Mentoring is defined as an “intense caring relationship in which persons with more experience work with less experienced persons to promote both professional and personal development” (Caffarella, 1992, p. 38). It is “a powerful emotional, and passionate interaction whereby the mentor and protégé experience…intellectual growth and development” (Galbraith & Zelenak, 1991, p. 126). In cross-cultural mentoring, mentors and protégés from different cultures confront social and cultural identities, goals, expectations, values, and beliefs (Cross & Lincoln, 2005) to “achieve a higher level of potency in education and society” (Mullen, 2005, p. 6). Cross-cultural mentoring research explores attitudes, behaviors, linguistics and motivators of the more visible racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. (Elmer, 1986, Ulmer, 2008). The cross-cultural mentoring experiences of Indo-Caribbeans in the U.S. are obscured from the research despite their rich socio-historic culture. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore the perceptions of Indo-Caribbean protégés regarding the effects of their cross-cultural mentoring experiences in the United States. Phenomenology is “the systematic attempt to uncover and describe…the internal meaning structures, of lived experience [by studying the] particulars or instances as they are encountered” (Van Manen, 1990, p. 10). Criterion and snowball sampling were used to recruit 15 participants. A semi-structured interview guide was used to gather data and Creswell’s (2007) simplified version of Moustakas’s (1994) Modification of the Stevick-Colaizzi-Keen Method of Analysis of Phenomenological Data was used to analyze the data. Three themes emerged: (a) “Sitting at the feet of gurus” taught protégés how to accept guidance, (b) Guru-Shishya: Learning and Discipleship, ways that protégés perceived mentors’ guidance related to work, skill acquisition, and social or emotional support, and (c) Samavartan sanskar: Building Coherence, helped protégés understand, manage and find meaning. Protégés’ goals and professional expectations determined what they wanted from cross-cultural mentoring relationships and what they were willing to endure within those relationships. Since participants valued achievement and continuous improvement, mentor support was integral to making meaning and developing a sense of coherence in their lives. Implications regarding cross-cultural mentoring relationships together with recommendations for future research conclude the study.

This dissertation examines the production of culture among Indo-Caribbean communities in New York City and Trinidad. It seeks to understand how cultural producers use performance as a way to mediate their experiences of racialization in local, national, and transnational spheres. Based on a multisited ethnographic study, I analyze the Indo-Caribbean diaspora as a result of nineteenth and twentieth century indentured labor migration and as a focus of post-1965 transnational migration. To do so, I introduce the idea of "transnational performances," which I employ to examine how expressions of Indo-Caribbean identity are performed in Trinidad and New York City as a way of mediating global processes. Specifically, this dissertation begins with a geographic and historical overview of Indo-Caribbean transnational populations, then provides an ethnographic study of contemporary Hindu religious festivals in Trinidad, an Islamic festival held in both New York City and Trinidad, Indo-Caribbean media in New York, and a cultural and arts center in New York. In all these sites Indo-Caribbean cultural producers engage the politics of public representation of Indo-Caribbean identity. I argue that while Indo-Caribbean religious, festival, media, and cultural producers engage with diasporic formations of identity and develop diasporic narratives that address Indian origins, they simultaneously develop new, creative, and flexible Indo- Caribbean transnational performances in the public sphere often coproducing their identities in relation to other diasporic communities. Concerns about authenticity exist alongside the desire to create new cultural practices that employ hybridity as a strategy to assert belonging. These transnational performances are spaces from which Indo-Caribbean communities develop a public voice that responds to perceived exclusions and erasures. The geographies of belonging that are central in the transnational performances of Indo-Caribbean cultural producers suggest that we must attend to the cultural practices developed within and across boundaries while taking a historical perspective on global processes that are reconfigured in the contemporary period. / text

Little is known about the factors that influence people from the Caribbean to seek reproductive health services in the United States. In this paper, I focus on Indo-Caribbean women from Guyana and Trinidad who undertake reproductive journeys to New York. I ask: (1) What influences Indo-Caribbean women to begin their reproductive journeys to Richmond Hill, New York? (2) How do Indo-Caribbean women challenge gender norms during their reproductive journeys? (3) How does women’s class inform their decision making in challenging gendered norms? After conducting 30 in-depth interviews with Indo-Caribbean women from Guyana and Trinidad who seek reproductive health services in New York, I find that Indo-Caribbean women’s reproductive journeys are influenced by sexism experienced within households, communities, and doctors’ offices, lack of proper care, legal restrictions, and unaffordable treatment. Another driver is support from women networks. Social networks helped women challenge gendered norms around motherhood that are present within communities in home countries. As women receive support from their networks, they challenge gender norms varied by their class. Women from middle-income households are more likely to challenge gender norms outwardly. Obtaining reproductive health care abroad becomes a journey with multidimensional experiences of gendered negotiations and constraints.

The high school English Language Arts curricula of Central Florida has faced increasing scrutiny during the past decade under often conflicting influences such as a rapidly diversifying student population, activism for and against multicultural curriculum reform, and pressure to streamline curricula and make it conform to state testing standards. Against this social backdrop, the question of how to introduce Inda-Caribbean literature at the secondary level presents unique intellectual and political challenges. On the one hand, first and second generation Inda-Caribbean migrants make up an increasingly significant percentage of Florida's student population. Like other first and second generation Caribbean migrants, Inda-Caribbean students must straddle between their modern Caribbean traditions, juxtaposed with North American societal values; however, their East Indian heritage is rarely reflected in those Caribbean texts that do make it into secondary language arts reading lists. In my thesis, I will explore some of the demographic shifts in Central Florida, consider the extent to which Inda-Caribbean texts might be regarded as representative expressions of Caribbean experience, and suggest how the inclusion of Inda-Caribbean literature in the canon might provide a model for similar curriculum reform in the state of Florida.