ABSTRACT
“The ghetto not’ing but a sad shanty town now.” This is what one of my friends and informants sadly remarked to me upon my 1992 visit to “Oceanview,” a pseudonym for an impoverished slum neighborhood with a roughly 74 percent formal unemployment rate in the downtown district of the Kingston Metropolitan Area. Times were so hard that the tenements had deteriorated beyond repair. The conspicuous physical decline was a marker of the deepened socioeconomic austerity accompanying what some critics (e.g., Race & Class 1992) now consider to be the “recolonization” of Jamaica by “the new conquistadors”—the policies and programs that the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the Reagan and Bush administrations of the United States government designed to “adjust” and “stabilize” the country’s revived export-oriented economy. These strategies for delivering third world societies from collapsing economies are informed by a development ideology that euphemizes the widening social disparities that have been the outcome of policies imposing an unbearable degree of austerity on living conditions. Hence, these policies have sacrificed ordinary people’s—especially the poor’s—basic needs in health care, housing, education, social services, and employment for those of free enterprise and free trade.
