Catching-up with Community Collections Grant Recipients: Documenting Goombay and Little Bahamas of Coconut Grove, Miami

The following is a guest post by Aarti Mehta-Kroll, co-leader of the 2024 American Folklife Center Community Collections Grant project, Documenting Goombay and Little Bahamas of Coconut Grove. This post is part of the Of the People blog series featuring awardees of the American Folklife Center’s Community Collections Grants program. The Community Collections Grants program of the American Folklife Center is part of the Library’s Of the People: Widening the Path initiative, which seeks to create new opportunities for more Americans to engage with the Library of Congress and to add their perspectives to the Library’s collections, allowing the national library to share a more inclusive American story. Read more about the 2024 Community Collections Grants recipients here.

Our project will be documenting the annual Goombay Festival that has taken place in Coconut Grove since 1976. To understand the significance of this event, which celebrates the transnational linkages between Miami and the Bahamas, it’s important to know about the history of the neighborhood in which it takes place.

Coconut Grove is the oldest, continuously inhabited area in Miami, predating the establishment of the city of Miami itself. It was founded by an eclectic group of adventurers, homesteaders and Bahamians who were undaunted by the untouched wilderness that characterized the area in late 1800s. The Bahamians were skilled at farming in what at first sight appeared to be unforgiving terrain. Using their knowledge of similar topographies in the Bahamas, they planted fruits, vegetables, and herbs that they brought with them from the islands along with recipes that they later shared with African Americans who migrated from Georgia and the Carolinas. In the 1920s, the Bahamians familiarity with coral rock led to many working as stonemasons who played an essential role in building the city of Coral Gables as well as estates such as Villa Vizcaya.

While Bahamians and Black Americans eventually lived in the communities of Perrine, Overtown, South Miami, and later Richmond Heights, the settlement that includes neighborhoods that connect parts of Coconut Grove and Coral Gables (henceforth “the Grove”) was a focal point of the Black and Bahamian community of Miami. This was partly because for many years, this neighborhood’s school, George Washington Carver, was the only school open to Black children in this region. Desegregation diminished the centrality of this neighborhood in people’s day-to-day lives, but not their cultural imagination. In 1976, a group of Black and White Grove residents collaborated to bring Goombay, a festival celebrating Bahamian dance, music, and culture, to the neighborhood. Goombay has traditionally taken place along Grand Avenue, what was once the main commercial artery of the Black community of the Grove. Lined with businesses that included restaurants, grocery stores, tailors, shoeshines, bars, and a movie theater, it fostered entrepreneurship and allowed residents to meet their day to day needs by patronizing local vendors.

Successive waves of urban renewal, disinvestment, civic neglect and most recently, gentrification have led to this once thriving street becoming dotted by vacant lots and just a few surviving businesses. In many ways, it mirrors the changes in the broader community where hundreds of families have been pushed out through the mechanisms of displacement mentioned above. However, during the two days of Goombay, this street and the entire neighborhood comes alive with music, people, the smell of traditional Bahamian foods, such as conch fritters, conch salad, and cracked conch, and the sense of elation as individuals and families return to the Grove and reclaim it as their own.

During prior celebrations of Goombay, our team from Florida International University has participated in the festivities recording interviews with community elders, and working with local historian Leona Cooper-Baker to display her vintage collection of Goombay posters. As recipients of the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress Community Collections Grant, we will be expanding our engagement at the festival. In the weeks leading up to Goombay we will be recording oral histories with members of the planning committee, learning what it takes to organize one of the biggest block parties of the year. During Goombay, members of our team and groups of volunteers will be taking photos and videos, doing interviews with festival patrons, junkanoo performers, and vendors, as we aim to capture the spirit of the festival. We are also working to recruit a generationally diverse group of community members to take photographs capturing their individual experience of Goombay. This year the festival will take place from May 31^st to June 2^nd, on Grand Avenue in Coconut Grove, Miami. If you can make it, do come join the festivities!