21.7 C
Belize City
Friday, March 29, 2024

World Down Syndrome Day

Photo: Students and staff of Stella Maris...

BPD awards 3 officers with Women Police of the Year

Photo: (l-r) Myrna Pena, Carmella Cacho, and...

Suicide on the rise!

Photo: Iveth Quintanilla, Mental Health Coordinator by Charles...

Belize mestizos and St. John’s College

FeaturesBelize mestizos and St. John’s College

The Changing Context of Dependency

Beginning in the 1960s, the colony’s economy, which had begun to shift toward greater integration with the United States early in the century – Swayne commented in 1917 that the United States secured “the lion’s share both of imports and exports” (1917:174) – lurched more dramatically in this direction. In 1960, 59 percent of the colony’s exports went to the UK, as against only 11 percent to the United States.  Sugar, despite its slump, is still the largest export, and over three-fourths goes to the United States, while the rapidly growing garment industry exports almost exclusively to that country and citrus goes both to the United States and the Caribbean. Only bananas go exclusively to the UK, under contract with Fyffes, Ltd., a British subsidiary of United Fruit (Everitt 1987:50).

Imports show a similar shift: already in 1970 the United States had 30 percent of the total import value, compared to Britain’s 25 percent, while in 1981, Britain held onto only 14 percent, compared to 35 percent for the United States. In 1980 the major importers claimed the figure was as high as 75 percent for the United States, as against only some 14-15 percent for the UK (Everitt 1987:50). The shift was further consolidated in 1976, when the Belize dollar was no longer tied to sterling; it has since remained tied to the U.S. dollar, at a ratio of two to one.

The shift in economic orientation has greatly favored the mestizo business interests (Grant 1976:175, 255). Their interest in business – and their light skin – brought them into the commercial banks and other international commercial institutions early in the century. Then in the 1920s a number of mestizos profited from rum-running during U.S. Prohibition, strengthening their U.S. connections.  Not until the Depression years of the 1930s did mestizos seek economic opportunities within the wider society, including the state apparatus. Within the civil service, while expatriates still monopolized the higher levels, creoles had established themselves in the lower and middle ranks, effectively closing these to mestizos.

By the 1950 and 1960s, however, with the rise of political parties and self-governing status, mestizos gained access to state power via party politics. By 1972 Brockmann found that mestizos occupied civil service positions in about the same proportion as they occurred in the population, while they held all the elected posts (1977:255). At the same time, the government-sponsored sugar industry was revitalizing the towns of Corozal and Orange Walk, offering dynamic business opportunities at home. Today, as U.S. investment increases, and with it the preference for light-skinned employees (Bolland 1991:18-19), government jobs   are again a last resort for mestizo graduates.

Mestizo business connections are sustained by educational and social institutions. Grant (1976:175) stresses their Catholic nature, arguing that the limited potential of the mestizo elite for “group affiliations” resulted in their drawing “their solidarity and group corporateness almost entirely from their various Catholic institutions.” Notable among these is St. John’s College (SJC), run by American Jesuits, to which middle class mestizos send their children.

The St. John’s College Alumni Association has long functioned as both a recruiting network and mini chamber of commerce for the business elite. Less significant than its Catholicism, however, has been its American orientation: if the British had tutored its creole subjects in the superiority of British institutions for centuries, the Jesuits shared no such bias. Moreover, while Anglican and Methodist schools conformed to the Cambridge entrance exams, and sent their best students to England for further study, SJC’s curriculum “reflected the preferences of the American Jesuits, who encouraged and arranged for the more promising students to continue their studies in Catholic institutions in the United States” (Grant 1976:99).

U.S. study has never been limited to Catholic school graduates, however.  Swayne noted the opportunities for higher education in the United States as early as 1917, commenting that in “after-life” these U.S. –educated Belizeans looked to the States for “inspiration” (1817:175). In 1951 Belize sent 14 students for higher study in the UK, and 17 for that purpose to the United States (Cain 1965:56).  After 1965, when U.S. immigration quotas for hemisphere residents were opened up, students increasingly looked to the States for post-secondary education, and SJC graduates were in a good position to get scholarships.

However, whites and creoles were by no means exclusively Anglican.  Throughout the 19th century, a majority of the white business elite were Scots, both Catholic and Presbyterian. Indeed, what is noticeable about the SJC boys, even in the early years, is the predominance of local and expatriate whites. Burns and Bowmans, both of local white families, attended from its founding, along with the sons of colonial officials and expatriate merchants. The younger sons of both the Hunters and the Woods studied for the priesthood, and later taught at SJC.  Thus mestizo school ties were not only with each other, but also with the dominant business class.

Conclusion: Economic Location and a Regional Elite

Mestizo immigrants succeeded in the process of capital accumulation by means of their successful exploitation of commercial agriculture in the late 19th and early 20th century.  The pioneering development of sugar, mainly, but also coconuts and chiclé, primarily in the north of the colony, facilitated their entry into commerce, especially in the border town of Corozal. Commercial operations, specifically the import-export trade, has been crucial to the ability of local capitalists to withstand the market blows to which local production – industrial as well as agricultural – has always been subject.  The Spanish rancheros and planters developed a commercial center in the northern districts, from which they were both protected from competition with metropolitan merchant interests in Belize City and well placed to profit from entrepot trade with Mexico and Cuba.  Many of them were also able to parlay this position into successful partnerships with metropolitan and Belize City firms, from which, at the senior partner’s retirement, they inherited estates or commercial operations.

The nature of this economic location is particularly interesting in terms of its cultural consequences. Throughout the 19th century, the British project of empire was a totalizing one, in which the identity of different groups was constrained to various degrees by the dominance of British political and social institutions, including education, religion, law, and government (Asad 1990). The British by no means exempted the Spanish from such institutional constraints; indeed, the surrounding “Spanish republics” provided the examples of anarchy and violence against which British institutions were most frequently defined.  But in addition to their crucial economic location, a number of factors combined to insulate mestizos: their location in the northern districts, away from the “project of empire,” encouraged the growth of community-based civil and religious institutions, while the establishment of the Jesuit mission in Belize in 1851, and the Jesuits’ rapid dominance of secondary education, provided an alternative path of social mobility and cultural legitimation.

As a consequence, the mestizo population strove neither for acceptance and integration with the dominant British culture, nor to validate their identity outside of their own communities. Rather, both Spanish and Mayas validated their own status and identity, vis a vis each other, in cultural rituals centered on community and church. The elaborate religious festivals, processions, public dances, and bullfights, which the British found “barbaric and noisy” (Jones 1969:77), formed a focus of unity between Mayas and Spanish, reinforcing their status in society and fostering the patronage relations on which it depended. Wolf (1959:238ff) has described the ability to attract followers through such alternative “networks of social relations and communications” as the hallmark of mestizos throughout Central America, arguing that it was precisely in this ability that they found “a validation of self and of [their] station in society” (ibid.: 239). Thus Yucatecans, quintessentially adaptable, were ideal immigrants; far from seeking validation from the British, as did creoles, they were indifferent to their opinion and flourished under their neglect.

Check out our other content

World Down Syndrome Day

Suicide on the rise!

Check out other tags:

International