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According to the beautiful young desk clerk, Sonya, Black River’s Waterloo Guest House was the first establishment in Jamaica to receive electric light. Facing the Caribbean Sea across the main road entering town, on the island’s arid southern shore, the blue-gray guesthouse is a large two-story wooden structure owned by a woman named Mrs. Allen and surrounded by variegated crotons and tall, prolific breadfruit trees. The guestrooms are upstairs. On the ground floor are a restaurant, bar, kitchen, the front desk, and a small gift shop that opens very occasionally and stocks so little inventory that one wonders who would ever shop there. Adjoining the courtyard in back is a swimming pool and two floors of newer, air-conditioned rooms made of concrete. The Waterloo is the kind of place that attracts Canadian, British, German , and Dutch tourists along with the occasional U.S. anthropologist looking for a bargain. In  its rooms ranged from US$ to $ and its meals from US$ to $. Its atmosphere and personnel are casual, tranquil, and so different from the scripted performances and amusements of the gated resorts or the desperate street people of the island’s largest resort cities that you might think you were on another island. FIVE   :      From archaic times down through all the length of the patriarchal regime, it has been the office of the women to prepare and administer these luxuries, and it has been the perquisite of the men of gentle birth and breeding to consume them. Drunkenness and the other pathological consequences of the free use of stimulants therefore tend in their turn to become honorific, as being a mark . . . of the superior status of those who are able to afford the indulgence. Infirmities induced by over-indulgence are among some peoples freely recognized as manly attributes. It has even happened that the name for certain diseased conditions of the body arising from such an origin has passed into everyday speech as a synonym for “noble” or “gentle.” — , The Theory of the Leisure Class, – Yet it is far more likely for a Jamaican chambermaid to work in a place like the Waterloo than in one of the thirty or forty gated resorts outside Montego Bay, Ocho Rios, Runaway Bay, or Negril, and thus it is far more likely for a Jamaican chambermaid recruited to work as an H- worker in South Carolina, Virginia, or Michigan to come from a place like this than from one of the sprawling, exorbitant, exclusive resorts. In a study Monica Heppel, Luis Torres, and I conducted during the mid-s, we found that slightly more than two-thirds of Jamaicans working with H-B visas did come from resort areas, although only a handful worked for places like Sandals, a chain of exorbitantly priced resorts in the Caribbean. As much as possible, many continue to work in Jamaica during the months they are home, but many also reported that Jamaican employers tend not to rehire workers who have entered the H- program. In each of Jamaica’s heavily visited tourist areas, for every expensive resort there are several smaller, independently owned, less expensive, quieter establishments whose desk clerks, chambermaids, cooks, and other service personnel work under both less desperate conditions than the street people and less structured conditions of employment than their fellow Jamaicans at the resorts. And for every one of those smaller independent establishments, there are several other Jamaicans who depend in some measure on the tourist traffic—growing and peddling ganja, carving wood, fishing, farming, diving for and selling shells, weaving baskets and tams, or engaging in any one of dozens of hustles in which people make from a few cents to a few dollars per day. It is these people who give the tourist areas of Jamaica their desperate feeling: these are the street people against whom the gated resorts are gated, for whom the cruise ships are off limits, and out among whom the patrons of the resorts venture, usually, only in guided vans. The sense of desperation surfaces especially whenever a crisis, however minor, occurs. A problem with a cruise ship left the crafts market all but empty one day when my wife and I walked among the stalls. The merchants, most of them women, were hungry. They came at us like barkers at a county fair, cajoling, goading, even pulling at our shirts, pushing us toward their wares. They never stopped begging for our attention. Swarming...

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