Book Review: Women and Tourist Work in Jamaica
Book review of Women and Tourist Work in Jamaica: Seven Miles of Sandy Beach, by A. Lynn Bolles (2022)
Women and Tourist Work in Jamaica: Seven Miles of Sandy Beach, by A. Lynn Bolles (2022). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
The new book, Women and Tourist Work in Jamaica, by A. Lynn Bolles, begins with a historiography of tourism in the Caribbean, in particular Jamaica. This account focuses on Jamaica as a harbinger among the region’s Anglophone countries as regards investments into the tourism sector. Between 1945 and 1962, with the arrival of new investors from Europe and the United States, the tourism sector took off in scale and scope. It was a sense of quality service, hospitality, and professionalism that resulted in more tourists, particularly Americans, choosing Jamaican destinations for their holidays. The second chapter develops this analysis but on a more micro level, detailing the development of tourism in the western resort town of Negril.
Chapter 3 examines the intersectional gendered system of tourism labor in Negril. It begins with a history of women in the town, going back to when they were members of the enslaved population during the English and later British colonial periods. Women, during this era, served as housekeepers, maids, and food servers. Much later, once Negril had become an international tourism destination, women would be employed as bookkeepers, accountants, sous-chefs, activities coordinators, and multilingual guides. With both change and continuity in the forms of their labor, the women of Negril had to find ways to navigate profound social obstacles. For instance, the practice of “skin-teeth” is a mechanism to cope with the racism, classism, and misogyny on the part of their male bosses, both in the colonial and post-colonial periods. This practice means showing your smile to a client, customer, or tourist as a sign of your politeness and courtesy. Even today, this cultural practice is developed among women via friendship and familial relations. It is seen as a form of in-house joking, a sign of denying that a person is uneasy or is discomforted by a situation. As Bolles shows, such a strategy was developed by necessity; indeed, the women working in Negril’s resorts are compelled to stay professional and kind, regardless of the situation or the type of job in which they find themselves.
Chapter 4 provides a short political economy of the hotel in Sandy Beach where the author completed her research. This account is based on Bolles’ participation-observation conducted with local women from this beach in Negril, where they toil as vendors and braiders. From these sites of work, she shows the precarity that the women face in “formal and informal face-to-face encounters with one another and with tourists” (69). Bolles also traces the tough, long workdays of the female owners of the area’s small hotels, who typically have inherited these properties from their parents or grandparents. Among the female hotel proprietors, there is no time for entertainment, a social life, or even a much-needed vacation (sadly). All their days are, in contrast, taken up by work and more work.
Chapter 5 focuses on the entrepreneurship of women in Negril, where many own businesses of varying sizes. Among these women, there is an informal credit system known as “the partner” or “sou sou.” The women in the group agree to put a sum of money into a collective pot on either a weekly, biweekly, or monthly schedule. This system is of West African origin, which – as Bolles explains – crossed the Atlantic during the slave trade. Nowadays, it provides essential financing for the women’s businesses and micro-enterprises. They choose these informal credit systems over bank deposits, because with them comes the social obligation from the group to save and contribute. Continuing with the theme of work, Chapter 6 covers Negril’s night-time economy of tourist entertainment, leisure, and pleasure. This shows another side of the resort and is often a second full-time shift for working women who labor in the food, beverage, and entertainment sectors.
While I appreciated the detailed accounts of women’s work in Negril, the book would have been more compelling had it included information on the tourism-management techniques that these women employ, particularly their communication skills, cross-cultural competencies, and pricing and quality-control strategies. Additionally, a better socio-economic “anchoring” of the tourism activities in Negril would have made it possible to probe the interplay between local politics and the entrepreneurism and labor of these resolute women. Furthermore, a more robust post-colonial analysis would have shown how these women are channeled into the tourist industry in the first place. For example, the author only touched briefly on analogous hotel and tourism activities during the periods of English and British colonization.
Bolles does succeed, however, in showing readers the nuanced balance sheet of a tourism-based political economy in a Caribbean country like Jamaica. Tourism and its associated activities are not only an economic lifeline, but they also contribute to the island’s vulnerability. The exemplar of this would be the local sex market, and the unfair social perceptions of Jamaican women that the trade creates. In this vein, tourism requires a country to “open its borders,” often in a very revealing fashion, which can result in profound socio-economic disturbances along the way. To conclude, in her book, Bolles shows us what happens when a region like Negril must negotiate the often-profound avatars of change brought on by international tourism. For this reason, the text will find a readership among scholars and policymakers interested in learning more about the dynamics of gendered service work, tourist resorts, and contemporary Caribbean political economies.
