Orlando, Guyana

FHS Oral History Project – Guenet Gittens-Roberts

Guenet Gittens-Roberts was born in Guyana in 1975. She recollected her upbringing in Guyana during the 1980s, particularly how the country’s multicultural and diverse religious landscape influenced her profoundly. Guenet recalled memories of her parents owning a screen printing company and the intertwined relationship between work and life. Despite not explicitly realizing it then, Guenet reflected on the unique experience of being born only nine years after Guyana achieved independence from the British. Guenet spent her summers in Brooklyn, New York, and even attended Louis D. Brandeis High School in the Upper West Side. She emigrated permanently to the US around 2000, settling briefly in New York and then in Miami, Florida. Guenet recounted her experience living in Miami, particularly how she resonated with the deep Caribbean influences in the region. She then moved to Orlando with a mission to unite Caribbean peoples living in the City Beautiful, as she identified a lack of connections between the various but separate peoples of Caribbean origin living in the area. As a result, she served as the President of the Caribbean American Chamber of Commerce of Greater Orlando while establishing a print and digital newspaper titled Caribbean American Passport NewsMagazine to bolster the intracultural connections of Caribbean peoples in Orlando. She discussed her roles in both of these endeavors extensively. Lastly, Guenet shared broader observations about the immigrant experience in Florida and America, challenges Central Florida faces today (c. 2025), and how to maintain the tenuous American experiment.

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