.png){kind=small}
.png)
Camealia Xavier-Chihota
Caribbean Heritage Representation and Building Community in Medway
TENS-2026-001 | 10 Black Voices of Medway 2026
Camealia Xavier-Chihota brings together professional communication, Caribbean family heritage and a commitment to the place where she grew up.
In her conversation with me for TENS, she describes a life shaped by relationships: with colleagues, children, older generations and the communities she helps connect.
Her account moves between fashion, advertising technology, natural hair and Medway Culture Club. Across these subjects, a consistent concern emerges.
People need opportunities to be recognised, to participate and to see their experiences reflected in the spaces around them.
A career built around communication
At the time of her interview, Camealia works as marketing and social media director at The Digital Voice, a public relations agency working with advertising technology businesses. She makes a useful distinction when discussing this role. She communicates and markets technology; she does not describe herself as the person developing it. Her expertise lies in understanding businesses, explaining their ideas and helping the people behind them reach an audience.
That emphasis on people is important to her approach. Meeting someone gives her a stronger understanding of how to present their work than reading a biography alone. Conversation reveals common ground, interests and the character behind a professional profile. Her work involves helping clients communicate through opportunities including podcasts, industry events and written material. It draws on the ability to listen as well as the ability to promote.
Her route into this field began in fashion. She worked as a fashion buyer before her responsibilities developed into ecommerce and marketing. The transition brought new challenges, but it also provided a bridge into another industry. Looking back, she describes a career that changed through experience rather than following a single, fixed professional identity.
Work and family life
Motherhood also influenced those decisions. Camealia recalls the strain of commuting and the feeling that work was taking time away from her children. Remote working offered a different arrangement. It allowed her to remain sociable while having more choice about how professional and family commitments fitted together.
Her account gives a practical dimension to discussions about opportunity. An interesting job also has to work within a person's life.
Flexibility can affect whether someone has time for their family, whether they can sustain employment and whether they can contribute to community activity beyond paid work.
For Camealia, the working environment helped create room for the Medway Culture Club alongside her corporate responsibilities.
Within The Digital Voice, she also describes establishing the Culture Fix team.
Its purpose includes amplifying under-represented voices and building a sense of connection in a remote organisation. One example she remembers is a pancake activity involving colleagues in their own kitchens. It is a small detail, but it shows how belonging can be cultivated through shared activities as well as formal statements about inclusion.
Medway Culture Club
In the supplied interview summary, Camealia recalls co-founding Medway Culture Club in 2020, during the pandemic and following the murder of George Floyd. The organisation developed around cultural education, social connection and improving race relations locally. It began with online activity before moving into face-to-face sessions in Gillingham.
Her involvement connects professional skills with local commitment. Marketing becomes a way of helping families find activities, making community work visible and widening participation. The club's welcome extends beyond a single background, while its Black-led perspective responds to experiences that have often received less attention.
This work also places Camealia within a longer story of people organising opportunities for themselves and their neighbours. Community heritage includes the spaces residents create, the knowledge they exchange and the relationships they maintain. Recording the beginnings and purpose of an organisation preserves something that an event photograph or publicity poster cannot explain on its own: why people felt it needed to exist.
Caribbean inheritance and belonging
Camealia identifies herself as a woman of Caribbean heritage. Her parents came to Britain as children and later moved from London to Chatham. The family connections discussed in her summary include Dominica and Saint Lucia. Her story therefore joins Medway to several places without requiring one connection to cancel another.
She also speaks about her grandfather, Asquith Xavier, and his legacy of challenging workplace discrimination at British Rail. Within her account, this inheritance is personal as well as historical. A public story about resistance sits alongside the experience of belonging to a family whose choices continue to influence later generations.
The relationship between inheritance and action is particularly significant. Camealia's contribution is not confined to remembering an earlier achievement. Her community work raises questions about what recognition and inclusion mean now, in workplaces and neighbourhoods where younger people are building their own lives. Family history becomes part of the context from which contemporary choices are made.
Hair and the freedom to be visible
Her memories of natural hair bring these questions close to everyday experience.
She recalls expectations about appearance at school and the pressure surrounding what looked acceptable or professional.
She also remembers differences between generations, including conversations with her grandmother about presenting herself when looking for work.
These recollections show how cultural expectations can be carried through ordinary advice.
A remark about hair may contain assumptions about employment, respectability and how a Black woman will be received. Camealia's account also allows room for change.
Working in fashion gave her opportunities to express herself through appearance, and she describes reaching a point where her curls were good enough as they were.
Her TENS record preserves a contemporary Medway story in which professional life and cultural identity remain connected.
It recognises the work of communication, the responsibilities of motherhood and the patient effort involved in creating community. Camealia's voice invites readers to consider representation through the everyday conditions that allow people to participate with confidence.
The interview summary also records an alumni award from Canterbury Christ Church University recognising equity, inclusion and impact. Within this account, that recognition sits alongside less formal work: making colleagues feel connected, finding time for children and helping local families encounter cultural activity.
Keeping those different kinds of contributions together avoids making a public award the only measure of value. The relationships Camealia describes remain an essential part of understanding what recognition means within her life.
About this collection
An edited account based on the supplied oral-history transcript extract and interview summary. Personal recollections are attributed to the narrator; this article is not a verbatim transcript.
Supported by the Medway Heritage Place Project, with funding from Medway Council and the National Lottery Heritage Fund. With thanks to National Lottery players.
Interview, editorial adaptation and project direction by Michi Masumi — Anthropology, Art & AI. Published through the Benjamin Zephaniah Digital Archives & Library, an initiative led by Michi Masumi. Portrait photography by Michi Masumi unless otherwise credited; Leslie Haynes family photographs supplied through Russell Haynes, with original photographers credited where known.
Copyright © Michi Masumi 2026. All rights reserved. Copyright in individual contributions and third-party material remains with the respective rights holders.
Comments