After a century of destitution, the island of Saint-Barthélemy in the French West Indies has developed continuously since its “discovery” by the U.S. upper bourgeoisie at the end of the 1950s. The island’s economy, now centering on luxury resort activities, has necessitated an increasing recourse to a migrant workforce coming mainly from metropolitan France. The three groups interacting on the island today, that of the historic Saint-Barths, that of metropolitan immigrants, and that of rich vacationers and villa owners, are all overwhelmingly white. Their exclusive cohabitation tends to maintain the elitist character of the island, while obliterating most of its Creole heritage, and effacing its insertion into the Afro-Caribbean space. St. Barts’ new resort identity is structured around a generic brand of exoticism, making it the local variation of a global space of distinctive upper-class leisure, within which the island has achieved a central position. As for old Saint-Barth families, some of them now multimillionaires, they deploy strategies to orient the island’s development in a direction allowing them to retain the numerous political and economic levers they control.