Focuses on American and European tourist women in a transnational town in Atlantic Costa Rica renown for its intimate "vibe" and independent eco-oriented tourist development, where they grappled with the unexpected monetary aspects of intimate relations with Caribbean-Costa Rican men.
Examines Caribbean representations of race, gender and ethnicity, and how these influenced the labor allocations of female migrant workers in St Maarten's tourism economy. From the late 1970s to the 1990s, thousands of poor women from Haiti and the Dominican Republic worked in the service sector of St Maarten's tourism economy. St Maarten's black population, and especially its male residents, interacted with the migrant women, and created gendered and social-sexual images that privileged the Latina/mulatta women over the black Haitian women. These gendered/racial stereotypes helped to incorporate the Haitian and Dominican women into specific and different labor sectors of the tourism economy.
