Series Tuesday: Child of first-wave Guyanese immigrants to Schenectady looks to build community in hometown | The Daily Gazette
SECTIONS
Shares0
When Travis Ghirdharie started a fellowship working at the Schenectady City School District central office in August 2019, he hoped to get to the bottom of a vexing question: How many students of Guyanese descent attend Schenectady schools?
The eldest son of a Guyanese immigrant family that settled in Schenectady in the early 2000s, Ghirdharie returned to the city with a Cornell University diploma, multiple years of experience teaching in a New York City charter school and a burning desire to help improve his hometown.
Series Sunday: Guyanese immigration has changed face of Schenectady | The Daily Gazette
SECTIONS
Share1
SCHENECTADY – The ethnic makeup of cities is always evolving.
Across the northern United States, cities have changed over the last 200 years, as successive waves of the Irish, Italian and eastern Europeans arrived. In the mid-20th century, millions of southern Black people moved to northern cities, seeking new opportunities. Schenectady knows all those trends.
But Schenectady is unusual in having made an intentional effort to attract a newer ethnic group immigrants from Guyana and their Guyanese-American descendants, many of whom came to the U.S. following the South American nation’s gaining independence from British colonial rule in 1966.