Behind the Smile, Second Edition: The Working Lives of Caribbean Tourism

Preface

Preface When people talk about tourism, they usually talk about their own holiday experiences and the places they have seen. Rarely do they consider the people who serve them and make their vacations possible . Behind the Smile is an inside look at the world of Caribbean tourism—specifically Barbados—as seen through the working lives of twenty men and women. The workers come from every level of tourism, from maid to hotel manager, gigolo to taxi driver, redcap to diving instructor. Their stories reveal the work of tourism and the encounters between “hosts” and “guests,” as workers and tourists are known in both the travel industry and academe. The tourism dealt with in this book involves travelers from the most developed parts of the world who are vacationing in an economically less developed region—the Eastern Caribbean. In Barbados , the guests are primarily British, American, and Canadian. Through interviews with the tourism workers, we learn how they interact with the visitors and what they think of them—of their af- fluent lifestyles, their moral character, and the manner in which they pursue leisure. We learn what they admire about them and what they shun. We discover the generalizations or stereotypes they make about nationality and gender. Do women on vacation complain more than men? Americans more than Europeans? Are Canadians cheaper than all others? Are Americans less curious? Brits more prejudiced? We also hear how Barbadians assess the costs and benefits of international tourism for their island and society. My interest in tourism evolved slowly over a two-decade span of research and teaching in the Caribbean. Initially I went to Barbados in 1982 to study emigrants who had returned home after spending many years living abroad in England and North America. I was interested in comparing the experiences of Barbadian returnees with the return migrants I had studied earlier in Ireland and Newfoundland (Gmelch 1992a). Since then my wife Sharon Bohn Gmelch and I have taken groups of anthropology students to Barbados every other year on field-training programs (see Gmelch 1992b). By merely living in Barbados, a small island, we were routinely exposed to tourism. Many residents of the villages where we lived worked in tourism. Most afternoons, we took a break from our village life and went to a large resort near Speightstown to swim and walk on the beach. Although I hated being identified as a tourist myself, I enjoyed observing and talking to visitors and the staff at the resort. When friends from home visited us in Barbados, we became real tourists as we took them around to see the “sights.” But it wasn’t until we collaborated on a study of culture change in rural Barbados that I developed a scholarly interest in tourism. In The Parish Behind God’s Back: The Changing Culture of Rural Barbados, Sharon Gmelch and I wrote briefly about tourism as an agent of change. Doing that research piqued my interest in the lives of my village friends who worked in the “industry” and eventually led to the interviews for this book. I hoped that interviews with these individuals , edited into narratives of their working lives, would be an effective way to get an insider’s view of the work of tourism and its impact on individuals. As several scholars have noted (Crick 1989; Stronza 2001), a major shortcoming in the literature on tourism has been the lack of local voice. I hope this work will be a step toward filling that void. The twenty narratives in this book are divided into four primary sections that reflect the different settings and workplaces in Caribbean tourism—airport, hotel, beach, and the attractions. A fifth section looks at the government’s effort to collect information on tourism. Each section is introduced with a brief history or description of the setting. x Preface Behind the Smile The Caribbean. Barbados with parish boundaries identified. ...