The islands of the Caribbean are viewed as popular vacation destinations that draw in travelers because of their beautiful landscapes, weather, wildlife, and people. The island nations attract millions of tourists to their cities and villages every year and allow them to patronize their businesses and create economic flow in their societies. There are many ways that tourists enjoy these islands; gateways like hotels and resorts, and the increasing popularity of cruise liners, makes it much easier for people to travel and explore these islands. The workers in these attractive tourist destinations are not immune to racial stereotyping and the social hierarchies within their own society, however.
The historical background of the Caribbean would show the precedent theme of the darker skinned locals serving the white colonizers.The European conquest includes displays of racial hierarchies through the enslavement of the local population, and has potentially left a lasting impact on societal structure, which is something that I will explore in my research (Montenegro and Pujol 2022). Through my research, I plan to observe the colonial narrative in the Caribbean and how it has affected the portrayal of race to ultimately conclude if such a problematic narrative still exists in today’s media.
Noting the Spanish exploration in particular, their colonization process included the use of structural racism in order to keep the darker-skinned inhabitants on the bottom of society even after they left the nation. (Montenegro and Pujol 2022) This kind of behavior translates to the critical race theory that is observed in American societal discourse as systemic infrastructures are built in a way to keep racial minorities at a disadvantage in their everyday lives. The similarities in contemporary critical race theory and the colonization of the Caribbean Islands are that both societies were built by white groups who classified social class by race, marking the white majority as the default upper-class. This creates an idea of a legacy to be observed in the tourism industry, as the enslavement of Caribbean natives by the European colonizers conceived a notion of racial servitude that is perpetuated in tourism advertising. (Sarti 2022)