Take Me to My Paradise: Tourism and Nationalism in the British Virgin Islands

2. Making Paradise as a Tourist Desti-Nation

Chapter 2 Making Paradise as a Tourist Desti-Nation The physical place that tourists to the BVI visit is at once the historical place evoked in claims to a particular “essence”; the contemporary place that is the residence of people from the Caribbean, North America, and Europe and home to almost a million offshore companies ; the popularized place of beach bars, resorts, and islands that are known throughout the world; and the idealized place of a premodern paradise. In order to understand what living in this BVI is like, I follow directions taken in recent scholarship and consider the BVI as a space that is always in the process of being shaped by the interactions of people, things, and ideas that move through it (Massey 2005; Sheller 2003; Sheller and Urry 2004). Development of the BVI tourism economy began in 1960, and in 2007 was generating close to one-half billion dollars in revenues annually. In my discussion of this development, I continue to illuminate the issues that affect life in a country that depends so heavily upon tourism, and that shape the contemporary BVI space. The shape and sense of the contemporary BVI space can be conveyed through a comparison of two photos of the same landscape, separated in time by almost fifty years. A 1960 photo of the BVI capital of Road Town on Tortola (figure 2.1) shows a small seaside village around a perfect halfmoon harbor, with two small cays in the middle and a large cay to the west.The green hillsides sloping down to the harbor appear to be divided into agricultural plots, and the fields surrounding a concentration of red-roofed single-story buildings close to the shore appear to be surrounded by lush palm groves.The harbor itself, Road Harbour, is empty of any sea traffic, as is the channel outside the harbor.The overall sense one gets when looking at the photo is of a sleepy town where nothing much is going on. A photo taken in 2008 from the same vantage point (figure 2.2) shows a vastly different landscape. In place of agricultural plots, houses and apartment houses dot the hillside running all the way from the harbor to the crest of the hills, and roads in different stages of construction crisscross 37 Take Me to My Paradise 38 the mountains that surround Road Town. To the west, the large cay has become part of the mainland, and is covered with buildings, the largest of which is four stories tall and houses the modern government administrative complex. At the tip of the reclaimed land on which the administrative complex sits is a large dock, with a cruise ship tied up. In the middle of the photo, where the two small cays were, there is what appears to be a forest of sailboat masts, and on the land across from this mast forest, every inch of space seems to be built on. The harbor itself is busy with sea traffic. I do not make this comparison between the Road Town of 1960 and 2008 out of nostalgia, although Renato Rosaldo’s notion of imperialist nostalgia—that is, Western nostalgia for that which we have had a hand in destroying—could certainly apply (Rosaldo 1989). Rather, I make it to suggest that regardless of one’s occupation or one’s age, regardless of whether you work in tourism or you live in a small village up on Great Mountain and raise goats, the landscape of the present-day BVI—the built environment, the tempo of life, the comings and goings of people—creates a space that emotionally, psychically, physically “speaks” the material conditions of a place on the move. And you cannot be in this space or pass 2.1. Road Town circa 1960. From collection of author. Making Paradise as a Tourist Desti-Nation 39 through it without being affected by it. I begin my discussion of the development of BVI tourism with a field note that provides a picture of some of the complexities of life in the BVI. [Field notes 3.20.2004] Every day since we have been here the beach has been swarming with cruise-ship tourists—on Friday, with three large and one small ship in town, the potential number of cruise tourists on Tortola was over 7,000! This on an island with a population of 17,000. Yesterday, though, there were...