Coin Diving, Tourism, and Colonialism in the Caribbean, 1890–1940.

This article examines the practice of coin diving—where Black boys and young men in Caribbean ports dove into harbor waters to retrieve coins tossed by white American and European tourists—from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century as a lens on the transition from Caribbean colonialism to mass tourism. While tourist media depicted coin divers as exotic, picturesque, and erotic symbols enhancing the appeal of tropical travel, local colonial authorities and newspapers often criminalized them as vagrants or social threats, reflecting tensions between commodification and control. The divers, working-class youth inhabiting a liminal harbor space, exercised limited autonomy and resistance within a racially stratified society shaped by plantation legacies and emerging tourist economies. The article situates coin diving within broader dynamics of racialized labor, sexualization, and neocolonial tourism, highlighting both the agency of the divers and the contradictions inherent in Caribbean tourism’s development.