✦ The Caribbean · Guardian 18 of 64

Amaya

Scotch Bonnet Pepper — anchored in Caribbean Islands (Jamaica, Trinidad, Haiti).

AMAYA Final artwork pending

Crop: Scotch Bonnet Pepper
Cultural anchor: Caribbean Islands (Jamaica, Trinidad, Haiti)
Region: The Caribbean

Botanical origin vs. cultural anchor

Botanical ancestry: Capsicum peppers are American crops; Scotch bonnet is a Caribbean cultivar identity shaped through island seed selection, heat, flavor, and preservation.

Narrative

Amaya's story follows Scotch Bonnet Pepper through storm-tested orchards, where taste is inseparable from land use, season, and inherited technique. The guardian asks viewers to see Scotch Bonnet Pepper as an archive of choices made across generations.

Origin

For Amaya, origin is not a single discovery moment. It is a chain of growers, cooks, seed keepers, and landscapes that made Scotch Bonnet Pepper meaningful in relation to Caribbean Islands (Jamaica, Trinidad, Haiti).

Notes

Scotch bonnet is flavor architecture: heat, fruitiness, fermentation, preservation, and identity in one small pepper.

Final Guardian artwork pending for this character.

Add to the record

Know Scotch Bonnet Pepper from the inside?

If this crop has a story where you are — a name it carries, a dish it belongs to, a recipe, a season, a source we should be citing — it belongs in this record. Amaya’s entry, like every entry, is a living document: community knowledge is reviewed and incorporated into future editions.

What are you adding?

A memory or story A dish A recipe A name it carries A correction A source Something else

A memory can live in a place — a yard, a market, a kitchen — or in the body: a smell, a taste, the weight of a full basket. Place is memory; so is smell. Tell it the way you carry it.

Name the dish and the table it belongs to — the season, the occasion, who cooks it and who taught them. The dish is where a crop becomes a culture.

Write it the way it is actually made. “A handful, until it smells right” is a real measurement — looseness is information, not a flaw.

What it is called where you are, in any language — uncertain spelling is fine. Say who uses the name and where; names carry routes.

Point to what is wrong and say what is right, as you know it. Lived knowledge counts as evidence here — you do not need a citation to be taken seriously.

A book, a paper, an archive, an elder, a grower. People are sources. Tell us where to look and what it will show us.

If it does not fit any box here, it may be the thing we have not thought to ask for. Say it plainly.

Your contribution

Name the record credits its contributors

Email to verify authorship — never published

Reviewed before anything is published, per the data privacy policy. Your name and email are asked for because authorship matters here: a record that cannot be verified cannot be trusted, and a contribution that holds is credited to you by name in future editions. Your email is never published.

When the collection launches

From Guardian to Garden

Nothing here is for sale yet. When the collection launches, 60% of proceeds will be reinvested directly into community-controlled programs — the split is already fixed by policy.

The whole collection