There aren't many young people left on Curaçao, and the ones who leave for the Netherlands in search of better prospects mostly don't come back — not because they wouldn't want to, but because there's little real encouragement to return. Part of the problem sits squarely inside tourism itself: even Curaçaoans trained for a given profession are often passed over in favour of foreign workers for the same role.
Poverty compounds the frustration. Young people see the lifestyles tourists arrive with and, for a few, that gap has tipped into crime — robbery aimed not only at visitors but increasingly at fellow islanders too. It's tempting to draw a straight line from tourism to theft, but the truth is messier: broader social tension, a shift toward a more materialistic culture driven by advertising and television, plays at least as large a role.
Stealing is more promoted by advertising and TV than by tourists.
Schools have reintroduced uniforms partly in response — not just for discipline, but to strip away the pressure to keep up with expensive brand clothing that television and advertising have made feel mandatory.
On the employment side, young people feel largely excluded from tourism itself — not participants in it so much as bystanders to it. There's a real appetite to change that: more work, more inclusion in tourist events, more chance to develop the island's possibilities alongside their own. Part of the disconnect, as they see it, comes from tourists never showing up to the things that actually matter locally — the harvest festival, for instance, draws three to four thousand islanders every year and almost no visitors at all.
Carnival is different, and growing. Everyone is welcome to join the parade, and more tourists do every year. Some point to Rio de Janeiro, where tourists pay to march in the parade themselves, as a model worth considering — a nice holiday experience for the visitor, a real source of income for the population.
On dress codes, the position is more relaxed than elsewhere in the Dutch Caribbean: topless sunbathing needn't be banned outright, just kept to certain beaches, with tourists expected to read the room on the norms and values of the place they're visiting.
More appreciation for their own culture, they say, might be the one thing tourism could actually give young Curaçaoans back.