All of Antigua

In my recent post about El Manhattan you might have gathered how one might have struggled to find anywhere even remotely resembling a zona viva in Antigua back in the eighties — I mean, just how effortlessly did the city's single 'hot' nightspot transition into life as a supermarket? 

It wasn't until the early nineties that Antigua started to reinvent itself as a playground, the key drivers at first being the potential players from the capital, but soon the tourists were also taking their assigned role, particularly as the number of Spanish schools began to contract and a less serious sort of visitor started to predominate. 

From the very first day I came here it was clear that the life in Antigua had a strange underside or undersides. (Viz the 'retired' goose-steppers that used to gather for lunch at Welten.) What has changed over the years is the make-up of these semi-sequestered shadow worlds. 

In the early phases of transformation the old conservative elites remained resolutely dug in and the new commercial would-be elites, also mostly Chapines, faced off against them across a still very perceptible No-Man's Land. Yet, as with almost all unfilled spaces in Antigua, this was soon chocka with random people, many of them outsiders.  

As time did its thing with the generations, the battle lines became even more blurred as the younger members of older families became more overtly commercial in their instincts. 

At some point a bizarre new subculture emerged, consisting of individuals you might think would struggle to attain even a level of passable mediocrity in any other environment, but have somehow risen to the top of Panza Verde society — or at least that's how many seem to see it. Chefs, painters, writers, lawyers (oh God, the lawyers), restauranteurs, architects etc. 

On the face of it this should be a largely harmless phenomenon. That's how I saw it for quite a while, but then the nocuous personal experiences started to stack up and I began to peer a bit deeper at this apparent anomaly. 

When you have a well-connected clique of individuals with a strong yet largely delusional sense of personal authority, there is untold potential for detrimental behaviour. 

Maybe delusional is the wrong word, because I think it is clear that many of these people are in fact broadly aware that they could not behave the way they do anywhere else and this must be stoking the temptation to act like a dick. 

Anyway the effect of all this is that there are now multiple groups of joined-up individuals here who think they own the place, so the old model of straightforward polarity between old and new money, upcoming and past it, has to be set aside. 

Which brings me to a slightly tangential matter.

One of my mother’s favoured prefixes to any highly subjective opinion was “All of London"...with its implied mass collective reinforcement. 

 

My response was typically an eye-roll much like this…

Only very occasionally did I bother to point out that we were living in a city of around ten million people.

In effect, “All of London knows...” meant that a small subset of those she regarded as belonging to high society possessed some sort of privileged knowledge. 

 

Of course, only a subset of this subset were leading what might semi-subjectively be regarded as significant lives, such that the uncounted remainder of the city's population might have needed to care about the contents of their heads.

Anyway, a phrasing which seemed patently absurd in the UK capital back then is far more jarring in its Panza Verde equivalent, even in reference to what is overall, a significantly smaller concentration of human beings.

Nevertheless one does hear it and — even more face-plantingly — it is sometimes uttered in English: "All of Antigua...",  by non-natives who have assumed a sense of ownership and status here, often of the sort outlined above. 

My take on this is that the best one can really hope for here as an individual immigrant is to be known for one's essence. e.g. "he's a good bloke". Any craving for, or projection of, a greater significance is borderline pathetic and likely to be socially undesirable.