NEW YORK (RNS) — At the 37th annual Phagwah parade in early March in Richmond Hill, Queens, spectators danced to tassa drums, tossed brightly colored powders over the crowd and smeared each other’s faces with paint, all traditional ways to celebrate the Hindu spring festival known in Indian diaspora communities as Holi but called Phagwah by Hindus in the Caribbean.
But among the revelers and passing floats displaying names and logos of local businesses and Hindu temples marched a contingent of about 150 people demonstrating their Phagwah pride by less traditional means, waving LGBTQ pride flags and signs reading “Love is Equity” and “No Hate, No Fear, Immigrants Are Welcome Here.”
The group represented Phagwah Social Justice Collective, a coalition of civil rights and progressive Hindu organizations with missions to aid Indo-Caribbean women, immigrants and LGBTQ people in South Queens. Founded in 2019 by Mohamed Q. Amin, executive director of the 10-year-old Caribbean Equality Project, which advocates for the rights of Caribbean immigrants and LGBTQ people in New York, the coalition has become a fixture of the parade, the largest Phagwah celebration in the U.S.
Amin’s CEP had made history in 2016 by becoming the first group to wave the rainbow flag in the Phagwah parade, the same year New York’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade had allowed its first LGBTQ group to march. Though identifying as a queer Muslim, Amin, who uses he and they as their pronouns, had grown up celebrating Phagwah in their native Guyana and saw LGBTQ participation in the South Queens Phagwah parade as an essential step in creating a more inclusive Indo-Caribbean community.
“Here is this beautiful, colorful celebration, the festival of colors, that represents the triumph of good over evil,” he said in a recent interview. “As an LGBTQ community, we are some of the most colorful people, the most colorful identities, and we weren’t allowed to participate as our authentic selves in this parade.”
At that time, Amin recalls, the Indo-Caribbean and South Asian communities in South Queens became troubled by allegations of abuse by the leaders of local mandirs, as Hindus call their temples. For Amin, this scandal was a symptom of deeper injustices and inequities. “I love the community that I’m a part of, but we’re often not safe,” said Amin, who had suffered a violent hate crime in 2013, motivating them to found CEP.
The parade was part of Amin’s strategy to raise awareness of the treatment of women, immigrants and LGBTQ people in their community as related issues. Bias against these groups was the driver of violence, family rejection and housing and job discrimination, as was, they argued, lack of access to immigration and health services. Together, organizations that spoke for all these types of people could model what a safer, more equitable South Queens could look like.
In 2019, Amin reached out to social justice and faith-based organizations in Queens, along with two city agencies, the New York City Commission on Gender Equity and the NYC Commission on Human Rights, to form the Phagwah Social Justice Collective. After its first march in the parade, in 2019, the coalition began spreading a message of protecting LGBTQ rights and believing survivors of domestic violence through the streets of Liberty Avenue and Richmond Hill.
Not all of the coalitions members identify as Hindu, but Amin likes to point out that its members’ commitments are in keeping with Hindu beliefs and traditions, citing figures such as the 12th-century philosopher and social reformer Basaveshwara and the 19th century’s Swami Vivekananda and Dayanand Saraswati, Hindu leaders of the past who condemned discrimination as incompatible with Vedic teachings about the divine presence within every individual. Amin also sees a clear connection between the diverse tapestry of Hindu teachings and the diversity of the collective.
In 2021 the coalition held a virtual event, Queering Phagwah, that presented ways in which trans and queer artists and performers have preserved Indo-Caribbean religious culture through dance and music, despite experiencing discrimination from their faith communities. Conscious of this imbalance, in 2023, the group chose a trans woman, Olivia Valwaa, a community advocate at CEP, to lead the contingent in the parade.
Valwaa, a Guyanese immigrant, had misgivings about being offered the honor. Though she left Guyana to escape transphobia, she still faces discrimination in South Queens and at the time had not found a temple where she had been accepted, saying she was often distracted by scornful looks and demeaning questions from fellow worshippers. (She has since found a welcoming, queer-affirming temple through the United Madrassi Association.)
But on taking her place at the front of the collective’s contingent, she recalled, she felt immediately emboldened by the presence of her fellow queer and trans participants. She now treasures the experience as one of the greatest of her life.
“Where I come from,” she said, “we couldn’t celebrate Holi as ourselves. We had to be in the shadows, we had to mask ourselves, adding “that was just not me.” Valwaa now sees her visibility as an especially significant and joyful act of defiance against intimidation, given actions from the Trump administration aimed at erasing trans identities.
At this year’s parade, Valwaa led the contingent again, this time alongside a fellow trans member of the collective. Dressed in traditional clothing, they danced to a team of drummers while proudly waving the trans flag.
In the run-up to this year’s parade, Amin observed hateful rhetoric coming from naturalized immigrants who have adopted anti-immigrant values. In response, members of the collective chanted as they marched, “Who are we? Immigrants!” and held signs reading “Daughters of Immigrants,” “Protect Immigrant New York” and “Here to Stay! Holi Re!”
Other signs represented the range of the coalition’s concerns, bearing slogans such as “Teach Indo-Caribbean History” and “Indo-Caribbean History is Asian-American History.” In a short speech before the parade began, Amin reminded his co-organizers of Phagwah’s place in that history, how indentured Indian laborers, trafficked to sugar plantations in the British-occupied Caribbean, preserved their Hindu traditions and Holi celebration in the face of colonial violence and forced conversions to Christianity. Now their descendants had brought Holi, as Phagwah, to New York City.
After the parade had ended, Amin spoke again, stressing the importance of teaching Indo-Caribbean history in New York’s public schools. Working with the REACH Coalition, a multiethnic advocacy group, CEP is supporting a bill in the New York state Senate that would make Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander history part of the state’s public school curriculum.
Amin said the effort is part of a wider push to acknowledge the contributions of immigrants at a time when many fear mass deportations or detention. He said some clients among the 500 or so LGBTQ Caribbean asylum-seekers CEP represents have already self-deported.
But the Phagwah Social Justice Collective’s display of joy and solidarity in this year’s parade was cheering. Marching through Richmond Hill, celebrating freely with their neighbors brought to mind an emotional moment during the 2023 parade, Amin said, when they watched Valwaa, cheered on by her community, joyfully dancing down streets where LGBTQ people often fear harassment. “For this one day, and in this one moment, we were safe on our streets,” they said. “That’s what resistance looks like. Our voice is our power, and our visibility is our resistance.”
