Tami Garcia on Growing Up Disconnected & Reclaiming Caribbean Identity
Tami Garcia’s journey began with growing up disconnected from her Caribbean heritage. Today, she helps others reclaim their cultural identity, not as a performance, but as a birthright.
In this episode, I talk with Tami Garcia, a cultural heritage reconnection coach whose story lives right inside Lens 1 of the Caribbean Diaspora Experience Model. Tami has Jamaican and Dominican roots, yet she grew up in Cleveland with little language, tradition, or context around either culture. She remembers being “that Garcia who could not speak Spanish,” and classmates accusing her of pretending to be something she was not. In reality, she was trying to be exactly who she was, but without the tools, community, or language to stand in it.
College at Howard University became a turning point. Surrounded by Black students from across the diaspora, Tami started to feel pride in both her Black American identity and her Caribbean heritage. Later, she moved to New York, placed herself in Dominican and Jamaican spaces on purpose, and learned through proximity, language, food, and community. That reconnection work only deepened when she became a mother to her Ethiopian daughter and made a conscious decision that shame about roots would not be part of her child’s story.
Tami and I talk about cultural impostor syndrome, cultural gatekeeping, and why so many of us feel pressure to “prove” that we belong to the places our families are from. We connect her work to the Caribbean Diaspora Experience Model, especially the realities of being diaspora born and disconnected from culture, and how time period, geography and survival shaped older generations who hid language or accents to protect their children.
Tami leaves us with a simple but powerful reminder. Your heritage is your birthright, whether you grew up on the island, in the Midwest, or somewhere in between. It does not depend on how fluent you are in a language, or how many summers you spent “back home.” You have a right to claim your roots and to reconnect with them in ways that fit the life you are living now.
At the end of the day, this is about more than flags and food. It is about identity, confidence, and being able to walk through the world with a clear sense of who you are.
The Six Lenses of CDEM
The Caribbean Diaspora Experience Model™ (CDEM) is a new way to understand how our Caribbean identity forms, evolves, and expresses itself in the diaspora. Created through real-life experiences, this model provides the language many have been missing to describe their complex cultural journeys. At the heart of CDEM are six interconnected lenses that help individuals understand their relationship with Caribbean culture.
Here’s a brief overview:
- Where You Start Shapes the Journey: Whether you migrated as an adult or were born in the diaspora, your connection to Caribbean culture starts somewhere. That starting point matters.
- Where You Live + What You Seek = How You Connect: Living in Brooklyn versus Milwaukee isn’t just geography, it’s a different experience of Caribbean culture. Where you live + your intention shapes your connection.
- Cultural Anchors Keep Us Rooted: Food, music, language, celebrations, spirituality, and family. These are the touch points that carry memory and transmit knowledge.
- Your Identity Will Shift, That’s the Point: As we age, our relationship with culture evolves. It’s not loss, it’s recalibration.
- Cultural Identity Influences How We Show Up at Work: Our work ethic, ambition, and how we navigate professional spaces are all shaped by cultural values.
- You’re Not Either/Or, You’re Both/And: Being fully Caribbean and fully American/Canadian/British at the same time is not a contradiction, it’s our strength.
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