Trujillo Craft Women’s Histories Move Your Heart and Increase Understanding Diane Karper book

Trujillo Craft Women’s Histories Move Your Heart and Increase Understanding

By Wendy Griffin January 2015

Trujillo, Honduras which Norwegian Cruise Lines now visits, is a multi-ethnic city which makes it one of the better places in Honduras to buy Honduran crafts. There are a number of Garifuna people, both men and women, who make crafts. Some Garifunas sell as part of a cooperative that has a shop in the same building where IHAH sells tickets to enter the colonial Fort of Santa Barbara, right off the main square. A Garifuna woman Gina also has a small souvenir stand right between the Fort and Central Park, near the Cathedral of Trujillo.

There is a family of Pech craft people who live in Moradel, 4km outside of Trujillo, who have a small shop in Moradel and they also come into Trujillo to sell.  They report that unlike the first season of cruise ships, this year the cruise boat tourists have been buying their unusual crafts.

The mixed race Spanish speaking majority of Honduras is known as Ladinos.  There is an organized group of Ladino craft people who mostly live on the land in Guadelupe Carney, but sell in Trujillo, who make up the “Made in Honduras” co-op. They have a shop “Tesoros de Honduras” by the Christopher Columbus on the way out of town that tours associated with the cruise boats stop at.

Also they sell at a table in the Central Park in Trujillo on the days when the cruise boats come in.  They also have a website where they sell www.hondurastreasures.com which ships out of Pennsylvania. In their shop and on their website they also sell beautiful tunu bark cloth crafts made by a Miskito Indian women’s co-op in Wampusirpe in the Honduran Mosquitia. There are also independent Garifuna and Ladino craft people in Trujillo.

As Mayor Lainez prepared for the cruise boats to come, he asked all the craft people to organize into the Trujillo Artisans Association. This remains an informal group, with each organized group acting under its own legal charter. Initial meetings were uneasy as there have been recent conflicts between the different groups related to land and taking over the highway to pressure the government to give them definitive land titles.

Examples of Ladino, Pech, Garifuna and Miskito crafts available in Trujillo can be seen in the collection of Burke Museum, University of Washington and on their website. To see the Honduran crafts in the Burke Museum go to link: http://collections.burkemuseum.org/ethnology/ and in the search box at the bottom of the page type in the following:  %2013-189% and hit the search button. 2013-189 is the accession number assigned to the Honduran crafts donated to the Museum.

Traditional Garifuna, Pech, and Ladino toys from Honduras—tops, rag dolls, gourd bowls known as guacales, etc. made by members of the Trujillo Artisan Association are also on display at the Museum of Ethnic Toys, Neuquen, Argentina, which has both a website and a Facebook page for Museo Etnico.

Every craft has a story behind it. For example, the making of guacales or gourd bowls, and string and rope of traditional materials are all crafts that date to the beginning of agriculture in the region about 8,000 years ago, and significantly predate the introduction of pottery in these cultures around 3,000 years ago (except for the ancestors of the Garifunas among whom pottery may have begun about 7,000 years ago).

Books Tell the Stories behind the Crafts and the stories of the Craft People

There are books about Honduran crafts of the different ethnic groups like Los Pech de Honduras and Los Garifunas de Honduras, both in US university libraries and Los Pech de Honduras is available through libreroonline.com.  The Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History (IHAH) book on all Honduran crafts—Ladinos, Garifunas, and all Honduran Indian groups, by Italian anthropologist Alessandra de Folletti “Viaje en el Universo Artesanal de Honduras” is beautifully written, but is exceptional for the beauty of its photographs, as the book was done in full color on glossy paper with sometimes full page photos of craftspeople and their crafts.

I have told my Honduran university anthropology students that if they can only afford two books about Honduran culture and Honduran Indians, to buy this one and David Flores’s “La Evolución Historica de la Danza Folklorica Hondureña”.  Alessandra de Folletti’s book was distributed in the US  by Literatura de Vientos Tropicales.  Because of issues with double last names and married names that use “de” this book can be hard to find in WorldCat, but there are copies in US university libraries and at the Vine Deloria Jr. Library of NMAI of the Smithsonian. Almost all the photos of Garifunas and their crafts and dances in these books are from Trujillo. Cruise boat tourists also see Ladino and Garifuna folk dances at the Christopher Columbus Hotel while on their tour of Trujillo. Unfortunately the dancers only get paid tips and not even their bus or taxi fare to the Hotel is paid.

Understanding the Stories of the Lives of the People Behind the Crafts

Besides the stories of the crafts, there are the life stories of the craft people themselves.  What were the life crisises and decisions that made them end up in Trujillo? Of these craft groups, only the Garifuna craft people are all natives of the  Trujillo-Santa Fe area. How did they learn their craft and how did becoming a craft person affect their lives?  These types of stories are in Diane Karper’s touching book “A Walk in my Shoes Our Lives of Hope. An Oral History of the Artists of the “Made in Honduras Craft Co-op”, Trujillo, Honduras.  This book is available from Amazon.com and at the store of the Craft Co-op in Trujillo. There is a link to Amazon.com to order it from their website. Color photos of the black and white photos in the book can also be seen on the hondurastreasures.com website.

The stories of the family of the Pech artisans Juana Carolina Hernandez Torres and Herman Martinez Escobar are in the book “Los Pech de Honduras” of which they are the co-authors, and are on the Internet in both English and in Spanish as are their photos and crafts, including on Wikimedia Commons.   The Garifuna artisans also have interesting life stories, such as the head of the Garifuna co-op that sells at the Fort of Santa Barbara went through drug rehab about 8 years ago for being a drug addict and gave up that strange life and makes crafts as a way to maintain himself in a honest way and tries to encourage other young Garifunas to do the same.

How do the Campesinas live?

There was a famous book by the Honduran anthropologist Manuel Chavez called “Como subsisten los Campesinos?” (How do the Peasants (male) live?), his Master’s thesis in economics and the result of his research in Western Honduras. We could change the name of Diane Karper’s book to How do the feminine Peasants live, and the answer is with a great deal of struggle, moving around to try to find a better opportunity in life, and often violence, illness and death, seem to be important parts of their lives.

None of the women in Diane Karper’s book started their lives in Trujillo. Most came from the mountain areas of Yoro and Olancho. As both of these areas were places slaves and mulattos ran away to be free, a number of these women show that they are descendants of these colonial era run aways. In these areas and particularly among the mestizo and  mulatto ethnic groups it was also common that they had no legal land title. That combined with growing families on marginal lands, made their early years difficult, and most had few years of school if any.

Here we can find out the reasons behind the low school attendance statistics in Honduras—fathers who do not want them to learn to read and write so that they can not write love letters to boys, poverty so that they could not afford school uniforms and supplies, learning disabilities which led to problems in school, families that needed the girls to help with cooking and cleaning at home, living in areas too remote for a school, moving around in the middle of the school years, etc.

Health problems and the sudden death or abandonment by male providers also figure heavily in these women’s stories. Hilda, who made the mulatto dolls in the Burke Museum and Neuquen Museum collections, was pregnant with her second child when her husband was killed while riding a bike along the road. She was in such shock for so long that not only does she not remember the day he was killed, she does not remember when her second child was born. Most women find that being in labor all day is something that they never forget.   

Karper’s Book Gives Voice to Residents’ View Point of the Guadelupe Carney Land Struggle

The Bajo Aguan or Lower Aguan Valley of Honduras has been the site of significant conflict over the last few years spawning a movie “Tierra Fertil”, a book by a Food First reporter “Power Grab”, news reports like in Honduran newspapers, on the radio like on mediosdelpueblo, and a Wikipedia in English on the Bajo Aguan Conflict and over 100 deaths. This conflict is between peasant cooperatives organized in a Movement of the Peasants of the Aguan Valley and big land owners like Miguel Facusse who have planted African Palm on lands that previously belonged to Agrarian Reform Cooperatives.  

The legal issues, land titles, and their current relationship to Miguel Facusse in the case of the Guadelupe Carney Cooperative are somewhat different than the other Bajo Aguan cooperatives, however, they see their struggle as similar and it is helpful to hear what they think happened. The Campesina woman may have left out a lot of the legal details like land titles, visits to INA (The Honduran Agrarian Reform Institute), and taking over the highway multiple times that figure so highly in Garifuna accounts of the Guadelupe Carney land invasion and conflict, because these are the type of things men go to meetings about, while the women stay home with their children. The women went to the North Coast to get a piece of land for their house, and maybe some land for the men to work, and in most cases they got it, and the intermediate details are just all lumped together in the word “lucha” (struggle).  

While the men of the Guadelupe Carney Cooperative got land, which the Honduran government paid some land owners for, but not the Garifunas who had the older land title, instead of planting it in beans and corn so that they could eat, they were convinced by Miguel Facusse to plant their lands in African Palms with the idea of selling the Palm Fruit to Miguel Facusse, a major exporter of palm oil.  Unfortunately as they were listening to the stories of wealth that awaited those who plant African Palm, they did not think what will we eat for the 5 years while the African palms are growing and producing nothing?  The income of the women as craft people is doubly important if their little bit of land is taken up with African palms that are not producing yet.

These campesinos did not just suddenly appear in Trujillo by accident. According to the testimony of the women of the Guadelupe Carney Coop for two years before they came to Trujillo, they were told that the Honduran government had put aside land for Honduran peasants, and they had to give money to the movement for the two years before they moved, to pay the expenses of moving. The book does not say who told them this, whether Campesino organizations or the Catholic Church or who. In Trujillo, the Catholic Church was in favor of this invasion of land outside of Trujillo on land titled to the Garifunas, even though the Garifunas make up a significant part of the Catholics of Trujillo.  

This story told by the women is all the more odd, because the land where they were trying to settle, the former site of the CREM (Center for Military Training), which was used by the US military to train Salvadoran soldiers during the Contra War, also had a private land title to a Puerto Rican extended after the CREM closed. The women tell of their surprise upon arriving and at being shot at for invading land which other people were using or had land title to.

The name of the land invasion Guadelupe Carney comes from the name of an American priest who was very active with Honduran peasants in the 1970’s when the Honduran Agrarian Reform was very active. He became so upset about the situation of the poor in Honduras that when he lost his Honduran citizenship and was no longer a Catholic priest, he went to Nicaragua and joined leftist guerrillas in the mountains as a chaplain. When the guerillas entered Honduras, expecting a large popular uprising to support them, he went with them. He and the guerillas were captured, and he was reportedly killed by being thrown out of a helicopter in the Patuca River area of Honduras. His life and death is remembered in such books as Murdered in Central America by Edward and Donna Brett, In a Pit Behind the Soldier’s Tent, and in his own words in his Autobiography.

Given this name as inspiration, it is not too surprising the group has been belligerent taking the highway numerous times often for many days, blocking the entrance of the milk, eggs, gasoline, and the most essential in the Garifuna’s point of view, the supply of fresh green bananas. Dole, the owners of Standard Fruit, has threatened to not use the port at Puerto Castilla, costing 220 jobs, and shutting down its banana operations in the Olanchito area which would affect 80,000 jobs, because too often they have been caught with ships waiting for bananas in the Port, and bananas going bad in the trucks blocked from the port due to blockades by the Guadelupe Carney inhabitants.

The women in the book “A Walk in my Shoes” also report that on the original land they were fighting for, which was formerly the CREM, there were fire ants which bit them. So they just moved to the land on the other side of the road without buying it (to which the Garifunas also had land title to). Eventually that land was split between the Guadelupe Carney people and the Garifunas by INA.

The women do tell the story of how in one action of the people of the Guadelupe Carney the house of the elderly parents of a Honduran coronel was set on fire and they and their workers inside of it. Some of the women were devastated by this, more so because 32 arrest warrants were issued for people thought to be involved. There is no discussion of more street takeovers, the arrest warrants, etc. This is in spite of the fact that not  all of those for whom arrest warrants were issued were men.   Most of them did not report this as part of their life story which was mostly about trying to feed their families and cook the food and having a place to live.

Each of the women tells how happy they were to learn a craft that they could make to sell to tourists. Most of the people they sold to were medical brigades and housing parties from the States which were more common after Hurricane Mitch.  They talk about what they have done with the money they earned from making crafts like buy a stove which burned gas so that their husband did not have to constantly look for firewood. One of them helped her son go illegally to the US so he could send more money back to the family and build his own house. She thinks he is doing jobs most Americans do not want to do.

They felt proud that they were able to earn some money of their own and learn to make pretty things.  They were very proud of their store, which foreign funds changed from “Casa Quemada” (a house that had caught fire) to Treasures of Honduras, with an apartment downstairs for the managers and the women each work two days a month in the store, more now that the cruise boats are coming and they demonstrate how they make their crafts. They give 10% of the sales price of their goods to the store to pay for the accountant.

Cruise Boat Tourism Impact Increases in the 2014-2015 Winter Season

On the days the cruise boats come, 25 tourists in the morning and 25 tourists in the afternoon visit the Tesoros de Honduras store as part of a tour.  The store averages about $250 in sales a week since the cruise boats began to come. They also have a table in Central Park which the cruise boat tourists can visit, but they have sold only a little there, partly because of the arrival of Guatemalans to sell their cheaper and distinctive crafts to the cruise boat tourists, something new in Trujillo. While the women are happy that they are selling, they spent a lot of money to buy materials to make the crafts in anticipation of a lot of sales to cruise boats tourists, and that has not happened, so they are still in debt to the stores that sell the supplies, not yet breaking even. Some of the members of the craft group have not sold anything since the cruise boat season started in November.

Trujillo is the end of the cruise for the cruise boat tourists so their bags are full and their money mostly spent by the time they arrive. The spaces to sell on the dock continue to be priced out of the range that most locals could even break even.  There is an English resident who gives a historical tour of Trujillo who makes some money in tips as a English speaking tour guide.

Many of the tourists just opt to go to the lands by the sea of the cruise dock owner Randy Jurgensen and hang out, if they come ashore at all.  Trujillo during the cruise ship season which begins in November, can be lovely or it can be raining so hard you can not see down the street. This year’s cruise season they have had a little of all of that. If you can’t make it on a cruise to Honduras this year, you can still read about the people and places and crafts you could have seen, and some you can even order on the Internet.