76 Magical Bean Juice in a Short Story
Meredith Ryan
In Julia Alvarez’s A Cafecito Story, Joe, with a boring name, has a boring life in the most boring state I can think of: Nebraska. So, what better way to escape his bland life than to travel to the tropical country that is the Dominican Republic? Maybe people vacation to tropical destinations with little thought that people live mundane lives there as well. Just because it is a destination for one person, does not mean it isn’t home for another. This itself shows secondary colonialism. Within our readings for class, the one that stuck out to solidify secondary colonialism the most was “A Small Place” by Jamaica Kincaid.
In Kincaid’s piece she states, “[a] tourist is an ugly human being. From day to day, you are a nice person” (1228). Yes, he wanted to escape his mundane, dismal life, yet exploiting other’s equally if not more mundane lives for his enjoyment makes him, as Kincaid states “ugly”.
We, as tourists are not ugly humans in general, but what we do without consciously thinking about it makes us ugly. We, for lack of a better word, exploit individuals’ boring lives to make our own lives a tad bit more interesting. Although Joe and his government don’t formally own the Dominican Republic, through the use of consumerism and tourism, he is partaking in a form of colonialism: secondary colonialism.