George Gmelch - Behind the Smile, Second Edition

BEHIND
THE
SMILE

THE WORKING LIVES
OF CARIBBEAN TOURISM

SECOND EDITION

GEORGE GMELCH

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bloomington and Indianapolis

This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
601 North Morton Street
Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA

iupress.indiana.edu

Telephone orders 800-842-6796
Fax orders 812-855-7931

2012 by George Gmelch

All rights reserved. First edition 2003.

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or
by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying
and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association
of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions
constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum
requirements of American National Standard for Information
SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gmelch, George.
Behind the smile : the working lives of caribbean tourism / George
Gmelch. 2nd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-00123-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-253-00129-0 (electronic book)
1. TourismCaribbean AreaAnecdotes. 2. TourismCaribbean AreaEmployeesAnecdotes. I. Title.
G155.C35G63 2012
331.7'619172981dc23

2011042309

1 2 3 4 5 17 16 15 14 13 12

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 tourismspecifically Barbadosas seen through the working lives of twenty-one 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 regionthe 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 themof their affluent 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-one narratives in this book are divided into four primary sections that reflect the different settings and workplaces in Caribbean tourismairport, hotel, beach, and the attractions. A fifth section looks at the government's effort to collect information on tourism and a trade association's efforts to promote it. Each section is introduced with a brief history or description of the setting.

Preface to
the Second Edition

The research for the first edition of Behind the Smile was conducted between 1998 and 2000. A decade later, in the summer of 2010, I returned to Barbados to see how tourism had changed, if at all. Despite the global recession (20082010), which reduced the numbers of visitors to Barbados, tourism remains essential to the economic well-being of Barbados. Returning to Barbados gave me an opportunity to catch up with many of the people whose narratives are included here. For those I was able to locate I have added short epilogues. I have also added two new narratives, that of Rosie Hartmann, who offers a colorful description of her life and work organizing excursions for cruise ship passengers and locals, and Colin Jordan, who as president of the Barbados Hotel and Tourism Association (BHTA) describes his work trying to educate Barbadians about the importance of tourism to the country. This new edition also includes a description of the tourists who visit Barbados, thus addressing an unfortunate omission in the first edition, and an epilogue describing my field school students' encounters with tourists and tourism.

BEHIND THE SMILE

The Caribbean.

Barbados with parish boundaries identified.

ISLAND
TOURISM

Tourism is travel dedicated to pleasure. Although the Oxford English Dictionary dates the term's first appearance in print to 1811, the concept of traveling for leisure dates back several thousand years to the ancient Greeks and later the Romans, whose elites traveled to exotic places around the Mediterranean. The Romans used the Isle of Capri as a holiday destination in what may be the earliest example of island tourism.