poor lived in a world of "make believe" and achieved "greater and greater flights of imagination."

foreshadow a future filled with the seductively colonizing commodities of American modernity.

white supremacy,

Complex and ambiguous, women's engagements with sojourning U.S. personnel encapsulate the wider society during the years of occupation.

Yankees would just take out their dollars and throw to the singers.

Their romance with the Yankee dollar,

Replying to a local male who had earlier complained that women's clothes had begun to take on a masculine appearance, one female correspondent shot back that, quite the contrary, it was men's dress that was guilty of effeminacy.44 Her primary exhibit, it turns out, was none other than the jitterbug.

people in Trinidad made patterns from the United States integral to their dress

class privilege,