“Where’s the Cookup Rice?”

This chapter examines how African-Guyanese-Americans police the boundaries of “Guyanese food” at Come to My Kwe-Kwe to “remember,” to articulate Blackness, and to facilitate rediasporization. It also demonstrates the delicate balance established between the desires of the attendees and the financial goals of vendors who provide Come to My Kwe-Kwe meals. Diverse cuisines are sold at Come to My Kwe-Kwe, but attendees who are accustomed to eating Guyanese food, or are familiar with the traditional kweh-kweh, often attend the ritual expecting to consume African-influenced Guyanese cuisines, like cookup rice, metemgee, and conkee. This chapter also explores how migration and the changing needs and desires of the African-Guyanese community simultaneously facilitate destruction and innovations of Guyanese cuisines. Ultimately, this chapter articulates Come to My Kwe-Kwe foods simultaneously to diminish the symbolic distance between diasporas and homelands and establish new distances through cost, culinary innovations, and a changing African-Guyanese community.