Alice Yard is a contemporary art space and collective based in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. Our work is inspired by Trinidad’s tradition of communal urban yard spaces and mas camps—informal workshops for creative exchange. Since 2006, we have organized and hosted numerous projects, performances, conversations, and other events bringing together artists, musicians, writers, performers, scholars, and other makers and thinkers, developing an ethos of self-sufficiency and playfulness.

As we consider the past two decades and contemplate what we do and why, we are increasingly concerned with ideas of genealogy. Alice Yard understands its processes and practices not as a break with the past, but as belonging to a long and specifically Caribbean tradition, grappling with the problems and possibilities of self-determination. None of us is a formally trained historian, but we’re deeply aware of how our social, political, imaginative, and ideological contexts have been shaped by histories of liberation.

Our point of intersection with the broader project of Tirailleurs: Trials and Tribulations is our understanding of how Trinidad and Tobago’s critical political thinking was already being forged a half-century prior to independence in 1962, driven by the experiences of the First and Second World Wars. Though geographically distant from the European theatres of battle in the 1914–18 ‘Great War’, the former Crown Colony of Trinidad and Tobago, like other former British Caribbean territories, conducted extensive recruitment, including 1,500 officers and enlisted men who served in the British West India Regiment (BWIR) in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Several hundred women from Trinidad and Tobago were also recruited and participated through nursing, clerical work, and voluntary organizations, and many thousands more contributed through agricultural labour and food production in the First World War.

Two examples of those that were recruited include the labour leaders Arthur Andrew Cipriani (1875–1945) and Tubal Uriah ‘Buzz’ Butler (1897–1977). Politically active almost a generation apart, both men were radicalized (however too simplistic a term) by their experiences during the First World War with the BWIR. As amply documented in the new monograph Democracy’s Foot Soldiers (2025) by the US historian Reena N. Goldthree, the insistence on fair and equal treatment by the men of the BWIR, in the face of blatant racial prejudice, was a catalyst for both the 1918 Taranto Mutiny and political organizing in the Caribbean after the war. Many BWIR veterans joined the Trinidad Workingmen’s Association (TWA), an early political party soon to be led by Cipriani. What began in November 1919 as a Port of Spain dockworkers’ strike against unfair working conditions and inadequate pay, supported by the TWA, spread across Trinidad and Tobago in subsequent weeks to other working-class groups, including workers in the southern oilfields and the sugar and cocoa estates, and even newspaper printers. Less than two decades later, Trinidad’s 1937 Oilfield Riots, led by Butler—a series of sometimes violent disturbances arising from a campaign for fair wages—became the foundation of the country’s modern labour movement, and a landmark in the drive towards political self-determination.

When the Second World War broke out the following year, Trinidad’s oil reserves were a key asset for the British war effort. This is one of the reasons for the British government’s agreement to lease substantial areas of the island to the US to establish military bases, including a facility occupying most of the Chaguaramas peninsula in the north-west. Like many people recruited under colonial conditions, Ulric Cross (1917–2013) also became politicized through experiences in the Second World War. As a Black Trinidadian officer, he lived the contradictions of fighting against European fascism while freedoms were denied to him as a colonial subject. The anti-fascist rhetoric of ‘freedom’ exposed the absence of it under colonial rule, sharpening anti-colonial and Pan-African political horizons. After his work as a navigator in the Royal Air Force (RAF), Cross became a leading jurist and public intellectual, contributing to post-independence legal systems in the Caribbean and across Africa, challenging imperial continuities.

For our contribution, Alice Yard has assembled materials that include publications, a playlist of calypsos recorded between the 1930s and 1950s that function as a vital medium for political commentary in Trinidad and Tobago, and a series of images that document the recruitment in Trinidad.

Alice Yard