Inspired by her mother who would always preach “Trini to de bone,” Keisha Dabrowski returned to Trinidad to immerse herself in the Emancipation Day festivities, learn about and expose her son to what their ancestors endured while enslaved in TT.
Dabrowski was born in Sangre Grande – her maiden name is Peters – and was a pupil of Arima Girls’ Government.
She is happily married and her husband is of German, English and Polish descent. Together they have one son, Kristopher.
When she was six-years-old, her mother migrated to the US.
She said her father had migrated first before her mother, but her mother did not even tell her she was going and Dabrowski only found out when she came home from school that day.
“Understanding what it means to be abandoned… I understand that. And I understand the plight of immigrants and their children. When I became a mum, I realised that was a hard thing for my mother to do because I could not even think of leaving my son far less to go to a country I knew nothing about.”
She stayed with her aunt for two years and grew to look from her mum’s perspective, which she described as a leap of faith.
At eight, her mother returned and took her to the US.
“We were living in a small one-bedroom apartment in the US, but we had a house with a nice backyard where I used to make mud pies. But I also saw the opportunities because growing up in Brooklyn with a bunch of other immigrants from these other countries who became my community.”
Dabrowski said there were people from the Caribbean and other countries working together and fighting for their children to have a better future.
“I would go to Manhattan and Long Island with my mum who did domesticated work – babysit and clean – and I remember going there and saying, ‘I would love to live in a place like this one day. This is amazing.’ And only seeing white people and thinking, ‘I want to be like them, this is something that only they have.’”
Dabrowski said her mother wanted her to have all the opportunities the US could offer, after realising that, she stopped at nothing to get it.
She said the pivotal point in her life and one of the other reasons she chose to celebrate Emancipation Day in TT this year was when she learned about Jim Crow.
“Racism is alive and well, and while in TT we will separate ourselves into Indo-Trini and Afro-Trini or Native people, in America, there’s white and everything else.”
While in Trinidad, she never learned about slavery, but it made her wonder about the history of TT.
After realising that the US’ Jim Crow era was just the construction of black identity – that would be used to justify slavery – she decided to pursue an undergraduate degree in communications and marketing at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. She jokes and says she went to an engineering college for a business degree.
Her reasoning was if a black identity could be created for negative purposes, then it can be deconstructed and used as a way to educate people.
“Typical to any Trini, I had so much pride in who I a
