Abstract
This essay highlights some of the unexpected leadership roles that women have played in relation to the oil industry on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI) from 1965 to the present. The people of St. Croix (Crucians) have a long and proud history of strong women as community and family leaders. Despite their invisibility in contemporary narratives of oil refining under U.S. colonialism on St. Croix, Crucian women have contested commonly held stereotypes of women’s roles and contributed to, as well as challenged, the refinery on their own terms. This article is part of a broader literature about women’s leadership across civil society, the private sector, and the public sector in the Caribbean and Latin America that focuses on women’s agency. This essay is also about the unequal situations that places like St. Croix face when negotiating with multinational corporations under colonial circumstances. While the oil industry generates income for the USVI, the refinery has environmental impacts injurious to the local population. Despite colonial, neocolonial, and patriarchal characteristics of their societies, women leaders on St. Croix, across the Caribbean, and Latin America have been a constant phenomenon, not just a recent occurrence. All the women in this essay demonstrate the centrality that women’s guidance, leadership, and actions play in the fostering, functioning, and protection of families, communities, and public and private institutions on St. Croix. The women in this essay created their own opportunities and took matters into their own hands, demonstrating alternative expressions of self and community values, as well as local action and agency, whether through personal relations, labor protests, stringent economic negotiations, occupying political office, and/or community-based activism.
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Notes
1. For more information on the environmental impacts of oil refining in the U.S. Virgin Islands, see Bond (2017) and Johnson (2019).
2. I interviewed 23 women and 16 men. All interviews were conducted during my research visits to the islands of St. Croix and St. Thomas in September 2018 and August 2019. Thirty-three interviews were conducted in person at a location of the narrator’s choice. Most interviews lasted from one to two hours. The six interviews conducted over the telephone, for the convenience of the narrators, were shorter in length, about 10 to 15 minutes per conversation. I started each interview with general questions about the individual’s thoughts on the impact of the oil refinery on the region and their personal lives. Follow-up questions were asked based on those initial responses. People interviewed included community leaders, government workers, independent business people, educators, and general community members. My initial interviews focused on government employees and educators. At the end of every interview, I asked for recommendations for other people to interview, resulting in a snowball survey method. As my research topic evolved, my choice in people to interview focused more specifically on women involved with the oil industry or those with connected experiences.
3. Following the practice of respectful naming on St. Croix, when not quoting I provide a formal title with an individual’s last name.
4. According to the Danish National archives, during Danish colonial times, the term “free colored” referred to “people of African or African-European descent who were not enslaved but free. Formally, the free coloreds had the same rights as Europeans, but in practice they encountered many restrictions.” See Rigsarkivet (2021).
5. Also see Natasha Barnes’s (2006) discussion of Joséphine Tascher of Martinique in her introduction.
6. However, it is important to note that patriarchal ideas and power imbalances between women and men also existed in African cultures prior to the arrival of European colonizers.
7. See William Boyer (2010) and Harold Willocks (1995). While Arnold Highfield’s work (2014) discusses Miss Annie’s role, not much detail is provided about Miss Annie herself.
8. For more on U.S. colonials, see Poblete (2014).
9. For more on unincorporated territorial status, see Sparrow (2006).
10. See Sparrow (2006).
11. Three days after reopening on February 1, 2021, “a fine mist of oil and water from Limetree Bay Refining rained on the community of Clifton Hill, showering the slick mix onto cars, gardens, rooftops and cisterns filled with rainwater that residents use for daily tasks” (Eilperin, Fears, and Georges 2021). On March 25, 2021, the EPA withdrew the Clean Air Act “plantwide applicability limit” (PAL) federal permit. While the plant was still operational during the final edit of this essay, without a PAL, the refinery is now under closer scrutiny from this federal agency. See EPA (2021). For statistics on the economy, out-migration, and unemployment, see U.S. Virgin Islands Department of Labor (2013) and Office of Policy Development and Research (2021).
Copyright 2021 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
2021
