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SIDNEY MINTZ HAS ARGUED that "Caribbean creolization began five centuries past, with migration and resettlement, forced transportation, the stripping of kinship and community, the growth of individuality on a new basis, and the appearance of the first true creóles - things of the Old World, born in the New."1 Elsewhere, Mintz has defined Caribbean creolization as a process of "indigenization" or localization.2 Drawing on these perspectives, this essay focuses on creolization in the west-central area of Jamaica, at the core of the Caribbean region and at the gateway to Europe ' s New World, from the British resettlement of the island to the turn of the millennium. However, as even this brief case study shows, there has been no monolithic process of creolization; for several Creole ethnic identities have been forged even in this small locality. Drawing on the complex discourse of 'race', class and culture, these ethnicities include what may be termed 'EuroCreole', 'Afro-Creole' and 'Meso-Creole'. These concepts derive from Richard Burton's study of creolization, in which he coined the terms to designate the cultures of white colonists, black (and coloured) slaves and free coloureds in Jamaican slave society, before turning to explore the Afro-Creole cultures of "opposition" and "play" in Jamaica, Trinidad and Haiti from slaveiy to the present.3 My own analysis addresses the evolution of all three ethnicities in the microcosm of the west-central area of Jamaica and identifies variations on these themes.4 I also show how individuality, kinship and community have been re-built within these contexts.5
West-central Jamaica
Jamaica was encountered by Columbus in 1494 and colonized by the Spanish in 1509. By the time of the British conquest of the island in 1655, the indigenous Arawak/Taino individuals, kin groups and communities had been eradicated. After an initial period of English small-farming settlement, the European capitalist plantation system was re-introduced and by 1750 had escalated through the use of imported African slaves. By the 1790s Jamaica had become the most significant British West Indian colony and the world's leading sugar producer, based on the colonial slave-plantation system. Despite the abolition of slaveiy in 1834, emancipation in 1838 and political independence in 1962, in the year 2000 the island remained tied to the global economy through persisting plantations, the bauxite and tourist...