Dvance p raise for minding Their Own Business

The Setting
This study takes place in two different countries. The participants lived 
in Jamaica or the USA during the years that I collected data from them. 
Rather than describe the country in which each of the business leaders 
lived during the three years that I conducted interviews with them,
I prefer to describe the experience of being an immigrant from the per-
spective of those who have shared their insights about living overseas. 
The focus will be on the attitudes and hard-won rewards that accrue if 
one is willing to climb up the treacherous side of the mountain called 
assimilation. To quote one participant in a story about immigration, 
there is a prevailing attitude of persistence that is the signature ethos 
of successful immigrants in new countries: “If they don’t let you in the 
front door, you go in the back door. And if you can’t get in the back 
door, go in the side door. And if you can’t get in through the side door, 
you go in through the window” (Suarez, 2013, p. 254).
Queen Macoomeh (2007), an immigrant who published her work 
in 2007, stated that the book “fuh we who away from de Caribbean 
long time fuh we to remember de ole tings an appreciate de new.” The 
book is dedicated to those who are away from the Caribbean so that the 
group can remember their heritage and learn to love the land in which 
they have found themselves surrounded. Appropriately named Tales 
from Icebox Land
, this series of stories helps readers to see how “even doh
I born in Trinidad, ah claimin de whole an entire Caribbean as mines” 
and more importantly, Queen Macoomeh has written for “everybody 
back home so dey go know how we makin out up here” (p. xi). The 
writer makes clear the familiar immigrant’s theme of making oneself 
a bridge that connects the land of birth with the new home abroad. 
The Queen’s words, wrested from three decades of living in a cold 
northern country, ring true for the five female immigrants in this 
study.
In Eintou Springer’s work (2005), she celebrates the spirit of the 
immigrant in “Survivor,” and marks out the ways in which African 
descendants have saved their souls in spite of the horrors of the Middle 
Passage and the cruelty of slavery:

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the
businesswomen
from
trinidad
11
I survive
through the strength
a mih culture,
beat out
in the skin of the drum;
beat out
in the steel of the pan,
sung
in the calypsonian’s song. (p. 142)
While the poem addresses the experience of the Africans who were dis-
placed during slavery, it points to the inborn tendency of Trinidadian 
descendants of those formerly enslaved people to make a way out of 
“no way” and to celebrate life through art and oral history.
Finally, Suarez (2013) makes a point that can be easily related to any 
immigrants in their new country. With each passing year “they are in 
our country, these immigrants become less a part of the place they came 
from” (p. xiii) and a great portion of their new home. More importantly, 
Suarez asserts, the new arrivals transform a place, as much as they are 
remolded by it. The immigrant experience is one that is filled with the 
possibility of gaining better living conditions and a prosperous future, as 
well as the fact of the painful rejection that is part and parcel of exclusion 
from the mainstream for years or maybe generations. For any country 
that accepts immigrants into its fold, it must appreciate the history that 
this new group brings with it and the way in which the future will be 
impressed by the disappointments and achievements that the new citi-
zens forge in their adopted country. As time moves on, first-generation 
immigrants work and hope that they will one day say such things of 
their children as: “The world she and her friends grew up in is totally 
multicultural, so she can’t relate to the struggles she hears about from me 
and others about how difficult things were … in the past” (p. 254).
Data Collection
According to Merriam (1988), case study research is an investiga-
tion of a bounded system, a description and analysis of a single unit.

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12
minding
their
own
business
I have followed Patton’s (1990) advice and sought five women, whom 
I consider rich in information about the experience of being entre-
preneurs, to help me understand the experiences of successful Black, 
female entrepreneurs in the early years of their business development. 
These women all run their businesses in countries outside their places 
of birth, that is, Jamaica and the northern states of the USA. They are 
immigrants functioning in their “second home.”
The study developed inductively with categories and questions 
emerging from the data provided by Gina, Gee, Maria, Nadine, and 
Fona and the people whom they identified as their closest friends and 
colleagues. After every interview with each of the women, she was 
given a copy of an audio cassette with the interview and a transcript. 
Videotapes of two interviews, a total of six interviews, with Gina, Gee, 
and Nadine, were created by the researcher and copies were shared 
with them so that they could retain their own documents. The five 
women were asked to review the audiotapes and transcripts to ensure 
that no words were omitted and that the spelling of specialized vocab-
ulary was correct. They were also told that they could choose to remove 
any information they did not want to have reported in the final publi-
cation. The participants were also encouraged to add any information 
that they felt was important to the story that they were telling in the 
interview. Also, each woman could clarify a point that did not seem 
to have an obvious meaning in the interview when she reviewed the 
audiotape and the transcript. None of the transcripts were returned 
with corrections or elaborations on points that were discussed during 
each of the interviews conducted. No video recordings were edited for 
any reason.
The Interview Protocol
The first interview with the businesswomen was based on three broad 
questions based on Seidman’s protocol (1991). The first questions posed 
in each initial interview included: “Tell me some stuff about your life that 
will help me know who I am talking with?” I followed up with a prompt 
like: “Tell me in as much detail as you can muster how you came to be 

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the
businesswomen
from
trinidad
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a [businesswoman] to get to this point in your journey, stopping at any 
point and going through any series of events in detail.” My intention was 
to unpack the history of the woman’s life up to the point of opening the 
business. The businesses included catering, floral arranging, public rela-
tions, book selling, and book publishing. Next, I asked each entrepreneur 
about the details of a day in her life as a business owner. I added prompts 
such as: “If you had to train an actor to portray you, what would be the 
menu that they would have to become familiar with?” I wanted to find 
out about the kinds of activities that would fill each woman’s business 
day. Finally, I asked about her experience as a Black, immigrant woman 
with a career in a foreign country and what it meant to her. Prompts 
included, for example, “When you look back on your book of life, this 
journey called businesswoman … is a chapter, tell me what it means to 
you in the context of all the other chapters?”
The
second year when I interviewed each entrepreneur
the initial 
prompt was: “
So, you have to fill me in on what’s happened since we 
last talked.
” I referenced the first interview from the previous year to 
frame the next question: “
When I spoke with you last time you talked 
about …. Tell me about that. How has it evolved?”
I also prompted more 
discussion by continuing the conversation with “
What other highlights 
have taken place along the journey to this point since a year … [has 
passed]?” The next move in my questioning was made to elicit reflec-
tion by the businesswoman by asking “When you compare yourself at 
the beginning of this journey as an independent business owner and 
yourself now, what is the difference?” 
This helped 
each of the ladies to 
clarify the way in which their first interview laid the groundwork for 
my understanding of the continued evolution of their business plans. 
Through their reflection I was able to better see the way in which their 
company’s dreams were evolving
. I ended the interview with a request: 
“
Any last thoughts or feelings about this journey” called running my 
own business, so that we could get to their emotional take on their jour-
ney after the recounting of the facts and dates to that point.
In the final year of interviews with each woman in my business 
cohort I wanted them to fill me in on their experiences over the previ-
ous year. Questions included: (a) “what have been the highlights this 

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14
minding
their
own
business
year … from June last year to June this year?” (b) “Talk about your 
highlights as a businesswoman,” (c) “If I came back in a year, what 
would we reflect on as some goal posts that were dreamt up while you 
were on your mountain meditating?” (d) “How do you see your being 
a woman, an educated woman, facilitating or causing challenges in 
this role that you play as head of your company?” and (e) “Would you 
have done anything differently, knowing what you now know?” This 
line of questioning, done in the context of a deeper relationship with 
each woman, elicited more personal reflections on the choices that they 
made in the environment of maintaining their families and social rela-
tionships and building the company’s reputation as a quality outfit on 
which clients could depend for good service.
Interviews with Family, Friends, and Colleagues
Table 2. Support System for Each Businesswoman