Op donderdag 12 maart sprak professor Francio Guadeloupe zijn inaugurele rede uit aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA). Met deze oratie aanvaardde hij officieel de leerstoel Public Anthropology of Kingdom Relations, gefinancierd door het ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken en Koninkrijksrelaties (BZK).
Francio Guadeloupe, geboren op Aruba en verbonden aan het KITLV en de UvA in Amsterdam, richt zich in zijn werk op thema’s als identiteit, mobiliteit en ongelijkheid binnen het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden.
In zijn inaugurele rede laat Guadeloupe zien hoe ervaringen van mensen over grenzen heen, binnen verschillende delen van het Koninkrijk, ons helpen om anders te kijken naar samenleving, geschiedenis en onderlinge relaties.
Met het integraal delen van deze oratie willen we ruimte geven aan een belangrijk en actueel verhaal over verbondenheid, verschil en de geleefde werkelijkheid van het Koninkrijk.
Reweaving Dutch Caribbean studies
By Francio Guadeloupe
I focus on how the Kingdom of the Netherlands is lived. In other words, I study how our trans-Atlantic constitutional arrangement is used by people to make a life and how the multitude of these lives impact, transform, and produce research lines on the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It is what people do to structures that are done to them.
In my work I critically use the dominant social facts about the Kingdom of the
Netherlands as a jumping off point to offer radical empiricist descriptions that contest epistemological common sensesi. An example of such an epistemological common sense is the taken for granted idea that when you do research on the Kingdom, you generally study the reason for the Dutch attachment of Arubans, Bonaireans, Curacaoans, St. Maarteners, Statians and Sabans—or, you exclusively study the seventh island, which is the Dutch Caribbean diaspora in the Netherlands (c.f. Verton & Oostindie 1998; Oostindie 2011).
Here is a summary of the dominant catalogue of social facts about the Kingdom.
Curaçao, Aruba and St. Maarten have the status of autonomous countries alongside the Netherlands that includes Bonaire, St. Eustatius and Saba. Curaçao, Aruba, St. Maarten and Bonaire live off tourism. The two smallest islands are being encouraged by The Hague to follow suit: more tourists create more jobs and add to the government coffers. These are one-pillar economies, island states without sought after mineral wealth.
With 106.177 residents, Aruba is the second largest island of the Dutch Caribbean, after Curaçao, with 155.826 inhabitants. The remaining four islands that make up the Dutch Caribbean, namely, St. Maarten (43.350), Bonaire (26.552), St. Eustatius (3270) and Saba (2158), are much smaller places. All six islands are part of our Trans-Atlantic extended statehood headed by the Low Countries, officially called the Kingdom of the Netherlands (Oostindie & Veenendaal 2024).
In the Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek (CBS), the national census office of the Netherlands, I am categorized as a Caribische Nederlander. I would then be one of approximately 194.000 other residents in the Netherlands, more than on any of the islands, with roots in the Dutch Caribbean.
Mind you I am seldom asked me how I self-identify. I am hardly ever asked whether I ascribe to any, or more than one of the ethno-national and ethno-racial categories of the CBS. Why should the place where a person began their life, and not where they currently reside, or their many sojourns be so determinative? Isn’t the singular ‘You’ always a mobile empirical question? (Fanon 1967; Glissant 1997) My singularity, and those described as Dutch Caribbean, disappears whenever you engage in the misplaced concreteness of the ethno-national and ethno-racial seriality of the census and its multiple iterations in the catalogue of social facts about the Kingdom.
Many among those statistically ascribed as Dutch Caribbeans in the Netherlands engage in circular migration within the Trans-Atlantic Kingdom. Their life trajectory is marked by living for a few years in the Netherlands, then flying back to the islands totake up a job or take a break from hectic metropolitan life, only to migrate back to the Netherlands when better opportunities arise. For most this is a case of internal migration. Psychologically they remain connected to both sides of our Trans-Atlantic Kingdom. This is also the case for those who lived long stretches of their lives in the Netherlands or one of the islands, and who only travel for vacations or extended stays for a few months.
This reality of circular migration and dual psychological connection, and sometimes more than two associations (those ascribed as Dutch Caribbean may also be connected to countries beyond the Kingdom), binds the Kingdon the Netherlands in ways that go largely unrecognized. Travelling to maintain kinship and romantic love matters here. The to-and-fro of statistically ascribed diasporic people like myself, and, nowadays, the hundreds of thousands of those marked in the census as native Dutch who viscerally experience the islands as a second or first home and a stukje nederland in de Cariben means that anthropological research on the Dutch Caribbean has to factor in tourism, diversity and the growing everyday interweaving with the European part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
To consider the Dutch Caribbean islands and the Netherlands as separate worlds with distinct native cultures is farcical. It ignores the way the life trajectories of singular people interweave the Kingdom on an everyday level. Papiamento words like hodé/ooh gosh! and swa/comrade, snacks like johnny cake, and icons like Jandino Asporaat’s comic depiction of Judeska (a bawdy fashion-conscious working-class Caribbean woman), have become part of common culture in the Netherlands. Conversely patat en frikandel, Kapsalon, urban hits from Frenna and the Dutch language have gained headway on islands such as Curaçao and Bonaire. Popular culture artists and intellectuals are interlacing the Kingdom; a matter that deserves study.
Interestingly, those who in terms of phenotype are ascribed as native-Dutch, but who were born and raised in the Caribbean, hardly figure explicitly in research on Kingdom Relations. The schema in the catalogue of social facts about the Kingdom is racialist: The European part of the Kingdom is described as white, autochthon, and authentically Dutch, while the Caribbean parts are depicted as black and brown, colonized, and more of less Dutch; a holdover of the colonial era, which continues to negatively affect lives (Essed & Nimako; Jones 2007; de Jong 2010; Wekker 2016; Schinkel & van Reekum 2019; Balkenhol & Coenders 2021; Flores et al 2024; Lauret & Fatah Black 2024; Schields 2024).
My way of working troubles this racialism as I recognize from my ethnographic research in places like Rotterdam, Eindhoven, Willemstad and Kralendijk, that on an everyday level the European and Caribbean parts of Kingdom of the Netherlands are interwoven in manifold ways (Halfman & Guadeloupe 2014; Guadeloupe, van de Laar, van der Linden 2020; Guadeloupe 2022). This realization necessitates an ethnographic approach that tracks continuous interlacing that is as agonistic as it is convivial.
Such an approach starts by recognizing the ways in which pop culture and modern technologies enable this interweaving and dual psychological connection. Residents on islands such as Curaçao, Aruba, and Bonaire use WhatsApp messaging and Signal to keep up with realities in the European part of the Kingdom. The mainstream culture of most teenagers and young adults consists of styles of dress, talk, and rhythm furnished by the likes of Ir-Sais, Cache Royale and Broederliefde who frequently travel within the Kingdom to perform.
We are past the old days when migrating to the islands or to the Netherlands was considered almost a total break with one’s former home, as you had to wait for weeks to receive a letter or save up money to make an expensive 10-minute phone call at the Landsradio. Call houses still exist in some neighborhoods in the Netherlands, but their clientele is mostly irregular migrants. The mobile phone is synonymous with being a regular resident on both sides of our trans-Atlantic Kingdom. Moreover, with relatively cheap flights, movement has become habitual. In short, an intricate set of interweaving of the Kingdom of the Netherlands exists for those scholars who are willing to think and write in terms of movement that relinquishes any adherence to raciology; this is my way of attending, and thus the world I see, study, and write about.
The implications of this everyday interweaving and a mode of doing anthropology that takes this earnestly will be the focus of my inaugural address. I will make my argument in four vignettes.
1. Where fieldwork starts
For nine hours I sat in the belly of an iron-aluminum-titanium beast, an imposing Pegasus owned by KLM and manufactured by Boeing, which had safely brought me to Aruba. My fieldwork starts here, in a place of luxury. Every time I travel to the islands for work, I enjoy the delights of the privileged few who can fly to faraway places without fearing control at checkpoints.
I am like many in the middle class in our Kingdom who fly twice to three times a year to another country. I belong economically speaking to the world of Man, however internally differentiated by the size of pocketbooks, stations in life, professions, place of birth, nationality, sex, wealth, political outlook, and ethno-racial ascriptions. I am an heir of ancient Greek mythological figures like Icarus who were the first to mount a Pegasus. Human ingenuity. But was our fate doomed like that of Icarus? He who transgressed his limits, flying too close to the sun, so that the bee wax that kept his wings together melted: our flying is melting the icecaps (c.f. Russel 1973).
If I reduce these Pegasi to their common name, i.e. airplanes, I forget that they are assembled waste producing beasts. Titanium, steel, aluminum, carbon fiber, plastic and other composites, which allow these assembled Pegasi to defy gravity, are produced in a way in which the financial bottom-line matters in the first and last instance. Almost a quarter of the food served during flights remains untouched, as every flight contributes to the growing emission of carbon dioxide warming up the earth to boiling point.
Redescribing the commonsense names of major technological inventions, which aren’t tools of conviviality, and must be described as tools for making money and exploiting, is my way of seeing the machinations of capitalism beyond the habitual. Who are those who order the assembly? Who are those that own the hotels, businesses and cruises that cater to trans-Atlantic tourists? Did Icarus not sell his knowledge to capitalists?
We who travel first and second class can afford to refuse airline servings. We have discretionary cash to spend, or work for an institution that foot the bill. The privileged few who engage in trans-Atlantic travel are between 2% to 4% of the world population (Gössling and Andreas Humpe. 2020). We are major emitters, but I have not come across many deeply worried about this in Pegasi, let alone the ecological effects of our travel to faraway places.
Democratizing flights was deemed necessary by the UN in ensuring global peace, since the signing and ratification of the 1947 Chicago convention, the premise being that a sense of common humanity is strengthened through travel and getting to know each other’s cultures.
What would the integration of the Kingdom be without Pegasi? In high season, 2 to 3 Pegasi leave Schiphol for Curaçao. They literally enable time-space compression, dissolving the hundreds of thousands of miles between the Netherlands and the islands. I have sat next to grandparents travelling to the Netherlands to spend a few months minding their newly born grandchildren, giving the newly minted parents an opportunity to settle into the life-changing event of parenthood. Many of these grandmothers I met on Pegasi and in the Netherlands habitually spend 3 months annually in the Low Countries. Some told me it helped their daughter or daughters-in-law overcome winter depression. I have also met children who spend every vacation with their family in the Dutch Caribbean. This everyday interweaving our trans-Atlantic Kingdom goes largely unnoticed. Trans-Atlantic kinship ought to be a topic of study of how people use our constitutional arrangements in their lives. From this vantage point, Pegasi can be described as inventions that enable connection and creative intercourse for families and friends residing in various parts of the Kingdom.
Am I happy with the further democratization of flights on these Pegasi, knowing how it enabled the strengthening of kinship ties in the Kingdom? I have read too much not to know that often connection and comfort “is used as a rationale for the exploitation of society as a whole in the service of a value which is determined and constantly revised by an element of society, by one of its self-certifying professional elites” (Illich 1973: 20). I cannot forget the other side of this technological wonder. More production of Pegasi and international travel translates into more exploitation, expropriation, animal and plant death, and overall global warming. The Chicago convention has a business logic to it. More interaction, more global trade, more capitalism. The owners of the means of production worldwide, and in our Kingdom, are invisible or understudied.
There must be a way of enabling the everyday interweaving of our trans-Atlantic Kingdom that is economically just, ecologically sustainable, and good for the planetiv. I naively tell myself that my flight to Aruba is for a good cause. I am doing ethnographic research on Kingdom relations. And it starts here, in the plane. If I do not factor in Capital, then as the saying goes, hypocrisy is indeed the compliment vice pays to virtue.
2. Ethnography of singularities
One of my memorable encounters with a stranger I never met again was with Ida, a secretary employed at a Tilburg-based company. She was heading to Bonaire. The privileged few who can afford to regularly travel to the Dutch Caribbean can consist of an MBO credentialed secretary and a university professor.
I offer this example as it shows the growing emotional attachments to the Dutch Caribbean islands by Kingdom citizens who have no direct familial connection. It offers a corrective to static and implicitly naturalized conceptions of Kingdom identities, while recognizing the many prejudices that are held about the islands. Experiences like these have influenced how I study how people use the structure of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to make their lives.
Ida introduced herself as forty-ish, divorced and enjoying her second youth. Her children have their own families. She let me know that she religiously attended Antilliaanse feesten, Caribbean Night, Latin Breeze, and the Rotterdam zomercarnival. Antillianen she insisted are lieve mensen, temperamentvol en leuk/loving people, full of pit and fun.
Ida had been to Curacao at least 9 times in the last 4 years. If she had her way, and could afford it, she would migrate there. She could easily hop back to the Netherlands to see family and friends, given the excellent transportation, or they could come to Curaçao, but then she would need a big house and good job.
She lets me to know that there are many born and bred native Dutch like her residing on the islands: they own businesses, work in the private sector, are schoolteachers, pensionados, or stay a few months as interns. Some integrate, while others bring along their rude hollandse beweterigheid/dutch arrogance. Ooh, she suddenly thinks, there are also those who had been in Curaçao during the Shell days—between the 1920s and 1980s—who she occasionally comes across.
The islands are dushi/sweet and the men recognize that Ida is still dushi despite having a wrinkle here and there, and, attractive, perhaps, because she has a few pounds too many here and there. Antilliaanse mannen vallen op volle vrouwen! Ze zijn prachtig, maar je kan ze niet vertrouwen. Maar toch/Antillean men are attracted to thick women, they are wonderful, but you can’t trust them, but still, Ida giggles. She was done with kaaskoppen/chease heads, she said. Nederlanders zijn zo arrogant en ook nog eens kil/native Dutch are so arrogant and cold. Her former husband was a kaaskop met losse handen/with loose hands. In Bonaire she is meeting up with a Curaçaoan based baisite/boyfriend she had started dating two trips ago. He visits the Netherlands at least once a year but would never live there. She would have to move to Curacao, but she is not ready for that. The lat-relatie/living together apart relationship, she explained bevalt me prima/is to my liking.
Like her, Ida’s baisite is divorced. His children too are grown up, with two of the three living in the Netherlands. He works for the local government. A stable man she tells me, decent and a good dancer. Niet eentje die zijn pik achternaloopt/not one who runs behind every skirt.
Her dushi and the dushi islands are Bonaire and Curaçao. She finds them more nederlands and gezelliger/dutch and cosy than Aruba. Ida had been to Aruba once, but it is fake she averred, too American for her liking. In the social imaginary of most in the Netherlands, the Dutch Caribbean is Latin American music, salsa and bachata dancing men, reggaeton, rustic boutique hotels, and markets selling tropical fruits. It is emphatically not, as in Aruba, a North American soundscape, with yanking locals, mega deluxe hotels, Louis Vuitton shopping malls, Olive Garden, and Wendy franchises on every streetcorner. In contradistinction, Bonaire and Curaçao that cater to Dutch tourists are organized to conform to the dominant Dutch social imaginary; Ida felt that she got a real feel for the culture of the Caribbean, with the added value that they serve you in Dutch. Ida joyfully likened the nightlife of Curaçao to Eindhoven’s Latin Breeze festival and Tilburg’s Caribbean Nights but on the entire island. I laughed and remarked ‘maar natuurlijk, Nederland 2.0’/of course, the Netherlands 2.0. Precies/Exactly, she said, met lekker weer/with great weather. En mooie mannen/and beautiful men, I added. Jij bent me ene/you are a mess, she answered.
My tried ethnographic method first encountering strangers consists in attending to the humorous. It sanitizes the ipseity between me and strangers from historical and cultural overkill. Wit, laughter, humor, exorcise the ghosts of history and the specter of unbridgeable cultural difference that led many to see themselves and the other as identities—tied to majoritarian logics of having a compulsory racial self, gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, and so forth—rather than opaque singularities. They then become automatons speaking and enacting those major discourses. By laughing together, majoritarian senses of self begin to dissipate into a plethora of minor strands. A sense of singularity reappears whereby history and culture matter, but they are only two strands employed in the weaving that is my and their specific lives; we- comprehension is established and ethnographically deepened by the anthropologist’s recognition of singularity.
I replace the ethno-national and ethno-racial serialities with which statisticians, and unfortunately many qualitative researchers work, by being attentive to singularities. As singularities, as perpetual becomings with our interconnected organs, skins, streams of consciousness, dress, speech, analogically and digitally mediated relations and transactions, our specific weaves are part of manifold ever-changing weavings that we abstractly call the opacity of life. Singularities are social, ecological, and technological.
Singularities are opaque. They deny static boundaries; they are different without being separated. Where do I start? My weave is also the ever-differentiated unfolding of the weaves of e.g. my mother and father, my baker, the person who made my clothes, foods I consume, the music I love, the cultural scripts that inform my vocabulary, the pasts I have to contend with, etc. Conceived as weavings in, with, enabling, and disabling other weavings, singularities cannot be counted as Ones; as identities. That is the fallacy of methodological individualism and majoritarianism. Me and the other, the other and me, only entails that ipseity, being conscious of actual differences, is an important way of weaving. In other words, I am always potentially (in potentia) in the other I meet as they are in me, even if in actuality (in terms of our everyday habitual consciousness) we are not. I have come to see that laughing together, laughing at ourselves and at our lives, enables a recognition of differences, or rather ongoing differentiations, weavings, that are not separable. Are not the same fundamental particles recycled in me and the other? And is it not so that usually in each other’s weaves we find folds of commonality?
Reasoning in terms of singularities in a perpetual process of weaving entails an ethnographic sensibility that recognizes that while one’s interlocutors habitually employ the language of ethno-national and ethno-racial seriality, they are bending words and meanings that are collectively owned to speak about their specific accomplishments, anxieties, and aspirations. Claiming that because they speak the dominant discourse means that they unequivocally believe that discourse is ethnographically naïve and factually incorrect (Baumann 1996; Geschiere). I still subscribe to the old anthropological maxim attributed to Malinowski: the way a person explains their life is never the way they think it or live it.
Ida often spoke in terms stereotypes and ethno-national serialities: je kan ze niet vertrouwen or Nederlanders zijn kil. That needs to be acknowledged and criticized. She however did not consider herself coldhearted and her baisite was a trustworthy man. Ida came across as someone who wanted to be recognized and loved after coming out of a difficult marriage. I saw her. I heard her within the stereotypes she spewed. Perhaps it is that generosity, which remains riddled with critique, that constitutes an ethnography of singularities. What my encounter with Ida revealed to me is this: trans-Atlantic romances and the social life of Dutch tourists to the islands warrants study as a way of understanding evolving Kingdom relations.
3. No research about us, without us
I am having drinks with a set of self-proclaimed Aruban experts. They are a cordial bunch. Middle aged and older. They studied in the Netherlands, Europe, the USA, or Canada, and, as such, they have firsthand experience with the majoritarian categories of ethno-racial and ethno-national seriality. They have the networks and know what is bon ton in Dutch academia. Some of these experts were born and raised in the Netherlands, yet they are fiercely local. They offer a pronounced critique of the mediatic stereotyping of their island and the continuing imperialism of the Hague. They rightfully fulminate about the differences between the extensive social securities for Dutch citizens in the Netherlands and the lack thereof in Aruba. They also tie this to academia, thereby at times critiquing diasporic Antilleans like me who purport to speak for them. Their Dutch language skills are impeccable, and they love to show it. They work in the government, one of the island’s centers of learning, in the mass media, have written a book or two, or curated an exhibition or theatre in a cultural institution. They pride themselves on being the go-to for any foreign researcher interested in the island’s heritage, history, politics, and culture.
Experts on all six islands get miffed if you do not consult them at the beginning of your research. They reason that for far too long buitenlandse onderzoekers/foreign researchers, especially those from the Netherlands who do not need any visa, come to extract knowledge. They claim Dutch researchers write whatever they want, often, depicting the islands negatively. What’s worse, they then become internationally renowned experts, consulted by the Hague and all manner of quality media. They are awarded the major international grants, leaving local experts to settle for the crumbs they provide. Partnership is their credo. No research about us, without us (Allen et al 2023).
I understand their critique and discourse. I have encountered it on the other islands too. They have a point as the democratic deficit within the Kingdom of the Netherlands, with the Hague having more say and power than the rest, also translates into an academic deficit with the most powerful centers of learning being in the Netherlands. I make sure to collaborate with some of these experts that have become acquaintances.
Still, regardless of good relations, I engage in a joking relationship with them. Teasingly, but with some sternness, they question what problem I came to study this time. Poverty? Ethnic strife? Political incompetence? Climate deniers? No, one shouts, Francio come to teach us how to separate our waste like in mama Hulanda. He come to teach the natives.
I jokingly reply, am I under arrest? Isn’t it guilty until proven innocent on dushi Aruba? Couldn’t I just be here on vacation? Everybody from Holland is guilty, one of my interlocutors’ stresses, but you diaspora researchers are even worse. I stand up, turn around, place my hands behind my back and motion him to put on handcuffs. But I plead that he please wait until after the carnival. Francio ta konio, ela bin pa carnaval, rubiano e ta/Francio is a scunt, he came to celebrate Carnival, he is a real Aruban. We laugh it off.
So, I am here for carnival, they muse. That makes good sense. Many in the Diaspora come down for the grand fete. Not able to help themselves—once an expert, always an expert—they begin telling me about how carnival arrived in Aruba ‘with my people’. As they proceed to regurgitate the well-known tale of Aruba origin, I hear them echo the majoritarian academic narration of their island, which is in the keys of racial kin, nation, and hierarchical belonging. Here is the tale: In the early 20th century there were just about 9.000 indigenous Arubans who are typified as being the mixed descendants of Amerindians and European colonists and to a lesser extent enslaved Africans who never made up more than 21% of the colonial population. This mixed population was ruled by the descendants of a European elite who dominated trade and politics. The establishment of the Lago Oil and Transport Company in 1924, the counterpart of
Shell in Curaçao that set up shop a few years earlier saw the arrival of hundreds of Euro- Americans (as managers and experts) and thousands of Afro-Caribbeans (as skilled and semi-skilled workers). The latter are the ‘my people’ who came to refine crude oil from Venezuela. ‘My people’ surpassed the rural visibly mixed indigenous population in terms of ‘position, education, income and prestige’. In San Nicolas where they mostly resided, a creole English became the lingua franca. Aruba carnival is mostly a product of these people taking their culture to the island and mixing it with the carnival of the indigenous European derived elite. The traditional elite families felt threatened by the Afro-Caribbean upstarts and, what’s more, they had to play second fiddle to the American overseers of the Lago and they had to contend with the foreign trading firms of Jewish, Lebanese and Chinese newcomers. To boot, colonial authorities from Curaçao were exerting more power over island affairs.
These threats led to a movement, going back to the 1930s, whereby Aruba’s self-representation among the island’s indigenous “political leadership and much of its rank and file” became mestizo. The Afro-Arubans have consistently contested this depiction leading to an ongoing conversation on ken ta Arubiano/who is Aruban? This debate has become even more acute, given that the rapid expansion of tourism has led to ‘a third wave of labor migrants’ from Latin America.
As I listen to them tell their national origin tale, it becomes clear to me that it consists of a template employed on every island. For instance, in conversations on the sister island of Curaçao, local experts speak about a social pyramid with a large Afro-dominated indigenous group at the bottom, much smaller Jewish trading families in the middle, and a tiny mostly Euro-protestant elite at the top that culturalized the island during colonialism. The Shell oil boom in the 1920s brought Euro-Dutch managers and Afro- Caribbeans to the island, causing Curaçaons of all strata to feel displaced, and today they speak of the hordes Latin American migrants coming in. Ken ta Arubiano had its counterpart in respet pa yiu di Korsou/respect for the child of Curaçao.
Since the 20th century Aruba and the other Dutch Caribbean islands have undergone exponential demographic changes. The population of Aruba grew from 10.000 in 1925 to 55.000 in 1960; Curaçao was equally remarkable from 40.000 to 130.000. St. Eustatius and Saba, the smaller islands, present a similar pattern; their kinship is pan-Caribbean with many increasingly having family ties with St. Kitts, Jamaica, USA, the Netherlands, and the Philippines.
Yet facts about people arriving on these islands don’t speak for themselves. They need a story to mean. They need a template to tell a story. The template used on all six islands to tell a story about the hierarchical belonging of different groups is a narrative mired in the worst of Occidental thought. Thinking of the world as divided into racial kin, synonymized with sovereign nations that ideally own and exploit land, is the heritage bequeathed by powerful classes who in the past mostly resided in the Occident (Allahar 2005; van der Pijl & Guadeloupe 2015; Lewis 2024). Every colonized collective having to contend with this legacy is lured to structure their dreams of freedom according to this inherited template. One of the greatest tragedies of colonialism is that it is local experts who for a myriad of reasons—some demagogic, some self-serving, some seeking to contest unequal structures between the metropole and the periphery—lend credence and legitimacy to hierarchical conceptions of belonging (Ibid).
What also became clear to me in speaking to these experts, is their specific role as ethnic entrepreneurs in the interweaving of the Caribbean and European parts of the Kingdom of the Netherlands (Watson 2001; Allahar 2004). Their interweaving is such that in their political critique, territorialized cultural difference, rather than class that crosscuts geography, is foregrounded (Allahar 2004; Schinkel & van Reekum 2019; Guadeloupe 2022). Violence inflicting ideologies of ascriptive difference such as racism and gender inequality are instances of discrimination; class is about modes of exploitation and expropriation. These two ways of infra-humanizing are entangled, and as such should be combined (James 1993; Trotz 2010). Local experts residing in the Dutch Caribbean frequently travel to the Netherlands for work or to visit family; in terms of class they are close to the Antillean grandparents and Netherlands based professionals that I meet on the planes. What they are not are the people who serve and clean up after tourists like Ida, or the people who manage the hotels where the Ida’s of our Kingdom stay. No fieldwork in our interweaving Kingdom is complete without including the subalterns and those who manage and exploit them (Granger & Guadeloupe 2026; Guadeloupe 2020; 2009).
4. Arubans who work in the tourist industry
Anouscka is an old friend. She is staunchly against any ethnic distinction between Arubans. She is also very much involved against any form of xenophobia against newcomers, in this case those coming to the island to work in the tourist industry. After her studies in the Netherlands, she returned to the island of her birth for love and to be close to her parents. Love did not work out, except for her beautiful daughter who she adores. Her boyfriend ran off with a Venezuelan woman. A matter of continuing chagrin, as many of the newcomers she defends are from that country. Still, economically speaking, Anouscka is doing well for herself.
She does, however, plan to return to the Netherlands when her daughter, who she is raising alone, is older. Anouscka will remigrate to the Low Countries as soon as her daughter is ready for post-secondary education. She is saving up for that day. This phenomenon of moving to the Netherlands with children, often with men staying behind, is a matter I encounter on all islands. I met many like Anouscka who saved for that remigration. To do so they must be earning a very good living.
Anouscka is earning well. Quite well; as she proudly told me that this year, she spent 2400 Euro on her carnaval costume. And her shoes, make up, and hair are not included. Anouscka manages some of the personnel in the small hotel I happen to be staying in. I am amazed at how North American her English accent sounds. She tells me she can mimic several regional North American accents, including Canadian ones. The customers love it as it makes them feel at home.
Anouscka also speaks Spanish quite well, but here I it seems that she deliberately makes sure that Papiamento sounds through. I asked her about it. She explains that it has to do with Colombian and other Latin American tourists. If she speaks like them, they would mistake her for a working-class immigrant from their countries. She noticed that they are quite status-aware and would expect her to bow to them. “nan kier tratami mi mane sushi, awel ami tambe sa hunga Francio/they want to treat me like dirt, well two can play that game Francio, what you think”.
Her linguistic play also had to do with the Spanish speaking cleaning personnel at the hotel. Many did not speak Papiamento or English. She was accommodating them by speaking their language. That to her was as far as she should go, as she believed that many Latin American personnel could speak some rudimentary Papiamento but feign that they could not.
Anouscka knows I have met with Conchita, the Venezuelan housekeeper who tidies my room. Conchita earns less than the monthly Aruban minimum wage of 1500 Florins (about 770 euros). Via Conchita, who lives in a small 2-bedroom apartment with 4 other women, I get to meet other struggling workers. Many, if not most, work two to three jobs, smile and cater to tourists while living under pressure, to support their children and family in the countries from where they migrated. The tourist industry runs on exploited subaltern workers like Conchita. They are a public secret.
Anouscka is suspicious of Conchita and claims she has my best interest at heart. She tells me to be careful as I do not know Venezuelan women. They are supposedly loose, as are all Latin American women. She knows from experience! They are desperately searching for a man to take them out of poverty, and better yet to the Netherlands. She claims that Conchita will also want to bring over her entire family. Anouscka tells me I should not spoil Conchita too much with tips or she will think I am rich. But I should leave her something decent when I am checking out. Muhe ta traha duro/women work hard Anouscka says, and as a feminist she has solidarity.
Given my ecological predilections, I see women and structurally exploited feminized men as the human coal slowly burnt up on the touristy Dutch Caribbean that is being ecologically ruined. As American, European, and Asian businessmen and investors have rediscovered Aruba, the island is once again undergoing a demographic shift, importing more human coal and human coal exploiters. The census reads “in 2024, the population of Aruba was composed of persons from 153 different countries and with 99 different nationalities”. About two out of five people (39.7%) were born elsewhere. Next to American tourists, you meet newcomers from Venezuela, Peru, Colombia, the Dominican Republic Haiti, Surinam, the Philippines, China, the other Dutch Caribbean islands and the Netherlands.
Aruba is no exception in the Dutch Caribbean. Curaçao resembles Aruba in the fact that 107 nationalities live on the island. Persons who migrated from the Netherlands make up 25% of the foreign-born residents on the island. Most from the Global South work in the island’s growing tourist industry. Managers are calling for more immigration. Bonaire and St. Maarten are already full-blown hospitality islands, with newcomers accounting for respectively 62% and 70% of the resident population. The Dutch Caribbean islands are places where most who tend to tourists are themselves newcomers to the islands where exogamy is rule rather than exception.
And yet despite their importance, and perhaps because of their importance for the tourist industry, they, the human coal, are scorned and distrusted. They cannot be seen, as in recognized and paid accordingly. Moreover, those who are on the top of the capitalist production and consumption chain, those who are the exploiters of human coal and the other natural resources that enable Pegasi to fly to the islands and mega cruise ships to dock, those who enable the middle- and aspiring middle class to interweave our Kingdom, are fully invisible.
Four research lines
What I have just presented, leads me to pursue 4 research lines: 1) the study of our trans-Atlantic cultural and intellectual interweavers (e.g. the Aruban experts, performers like Broederliefde, and, a dose of self-reflection on how I am positioned-imprisoned); 2) the study of trans-Atlantic kinship and romantic relationships (e.g. the grandparents who yearly spend a few months in the Netherlands, parents who travel with their children like Anouscka plans to do, and lovers like Ida and her baisite); 3) the study of the impact of Dutch tourism on the Netherlands and the islands (what happens when e.g. the Ida’s disembark and return home); 4) the study of the workers and owners of the means of production (e.g. the Conchita’s and Anouscka, and those who employ and exploit them). These four research lines will be done with an attentiveness to the singular, which to repeat includes the social, technological, and ecological.
Now to end, if you think you have implicitly heard that my project, by focusing on what people do, is to unweave the Kingdom by reweaving it, you are correct. Unweaving and reweaving the Kingdom is a contribution to refashioning our far too unequal world.