In this ethnographic montage, the author revisits the development of her feminist consciousness as a young Haitian teen in the US after migration. She interprets her struggles with her parents’ patriarchal authority. Her responses to this authority serve to highlight the significance of self-definition as a primary tenant of US Black Feminism. She demonstrates how tales of experimental feminist anthropologists whose ethnographic storytelling crosses the boundaries of the personal and the social.

The Caribbean “market woman” is ingrained in the popular imagination as the archetype of black womanhood in countries throughout the region. Challenging this stereotype and other outdated images of black women, Downtown Ladies offers a more complex picture by documenting the history of independent international traders—known as informal commercial importers, or ICIs—who travel abroad to import and export a vast array of consumer goods sold in the public markets of Kingston, Jamaica.