ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how neoliberal choices made by the status quo, in the context of the history of Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), have shifted social and infrastructural support systems impacting on disabled bodies. It seeks to ethnographically foreground disability on the move, occupying and being occupied, while interrogating existing power hierarchies that affect mobility and occupation. T&T are the two southernmost islands located in the Caribbean archipelago, and as its Caribbean counterparts, having survived the imperial remains of the colonial epoch, reveal themselves in postcolonial life as sites rife with mobility and occupational injustices, racial hegemony, and neoliberal exigencies, evidenced through structures of power. Departing colonial powers left histories of domination, and economic exploitation over black and brown bodies. They inculcated through systems of governance attitudes of dependence on the state which are so entrenched in local society that they restrict demonstration of personal agency. These systems of governance have been adopted in postcolonial T&T by indigenous leaders who continue to perpetuate these attitudes of state dependence.
