June is Caribbean American Heritage Month, and most people scroll right past it. That’s a shame, because the Caribbean — including its Spanish-speaking islands, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic — has shaped American culture so deeply that you can’t separate the two anymore. The biggest example is one almost nobody connects to the islands.
Hip-hop was born from a Jamaican block party
On August 11, 1973, an 18-year-old named Clive Campbell threw a back-to-school party in the rec room of an apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. You know him as DJ Kool Herc. He was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and he brought the island’s sound-system culture with him — massive speakers, a DJ working the crowd, and a trick of extending the instrumental “break” of a record so dancers could go off. That break became the breakbeat. The breakbeat became hip-hop.
The genre that became America’s dominant cultural export started as a Jamaican immigrant doing what DJs did back home. And the Caribbean thread never left it: Notorious B.I.G. (Jamaican roots), Busta Rhymes (Jamaican), Nicki Minaj (Trinidadian), Cardi B (Dominican and Trinidadian), and the entire reggae-to-rap pipeline all run straight back to the islands.
6 more the Caribbean quietly gave America
1. The first Black woman to run for president. Shirley Chisholm — daughter of Caribbean immigrants (Barbadian and Guyanese) — became the first Black woman elected to Congress in 1968, then ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972. “Unbought and unbossed.” Decades ahead of her time.
2. The food on your block. Jerk chicken, beef patties, roti, rice and peas, oxtail — Caribbean food is now a fixture of every major American city, especially New York, where the line between “Caribbean” and “New York” food has basically dissolved.
3. The biggest street party in the country. The West Indian Day Parade in Brooklyn draws over a million people every Labor Day — Carnival culture, soca and steel pan, transplanted whole from Trinidad and the wider Caribbean.
4. The roots of reggaeton and salsa. Reggaeton was built in Puerto Rico on a Panamanian-Jamaican dembow foundation. Salsa was assembled in New York by Cuban and Puerto Rican musicians. The sound of Latin music’s global takeover is Caribbean to its core. (We’ve got a whole piece coming on each.)
5. The thinkers who shaped Black America. Marcus Garvey (Jamaican) built the largest Black movement in U.S. history. Arturo Schomburg (Puerto Rican) built the archive that saved Black history. Caribbean immigrants didn’t just join American Black culture — they helped build its intellectual backbone.
6. The icons we claim as simply “American.” Sidney Poitier (Bahamian), Harry Belafonte (Jamaican heritage), Colin Powell (Jamaican parents), Kamala Harris (Jamaican father). The “American” story keeps quietly omitting the word Caribbean in front of it.
Why say it out loud
The Caribbean gets treated as a vacation, not a civilization — beaches and rum in the ads, and not much else. But the islands have been exporting culture to the mainland for a century: the music you stream, the food you order, the movements that changed the country. This month is a good time to put the credit where it belongs — and to notice how much of what we call “American” arrived on a boat or a plane from somewhere a lot smaller, and a lot louder.
Watch on Wehpa
For more on the Caribbean roots running through American and Latino culture, head to Wehpa TV — free on Roku.
