Aruba is one of the Leeward Islands, situated in the Caribbean Sea some eighteen miles north of Venezuela's Paraguana Peninsula. Formerly part of the Netherlands Antilles, since 1986 Aruba has been a separate entity in the kingdom of the Netherlands (which consists of Holland, the Netherlands Antilles, and Aruba). Oriented in a northwest-southeast position, the relatively flat island is only nineteen miles long and six miles across at its widest point. The island is actually an elevation of the South American continental shelf, and its landscape is characterized by unusual and immense boulders of diorite.
Aruba's climate can be described as semidesert. Volcanic rock, limestone, and coral make up most of the island, and the Aruban soil is thin, gravelly, saline, and alkaline. Southeasterly trade winds prevail throughout the year, except during the planting season, during October and November. The Aruban climate is hot and dry. The average mean temperature is eighty-two degrees Fahrenheit, and rainfall is as unreliable as it is throughout most of the Lesser Antilles. Wind and rain erosion are extensive, owing to the arid terrain. Most of the rains come during the growing season and sometimes extend into December. Average annual rainfall is around seventeen inches.
Aruba is populated by many ethnic groups. Many of the most recent inhabitants came to live and work on the island when Lago Oil began building a refinery plant in the late 1920s. (The plant closed in the mid 1980s.) Early labor relations were strained, since many of the native Arubans did not speak English, and the American supervisory staff saw no advantage in speaking Dutch (the official language of the island), or in learning papiamento (the local dialect, a Creole based in part on Spanish) or Spanish (which most Arubans partially understood). Although Arubans have since learned English, most of the initial labor force was supplied by immigration from the surrounding Caribbean islands, primarily from the English-speaking Dutch Windward Islands and the British West Indies. This event has had a significant impact on Aruba's subsequent social and economic organization.
Automation of the refinery in the 1950s caused drastically reduced immigration to the island. Those immigrants who remained in Aruba have been incorporated into the local population, though they are generally referred to as "the English," since native Arubans clearly distinguish between themselves and non-natives.
In Aruban perception, the island's population consists of two ethic groups: mestizos and immigrants. Over forty different nationalities are represented among the island's sixty-five thousand inhabitants, half of whom are mestizo. The "immigrants" are descended from the European settlers, the people from neighboring islands--including descendants of Africans--who came to work in the oil refinery, and migrants from Central and South America, India, and the Orient. No slaves were ever brought to work in Aruba.
The mestizos can be traced back to Arawak Indians, the indigenous peoples present on Aruba when Spain claimed the island in 1499. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a handful of Europeans, perhaps thirty individuals in all, resided on Aruba, and the island was a haven for pirates and smugglers. Aruba became a Dutch possession in 1634, was held by the British from 1805 to 1815 during the Napoleonic Wars, and was retuned to Dutch sovereignty in 1816. Some
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