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1 introduction Assessing the“Whole of Informality” In a small rural village in the foothills of the Blue Mountains, Miss Virginette , an Afro-Jamaican market woman, awakens before dawn.1 It is Saturday morning, market day. She gets dressed, takes a moment to drink some tea, then begins to gather her baskets for the long trip ahead of her. She needs to catch the 5:00 a.m. bus to the city of Kingston. She must hurry. She calls out to her son, who will carry her baskets to the bus stop at the bottom of the hill. As they step out into her front yard, Miss Virginette smells the dampness of the red earth beneath her feet. This smell brings back memories of countless mornings she accompanied her mother and grandmother on this very journey as a child. When the bus arrives, fifteen minutes behind schedule, Miss Virginette quickly finds a seat as her son packs her baskets onto the back of the bus. Once he sees that his mother is properly seated, her son says his goodbyes and returns home. The bus trip is long and extremely uncomfortable —even dangerous—but Miss Virginette knows she must make this trip in order to support her family.2 When she finally arrives at the Papine Market in Kingston, Miss Virginette secures her money in the deep pockets of her apron, gathers her baskets, and with the help of a young boy carries them to her stall in the marketplace. Meanwhile, Miss Carida, an Afro-Jamaican informal commercial importer (ICI), steps out of her husband’s car in front of the Constant Spring Arcade, also in Kingston, and unloads some boxes from the trunk. It has been a week since she’s been away overseas and she is still experiencing jet lag from the eighteen-hour flight from China. As she and her husband carry some boxes to her stall, Miss Carida still can’t believe her good fortune. Her favorite store in Quanzhou was having a blow-out sale, which allowed her to purchase twice as many pairs of school shoes as she had anticipated. She knows they will sell easily, as the new school year is quickly approaching and parents will soon be searching for shoes for their children. The thought of the profits she expects to make brings 2 Higglers in Kingston a smile to her face. They will allow her to pay her daughter’s school fees on time this year. Miss Virginette and Miss Carida are Afro-Jamaican female microentrepreneurs , known as “higglers,” in the Jamaican urban informal economy.3 “Higgler” is a term commonly used by Jamaicans to identify a particular kind of street vendor—a so-called lower-class black woman who sells a range of items on the streets or in government-appointed market areas and arcades (covered passageways with stalls on either side where vendors display their wares). This group of informal entrepreneurs can roughly be divided into two broad categories: traditional and modern.4 Traditional higglers include, but are not limited to, market women. They specialize in the sale of locally grown produce and have been an integral part of the Jamaican informal economy since slavery (Durant-Gonzalez 1983, 1985; Katzin 1959, 1960; Mintz 1954, 1987; Simmonds 1987). The modern higgler includes “informal commercial importers” (ICIs). These women entered into the informal economy in the mid-1970s and are transnational traders specializing in the sale of manufactured items (e.g., clothing, furniture, appliances, etc.) they import from areas such as New York, Miami, other islands in the Caribbean, and, most recently, China.5 This group of informal entrepreneurs acquired the title informal commercial importers in 1982 from Jamaica’s Revenue Board, which not only assigned them the title but also imposed upon them various fees, import licenses, and import duties (Harrison 1988; LeFranc 1989; Ulysse 2007). Today, the businesses of market women and ICIs are marginally regulated by the government. For the most part, however, these businesses are largely informal. The steady growth of microenterprises by women like Miss Virginette and Miss Carida illustrates that the informal economy is here to stay. Indeed, despite predictions of their inevitable disappearance as modern economies evolved, informal economies have not only survived in the modern era but also expanded, providing the majority of employment to the poor, especially poor women, in developing countries. In recent years there has been renewed interest among feminist scholars and practitioners in the informal economy, as large numbers of...

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