By Thomas Isaac
That early Spanish town design, reiterated ad infinitum et nauseam throughout the Americas, may be gradually marginalized with the rapid southward expansion of the town. But until quite recently, well into the new era of national independence, it retained its prominence as a kind of geographical and spiritual focus, and indeed still does today. The aesthetic magnificence of the Northern Range, that compels the onlooker to turn north often as a landmark for direction and location, has largely configured the sense of space and direction for most whom live along the corridor.
Turning northwards one couldn't help seeing the spire (unless blocked by trees), or on mornings and sundown hearing the church bell calling the faithful to prayer and the tasks of the day ahead. Just south of the little village the town's secular/commercial centre developed as the main road connecting Arima to the capital city of Port of Spain and the eastern counties beyond. This became Broadway or the Eastern Main Road running west through Mausica or Arima Old Road. What became Queen Street the central north-south axis of the town took you to the early outskirts and the market centre, bounding with the ranch that developed in the 19th century into a national centre of horse-racing activities. The coming of the train in the 1870s provided a virtual extension of the town boundaries. Queen Street had to be lengthened to link with the rail transport system and buggies, carts and carriages were virtually extending the area of the town and inviting increasing migration from all quarters. Arimians dumped their refuse along the Mausica Riverbank on its leeward side. And this was the Arima that survived well into the period of early independence
Talk about the borough's boundaries makes sense after 1888 and the Royal Charter. The boundaries were defined as running along the eastern and western water courses, and southwards along the train-line. This was the inheritance received by post-independence Arima. The layout of the town possessed its own kind of functional rationality, clearly developed by insightful planning over the decades. By now the town regarded as the third most populous and strategically significant district of the island given its status as a borough and the mayorship.
The dial's erection in 1912, towering over the surrounding buildings, as well as its central location, endowed it with a symbolic character, embodying the spirit of a noble, ambitious people, gens Arima. The dial became the emblem of a sense of separateness and
uniqueness, of identity and character, and still remains the distinctive feature of the Arima landscape. It continues today to retain a kind of fetish presence and to function as one of the nodal points of community living, together with church, market, savannah, or police station, all strategically positioned in old Arima
It is important to note however that the prescribed boundaries of the borough with its dial centre, was little more than an administrative construct by 1962, a kind of counter factual designation that misrepresented the reality of a much larger communal association. New expansive areas of residence and commerce had transgressed the landmarks set by officialdom and the Arima of the 1940s to 60s was indeed far more complex and varied, with districts or sectors developing with marked cultural and ever ethnic peculiarities. The sense of cultural homogeneity was virtually falsified by the ethnic and cultural diversity that gave colour to community life.
The cultural and spatial segmentation of Arima into clearly distinct and competing districts often became palpably manifest right there in the Arima savannah during football or cricket encounter. In the immediate post-independence period Arima was a cohesive association of
mutually competing districts, whose differences came to life on the public playing fields, though it generally immured menacingly beneath the surface in social prejudice, religious separateness, and cultural retentions that made it a virtually proto-globalised multi-cultural space reflecting in miniature the diversity of the larger national community.
Arima's centre remained the Church to market nexus along Queen Street. This was and still remains the business centre and the meeting place of the folk. lt’s inhabitants comprised a kind of brown-skinned bourgeoisie of mixed African and Spanish-Carib ancestry, Roman Catholic in religion and patois-speaking at home. It was their cultural dominance that socialised the new migrants in the outlying areas, in Carnival celebrations, horse-racing, Santa Rosa festivities, parang music, Christmas observances and almost all that became distinctively Arimian
Lord Kitchener, Holly Betaudier, Arnold Thomasos, Johnny Brooks, Ulmont Pierre, Vincent Edwards, Charlie Z Bain, Atai, Shakespeare, Raphael Chinaleong, Louise Horne, Juliana Beckles, Percy Cezair, as well as Big John, Big Bacas, Jet Sam, Sharkey, Crazy Kenneth are many of the more memorable names of that generation of Arimians, and they all lived well within the borough's inner boundaries
The Last 50 Years - The changing face of the Royal Borough
Thomas Isaac
Arima Borough Corporation Jubilee Publication 2012
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