you have only eaten North Indian restaurant food in America, very little of it will be familiar.
Roti here means both the bread and the meal. Dhal puri is a soft roti layered with ground seasoned split peas; paratha, usually called buss-up-shut in Trinidad for the way it is beaten into ragged pieces that look like a burst shirt; sada roti for breakfast. It is served wrapped around curry — goat, duck, chicken, shrimp, channa and aloo — or on the side.
Doubles, the Trinidadian street food of two pieces of fried bara bread around curried channa with tamarind and pepper sauce, is the most beloved cheap breakfast in the community and sells out early.
Pepperpot, the Guyanese national dish, is a slow-cooked meat stew made with cassareep — a thick black syrup from bitter cassava — eaten especially at Christmas, which Guyanese families keep as a major food holiday. Cook-up rice, metemgee, chow mein from the Chinese-Guyanese tradition, black cake at weddings and Christmas, and pholourie and saheena as snacks.
Liberty Avenue is lined with roti shops, bakeries and takeaways serving all of this. The concentration between about 115th and 130th Streets is the densest.
Music, Media & Community Life
Chutney is the community’s own music — Bhojpuri-derived folk singing and the dholak and dhantal driving it, fused over time with soca to produce chutney soca. It is played at weddings, in Liberty Avenue shops and at large seasonal shows, and it is one of the clearest examples of a culture that is neither Indian nor generically Caribbean but specifically Indo-Caribbean. Chowtal, the call-and-response group singing of the Phagwah season, is the older devotional form.
Bollywood matters here too, and has since long before the current wave of Indian migration — Hindi film songs travelled to the Caribbean throughout the twentieth century and are a shared reference point across generations, even among people who do not speak Hindi.
Organizations
Indo-Caribbean Alliance (131-12 Liberty Avenue, Richmond Hill) is the main community services organisation — immigration help, youth programmes, civic engagement and social services, founded to serve a population that fell between the cracks of both South Asian and Caribbean service providers.
Jahajee Sisters is an Indo-Caribbean women’s movement-building organisation working on gender-based violence and women’s leadership, built out of monthly gatherings with women in Richmond Hill.
Caribbean Equality Project organises LGBTQ+ Caribbean New Yorkers and convenes the Phagwah Social Justice Collective at the annual parade.
Alongside these are numerous mandir-based youth groups, Guyanese and Trinidadian regional associations, cricket clubs, and masjid committees. Cricket is worth naming on its own: it is the community sport, played across Queens parks through the summer, and one of the fastest routes into the community for a newcomer.
A Note on Identity
Indo-Caribbean New Yorkers get asked to explain themselves constantly — by Indian Americans who assume a shared homeland that is five generations distant, by other Caribbean communities who read them as not quite Caribbean, and by official forms that offer no box that fits.
Most people answer with the specific thing: Guyanese, Trinidadian, Indo-Guyanese, Indo-Trinidadian, or simply West Indian. The Census forces a race question, and many tick Asian Indian — which is why New York’s Asian Indian count runs so far ahead of its India-born count, and why data alone will always describe this community badly.
If you are arriving from India and settling near Richmond Hill, the practical version is this: you have things in common — Ramayan, Divali, Phagwah, a lot of vocabulary — and you have real differences in language, food, religious practice and historical experience. The community has been here longer than most Indian immigrants have, built the infrastructure on Liberty Avenue without help, and does not think of itself as a branch of anyone else’s community. Approach it that way and you will be welcome.
For cost of living, the job market, schools, climate and practical information covering all communities in New York, see our Indian Community in New York City guide.
Data Sources
U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey 2024 5-Year Estimates — place of birth (table B05006: Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, India, Bangladesh) and Asian Indian alone or in any combination (table B02018), aggregated from Public Use Microdata Areas covering the five boroughs plus Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester and Rockland counties • Guyana Bureau of Statistics 2012 Population and Housing Census (ethnic composition) • Community organisation websites and direct verification • Local reporting on the Phagwah Parade. Country-of-birth figures count all people born in that country regardless of ethnicity. Read our full research methodology →