Interview with a Caribbean Native

For my interview I interviewed Mugabe Tenn-Kin, or better known as Mugi to most people. Mugi is twenty-eight years old and was born in Kingston, Jamaica. He is one of four children and moved to Long Beach, California, with his family when he was four. Although, he was young when he left, he still has vivid memories of Jamaica and still returns about every two years. He speaks English and Patois.

He comes from a remarkably cultural diverse family. Mugi's mother's father is Panamanian and his mother's mother is a Maroon Indian, they met in Panama and eventually moved to Jamaica. Mugi's father's father is Asian and was living in Panama working on the Panama Canal, then was supposed to return to Asia but fled to Germantown, Jamaica. There he met Mugi's grandmother, she is German but she was born in Jamaica. In Jamaica is where his parents met.

His parents were very much into music, his father's day job was a cable man, but he also played the drums and actually played for Bob Marley a few times. He used to have dreadlocks, but he cut them off because, "now it is just a bunch of Wyclefs running around with them."Ð' His mother was a seamstress and made many of Bob Marley's shirts. This early introduction to music got Mugi extremely involved into music as well. When he was a teenager in Long Beach he was in many different bands. I was in fact especially excited because one of my favorite bands, Sublime, is out of Long Beach and Mugi knew them and had played with them before the lead singer died.

To Mugi, Jamaicans are rebellious people; he says that it started with the slaves, "they sent all the bad slaves to Jamaica.Ð'ЃEIf you tell a Jamaican to do something they are going to do the exact opposite. He sees this in himself a lot as he is growing up. His first impressions of the United States were mixed, some good and some bad. Once he got to middle school he really started to see the difference. In Jamaica, he says, "know one sees color, there are so many people from so many different places, and we are all the same.Ð'ЃESo in middle school when cliques begin to form, Mugi was friends with everyone. He did not see a difference. Some of his black friends would tell him he was a sellout for hanging out with white kids. He saw a prejudice that he had not seen back home. There is no racism between the ethnically different people in Jamaica. On the other hand he says the United States offers so much more opportunity that he would have never gotten if he was still living in Jamaica. With music or with his education.

While Mugi was growing up in Long Island he got very much into surfing and skateboarding. He said that even though Jamaica is an island, surfing is somewhat new and just now catching on really big in the past few years. They saw the waves and the beach as just a place to play not to surf. Actually now, Jamaica has their own surf company.

His family still celebrates the Jamaican Independence Day in August. One thing that I found very interesting was the way they celebrate Labor Day. In Jamaica, on Labor Day you go to your neighbor's house and do yard work and clean their house and they come over and do the same for you. Even though his family has been living in the United