The Twin Cities are home to a large and vibrant community of immigrants from Guyana and Trinidad for whom "home" can refer to Minneapolis, India, or the Caribbean. During the fall semester of 2007, the students in Dr. Schultz's ethnography course explored how music at Indo-Caribbean Hindu temples is used to negotiate identities of attachment to these multiple homes.

Indians first came to the Caribbean as indentured servants on British plantations following the abolition of slavery in 1838. Today, people of Indian descent comprise the largest ethnic group in Trinidad, Guyana, and Suriname, and--following a wave of migration that began in the 1960s--have steadily grown in numbers in North American cities. Despite the size and vitality of the Indo-Caribbean community in the Twin Cities, they remain under-represented in the broader cultural life of Minneapolis.

The diversity of musical expression at Indo-Caribbean functions in the Twin Cities is exhilarating. Some genres, such as chautal and wedding songs, are sung in Bhojpuri and are nearly indistinguishable from what one might hear in rural North India, while other genres, such as chutney and chutney-soca, were born in the Caribbean from a lively exchange between Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean practices. Every event is sure to include music from Bollywood films: young people dancing to hip-hop remixes or their parents singing devotional songs from older Hindi films.

In the pages linked below, Kylah Aull, Machen Davis, Jenni Kotting, Emily McManus, John Schaal, and Ethan Seabury-Kolod introduce you to the people and sounds of Vishnu Mandir and Gaayatri Mandir.