Truxillo Railroad Afro-Honduran stories Part II Forced labor, Assimilationist Education, Workers Revolutions

Truxillo Railroad Era Stories of Afro-Hondurans-Part II

By Wendy Griffin, Revised Janaury 2015

Part I was on the Illegal Rail spur into the Rio Platano Biosphere Región.

Part II

Forced labor- During the Cariato in 1930’s and 1940’s, Honduran men were required to meet every Sunday.  They would drill and then they would do forced labor for free on community projects, according to Arnold Auld of the Bay Islands.  The airport at Roatan was originally built by forced free labor of the Bay Islanders during the Cariato.  This airport was only used twice in the first 10 years, once when President Carias came to inaugurate it. Honduran Indians had been forced to free labor like maintain the roads since the early colonial period, but the Blacks of Honduras had not been forced to do free labor like that since slavery ended in the early 19th century. This is why the Bay Islanders sent letters of protest.

Education used as a way to Assimilate the Afrodescent groups of Honduras--During the Cariato in the 1930’s and 1940’s, there was also a forced Hispanization of the Bay Islands.  Teacher Arnold Auld said that he was sent around to different places on Roatan to discover what the name of different places were and translate them into Spanish.  For example, for use of police reports, the mail, in geography classes in school etc. the community of Flowers Bay was to be called Bahía de Flores.  These names did not stick.  I think it was also during the Cariato that most bilingual schools were closed, both on the Mainland and in the Islands. For example, for many years the Holy  Spirit School in Tela was closed. This forced Bay Islander to send their kids to Spanish schools to learn to read and write. Still to this day there is no special instruction in Spanish as a second language for Bay Islanders, Miskitos and Garifunas.

The Miskitos and Bay Islanders said they learned Spanish “a pura sangre”, as the teachers beat them if they did not answer in Spanish.  It was very prohibitted to speak Garifuna, Miskito and English in government schools, even though many students were monolingual speakers of these languages when they entered school, a policy that did not change until 1992. Public schools in the Honduran Mosquitia did not exist during the time of the Truxillo Railroad, although there were 4 public schools in what was known as the Zona Recuperada or now the Municipio Ramon Villeda Morales such as in Kruta which were run by the Nicaraguan government.  When the Tela railroad began in Tela most Garifunas were illiterate and this made them hesistate to go and apply for a job with the Tela railroad reported Garifuna Herman Alvarez. The Holy Spirit school in Tela opened at least 5 years before there was a public Spanish language school in San Juan, Tela, which is one reason Herman Alvarez went to the English speaking Holy Spirit School in Tela walking from San Juan every day.  His father became a sailor for the United Fruit Company which is why he was eligible to go to this school. By the time he finished 9th grade, there was a public Spanish speaking high school in Tela called Triunfo de la Cruz, which he attended.  The Tela Railroad subsidiary in Honduras had been active for 5 years before even San Pedro Sula had a public elementary school on the North Coast.

Rand Garo who was 92 years old when we interviewed him was the child of  a Black English speaking couple from Nicaragua who came to work for the Tela Railroad and stayed, said the older English speaking people on the North Coast were not interested in pursuing education in Honduras, like the Garifunas have.   There are hundreds of Garifuna professionals, including at least 34 Garifuna doctors (all of them had family in the States who paid for their university studies.). The Minister of Culture during Pepe Lobo’s government was a Garifuna from Trujillo, Dr. Tulio Mariano Gonzales, with a Doctorate in Tree Science from a Russian university.

However, sometimes Honduran English speakers go on to study in the US, and do amazing things there.   One woman’s child is a doctor in the US. Betty Meigham, the Black English speaker of Belizean origins from La Lima who became an UNAH university professor of English where she worked for 25 years, her sister works for the UN in Intellectual Property Rights in Geneva, Switzerland.  Sabas Whittaker, a Black English speaker from Puerto Cortes, got a Master’s degree in Mental health and worked in a facility for the mentally ill in Connecticut and wrote five books in English while his brother Overton Whittaker was a well known journalist in the US, Honduras and Germany. The doctor who founded the first public hospital in Puerto Cortes was a Black English speaker from Puerto Cortes. The lawyers William Logan in Tela and Kenneth July Brooks were descended from English speaking Black families.   Kenneth July Brooks was the only lawyer in Trujillo that I never Heard a gringo in Trujillo complain about law services from him. The current Episcopal Bishop of Honduras is a Black English speaker from Tela, Rev. Brooks.

Army conscription-  It used to be the policy of the Honduran Army, even when I arrived  in Honduras in the 1980’s  to simply grab youths who had not done military service and enroll them in the Army.  I know of several cases in Tegucigalpa, before cellphones existed and it was hard to get a land line, where their brothers and sons were taken for military service and the family had no idea where they were. 

In the 1980’s, there was an exemption for people who were studying, so their family members would check the jail, the hospitals, the Army, etc. until they found their sons and brothers.  In both cases I know of, the young men were students and were later released from the Army when their family members could prove they were students.

 I know of a project to teach sewing to the Pech that partially failed because the Army during the Contra War would wait for the people who walked between Culmi and the outlying villages and seize the young men for military service. After several Pech were taken, the other Pech young men refused to go to Culmi for the class because they did not want to be conscripted for military service. Most of the Garifuna men in Trujillo that I know that know how to drive, learned during their conscripted military service. Few Garifunas stay in the military and make it a career in spite of there being no jobs in their North Coast villages, as opposed to the Lenca young men who often voluntarily enroll in the Batallons partly as a way to get enough food to eat.

 Herman Alvarez said that Crisanto Melendez’s brother was the first Garifuna who was a cadet in the Officer Military Academy in Tegucigalpa during the time of President Villeda Morales (Pajarito).  When we were making a list of distinguished Garifunas for my book “Los Garifunas of Honduras” the Garifunas could not think of people who had risen above the level of lieutenant or sergeant in the Honduran military, but they did know the story that during the war with El Salvador the Honduran army used Garifunas who spoke Garifuna as radio operators, so that the Salvadorans would not be able to understand Honduran military communications which were passed in Garifuna over the radio.  A similar technique was used by the US Army with Navajo speakers in the Second World War and was made into a movie in the US in the 1990’s “The Code Talkers”. Most Ladinos do not know this story.

  I have not heard of Miskitos in the Honduran Army or the Army recruiting Honduran Miskitos. When Garifunas are in the military, they are often sent away from the North Coast.  For example, my friend Veroy when he was in the Honduran Navy was sent to Amapala in the Gulf of Fonseca in Southern Honduras even though there is a Navy base in Puerto Castilla. He could not tolerate it and came home.

In the 1930’s, the revolutionary armies would recruit people on the spot as Glenn Chambers said in his book.  For example, Sebastian Marin, Garifuna,  said that when the revolutionaries attacked Trujillo (I think many were Lencas Intibucanos following Gregorio Ferrera), first they passed through the Ladino banana camps like Tocoa and recruited soldiers.  Then they marched on Trujillo, which had the cuartel (barracks/headquarters) for the Army in Colon near where the hospital is now in the center of Trujillo.  After attacking the cuartel, they marched to Castilla.  Sebastian Marin’s  father  was jefe de la yarda there.  Sebastian and he went to the American zone of Castilla.  His father held up the American flag and said the marchers could not enter the American zone, and apparently they did not. He was lucky.  I read recently that Gregorio Ferrera’s army in 1929 burnt down La Ceiba. The oral history of Lencas following Gregorio Ferrera is in Anne Chapman’s book on the Lencas Los Hijos de Copal y de Candela.

The Garifunas like Sebastian Marin comment that certain building materials were anti-ballistic, that bullets would not penetrate.  These included stone houses and yagua (royal palm) wood houses cut in a good moon.  When the revolutionary armies would enter Trujillo in the 1920’s and 1930’s, some of the Garifunas hid in stone houses, like Pulperia Sabio, which was owned by a Garifuna who had immigrated to Trujillo from the Bay Islands.  Several Garifuna families in Trujillo including my friends Doña Sasa (her mother was a Garifuna from Roatan) and Yaya (her father was a Garifuna from Roatan) their families relocated to Trujillo during the time of the Truxillo Railroad Company so that they could work. 

Many of the Garifunas both men and women from Roatan spoke English as well as Garifuna.  While Garifunas comment that many older Garifuna men spoke enough English to work with foreigners, the ability of Garifunas, especially of the women, to speak Spanish during the time of the Truxillo Railroad varied.  For example, Doña Loncha of Trujillo who would be around Yaya’s age over 85 said when she was around 30, she went to the doctor and the doctor marveled that “una morena” like her spoke good Spanish.

The older Pech women say they do not speak Spanish because they never went to school, and there were few schools in Colon in the Garifuna communities east of Trujillo at the time of the banana companies and where there were schools, few Garifuna women went. Profesor Batiz’s sister Paula who is 90 years old, when she went to primary school in Iriona for three years had no female classmates, only male classmates.  She had to move from Sangrelaya which had no primary school to Iriona to be able to go to school. Even today, the teachers at the Normal School (grades 10-12) in Trujillo complain that the Garifuna students from Iriona where most children grow up speaking Garifuna have trouble in comprehension and writing in high school level Spanish. At the UPN in San Pedro they complain the Garifunas from Trujillo high school have such poor level of Spanish they often risk failing their clases—even if the Garifunas are monolingual in Spanish. 

Doña Sasa who was 90 years old when I interviewed her went three years to the bilingual school in Puerto Castilla. Her father was a fruit inspector for the Truxillo Railroad and lived in Company housing there. Arnold Auld’s father originally came from Jamaica to teach at the bilingual school in Puerto Castilla which like the bilingual schools in Tela and La Ceiba were founded by the Episcopal Church with the help of the railroad companies.  The teachers were usually Black English speakers, especially Belizean women, and examiners came every year from Belize to see if the students passed the year.  In the Bay Islands English instruction was more informal using the Royal Readers, bought in Belize, in schools taught by older Bay Islander women. There was off and on a Pech school in the county seat of Dulce Nombre de Culmi, Olancho which was founded almost 20 years before San Pedro Sula had a public school.

One reason that schools did not open in the Mosquitia is that the Honduran government around 1918 under Honduran president Alberto Membreño, author of Hondureñismos, and Toponimios de Honduras,  decided to open schools in Plaplaya, in the Tawahka or Sumu área at El Sumal and staff the Pech schools in El Carbon and Culmi.  The Army was sent to the Tawahka área and burned down their houses in scattered villages and forced them to settle altogether in El Sumal where they atended one year of school.Support for the schools did not continue due to civil war in Honduras in 1919. A Miskito man came from the Coast and stopped in El Sumal asking for medicine. The Tawahkas said for this illness we have no medicine, better continue on your way. After that so many Tawahkas got sick and died that there were not enough living people to bury the dead.  The Tawahkas abandoned El Sumal. In the period 1918-1920 was the panepedemic of Spanish Flu around the World. The ethnographer Eduard Consemius visiting the Pech in the 1920’s before the Truxillo Railroad came to their área reported that maybe one third of the Pech population had also been lost in the Spanish Flu epidemic. Given the disasterous results of this attempt to forcé these Indians to go to school, no other school was opened in the Honduran Mosquitia until the Moravian elementary school Renancimiento opened inBrus Laguna in the 1950’s.

Eduard Consemius, author of books on the Pech, the Miskitos and Sumus, Jicaques,Garifunas and Bay Islanders originally came to Honduras as a worker for the Truxillo Railroad. The leading archaeologist working in Honduras in the 1940’s and 1950’s also had ties to the Truxillo Railroad, as Doris Zemurray Stone who graduated from Radcliffe where she studied anthropology and archaeology was the daughter  of the President of the United Fruit Company, owner of the Truxillo Railroad, and founder of the Middle American Research Institute at Tulane University in New Orleans, Samuel Zemurray.

Internal Passports—During the Cariato on the North Coast, and before in Teguigalpa, it was necessary to have internal passports and permissions to go between one place and another signed by the Comandante de Plaza.  To go out of Teguigalpa to elsewhere during the presidency of Paz Barahona, when Carias was second in command of the Army, it was  necessary to have a pass signed personally by Carias to leave Tegucigalpa. The Comandante de Plaza for Trujillo was Col. or General Zanabria and his lieutenant for Iriona was Echeverria. Both were reported to have private graveyards.  After the Matanza de San Juan in 1937 by the troops of Carias, most Garifunas became supporters of the Liberal Party.  This led to some of them being persecuted by the Nationalist government of Carias.  Even the Garifuna dock workers in Guatemala went on strike to protest the murder of the Garifunas of San Juan.

 

My Garifuna student Claudio Mejia from Iriona, told me that he heard that some Garifunas had to flee in the middle of the night by canoe to Belize and then to the US, because they heard that the government was coming for them for being active in the Liberal party. So Garifunas were hesitant about asking for internal passports from these Comandantes. The story of how the Honduran military had to trick Coronel Zanabria by offering him the post of head of the Air Force to get him out of Trujillo and then as he flew to Tegucigalpa replaced him is in Cesar Indiano’s book Los Hijos del Infortunio. Coronel Zanabria was also famous for chasing pretty girls, Garifunas included, and left several of them with children as a result of his unwanted attentions according to the Garifunas of Trujillo.  Coronel Zanabria married a 19 year old girl with whom he had troubles, so this man whom even the Honduran military did not know how to control and who terrorized the department of Colon accused his 19 year old wife of physically abusing him and terrorizing him.

Some Bay Islanders were also Liberals.  Thomas Green, a Black Bay Islander, was once Congressman for the Bay Islands. He belonged to the Liberal Party.  He had to flee in the night to the States, because the government of Carias was looking for him.  He eventually returned to Honduras after several years in the States.

Worker organizations—According to the unpublished study of Louise Donnell, there was a special wing of the Nationalist  Party which was for “trabajadores”, and that workers in the banana camps were often organized under this wing of the Nationalist Party during the Cariato.  As Carias as head of the Nationalist Party was against strikes, riots, etc. this wing of the Nationalist Party partly functioned to control the workers, rather than listen to worker’s demands.  But the concerns of the workers that Black English speakers were taking the jobs of Hondurans, could have moved up this wing of the Nationalist Party, which eventually led to the laws prohibitting Black immigration in 1934. At least 15 strikes in the banana industry of Honduras were reported prior to the legalizing of unions and the huge 1954 general strike against both banana companies.

Garifuna participation in the banana industry—When the Truxillo Railroad was in Castilla/Trujillo and extended out past the Garifuna communities of Limon, and Iriona, to the communities in Gracias a Dios, there was a lot participation of Garifunas in the banana Company which reportedly had 6,000 Garifuna employees at its height in the 1930’s.  Most of the Garifuna  workers were “yarderos”, the men who worked in the yard of the dock loading bananas and things.

 However, some Garifunas rose to high positions mostly associated with Black English speakers.  Sebastian Marin’s father was “jefe de la yarda” until the US Navy took over the port in 1942.  Doña Sasa’s father was inspector de fruta.  This job was so controversial that he had to walk with an armed guard or armed himself. He lived for a while in Puerto Castilla in company housing, but when she was 8, they moved to Trujillo and built a wooden house in Cristales. Hurricane Ana destroyed the wooden house and they built a brick house where she still lives.  It caused a big crisis in her family when the Company closed.  Apparantly for a time he worked visiting the banana camps in Atlantida, as one of Sasa’s sisters was born in Atlantida.  She went to work as a domestic for a white Bay Islander family in the Cayos Cochinos, leaving her small children in Trujillo with her mother, but later her father got some money to send her to a sewing school and she earned her living as a seamstress.  She even made clothes for the wife of the governor of Colon. Her father was still working for the Truxillo Railroad in 1944 when her daughter was born, even though written sources often mention 1942  when the US government took over Puerto Castilla as US Navy Base as when the Truxillo Railroad closed operations. She had her daughter in United Fruit’s hospital in 1944 which was still open.

Trujillo Garifuna  Zoe Laboriel’s father was the first Garifuna mechanic in Castilla.  She went to Normal School, became an elementary school teacher.  She was active in politics and became Congresswoman for Colon for the Nationalist party. She was Asst. Consul of Honduras in New York.  With money from the States, she and Lourdes, a Garifuna who got money for the death of her husband in the Happy land fire in the Bronx, started Cablevision Cristales, a cable TV company in Cristales, Trujillo.  So it helped her a great deal that her father had a steady job with the Truxillo Railroad.

  Yaya’s father worked loading bananas on the ships in Castilla and my friend Jeca’s father, too.  They did this in addition to clearing land for crops, and fishing (Yaya) or hunting (Jeca).  Even Sebastian Marin’s father with a good job like jefe de la yarda, still farmed in Barranco while he worked for the Company, riding the train to his lands in Barranco. When the company tore up the tracks to Barranco, it became hard to get to for the Garifunas and few Garifunas still farm there. The Honduran government is talking about putting the Model City on “undeveloped flat land near Puerto Castilla” which almost all belongs to the Garifunas as part of their Barranco and Malpaso land titles. 

Victor Bermudez, a famous Garifuna composer of Garifuna songs, I think from Cusuna, Iriona, worked as breakman for the Truxillo Railroad Company. Profesor Batiz considers when Victor Bermudez’s mother died, is when the Golden age of Garifuna music starts as he travelled through all the Garifuna villages of Colon and taught people the words to the song he wrote on the occassion of his mother’s death and later other songs. So the movement of the Garifunas on the train helped circulate Garifuna music. The Southerns who were the majority of the White employees of the Truxillo Railroad were also the first people to pay Garifunas to sing and dance.  In Puerto Castilla they would pay a Garifuna woman from Cusuna known as Sisi to dance for them.  White employees of the Truxillo Railroad also watched Mascaro dances on Christmas and New Years as evidenced by the photo of a 1929 Mascaro dancer by a White engineer of the Truxillo Railroad from Louisiana taken in the Trujillo área.

Garifuna painters Cruz and Gil Bermudez’s father was originally from Limon.  Even in 1940 the elementary school in Limon only went up to second grade.  Their father got to Trujillo, probably helped by a family member working for the Truxillo Railroad and finished the high school in Trujillo El Espiritu del Siglo.  He went on to become a mechanic and timekeeper for the Tela Railroad in Tela. They lived in the wooden housing provided by the Company to its higher level Black staff, so most of their neighbors in Barrio La Curva in Tela were originally Black English speakers. Cruz and Gil both worked for the Tela railroad for a time as they got older, Gil starting his painting career painting numbers on the wagons of the Tela Railroad. When the Tela Railroad left the Tela área and moved its headquarters to La Lima it offered its workers the opportunities to buy their Company housing, which Cruz and his brothers did. His art gallery “El Aura” where he also lives is one of the only remaining Tela Railroad Company housing left in Tela. The banana Company housing in Puerto Castilla was torn down for the expansión of the container port of Puerto Castilla in the 1980’s, partly to help supply equipment for the Contra War. Pech Indians who arrived on the Coast in the 1950’s remember seeing the old Company barracks for their single Ladino workers  in Jerico in Trujillo when they arrived.

Only certain classes of banana Company employees got to live in Company housing in Puerto Castilla. The neighborhood in Trujillo of Rio Negro was very ethnically mixed during the Truxillo Railroad period.  In addition to Garifunas, there were Black English speakers, Chinese, and Syrians who lived in Rio Negro reported Yaya.  Ladinos and White merchants lived in the center of Trujillo and the stories of the Garifuna and the older Pech are full of stories of these merchants as employers for women as housekeepers, laundresses, women who ironed, and for men,  such as in the movie theater of Thomas Glynn, Johnny Glynn’s father, as customers of food and firewood, and interactions about buying in their stores, or selling them products like contraband soap and whiskey the Garifunas brought from Belize or cohune nuts and coconuts for sale in La Ceiba or Puerto  Cortes, and Johnny Glynn’s vault,the door of which is now the entrance of the Rufino Galan Museum, even acted originally as a vault for the Garifuna’s pieces of sterling they earned cutting mahoghany.   

English speaking women like Sabas Whittaker’s grandmother from Gran Cayman and his aunt who was born in the Bay Islands also washed clothes for a living.  She would make contracts with other women and they would agree to wash all the clothes of all the sailors on the ships when they came in.  Sabas’s grandmother lived in the Bay Islands and then Puerto Cortes for 60 years and never learned to speak Spanish, perhaps because she wanted to forcé her grandchildren to learning English. His aunt also washed sheets, towels, and clothes for hotels on the North Coast. They had several tricks for getting the clothes really White,as the custom was to wear all White clothes, but no everyone bathed everyday.  Some people used irons with charcaol inside of them, but it was necessary to watch that when you emptied out the iron all the coals were out.  More than one fire was started from the coals of a hot iron. The English women also made their own starch from yuca, and starching the clothes was part of the ironing. While some people bought soap, others bought just the Borax, and made their own blue soap which was considered very good for cleaning.  The Garifunas also use “blue”, as they call indigo, to whiten clothes still to this day.

 Gil Bermudez of Tela said these laundry  jobs were eventually lost, when the Tela Railroad installed huge commercial washing machines and dryers to wash the sailors’ clothes. Other Black English speaking women worked as domestics, and were sought after to take care of English speaking children. The Garifuna women would also leave Trujillo to work as cooks or domestics.  Yaya worked in Olanchito and then in La Ceiba for many years as a domestic, especially as a cook, for Ladino families.  She took the Truxillo Railroad to Olanchito. I asked if it was segregated like Southern US trains, but she said No, that if a mestiza woman (called indias by the Garifuna) saw you get up on the train, she would call you and say, “Here is a seat next to me. You can sit here.” However, during the Truxillo Railroad the Catholic Church in Trujillo was divided with the Garifunas sitting on side of the church and the mestizos and whites sitting on the other side.

 A Garífuna woman Doña Alisa worked as a cook in La Ceiba. Doña Sasa worked as a cook in Cayos Cochinos for a white Bay Islander family, the Griffis. Garifuna women Doña Maria Luisa and Doña Irene worked as cooks for many years in Tegucigalpa for Ladinos. Maria Luisa and Irene also sold coconut bread independently in Tegucigalpa for several years  and Jeca sold coconut bread, just selling in the street in San Pedro for 3 years.  They all eventually returned to Trujillo, a lot because they had land and houses there and would not have to pay rent. Few Garifunas and English speaking women now accept to work as domestics.

Most Garifunas do not know how to cook Ladino food or American food, so I do not imagine they were not the most sought group as cooks.  Doña Sasa said the white Bay Islander family had to teach her all about cooking, and her son Rigo learned from watching her.  He now makes a living selling European/American style cookies, pies and cakes. Garifuna women traditionally taught their sons to cook, in case their wife was sick or away or something, unlike Ladino men and many indigenous men in Honduras who usually can not cook.  Most Garifuna sailors I have met were  not manual deck hands, but rather cooks like Don Billo who was a sailor for 45 years before retiring back to Trujillo or Rigo’s brother, who has even been to Iraq several times as a cook/sailor, or they worked as saloonman,  like Sebastian Marin who sailed with Worldwide Shipping of United Fruit for 35 years.

In an ethnography of the Garifuna of Trujillo around 1949 the writer reported that they felt that they were in competition with Black English speakers for the good jobs in the banana companies.  Looking at the type of jobs the Garifunas got after the departure of the majority of the Black English speakers, the Garifunas did indeed benefit by getting good jobs like mechanic, brakeman, timekeeper, fruit inspector and jefe de la yarda.  The Garifunas were also originally in competition with poor English speaking Black men who lived in Rio Negro and used to work loading the ships, too, plus Black English speaking women were more sought after as domestic help to look after children or cook, because the White staff brought by United Fruit and Standard Fruit and especially their wives did not speak Spanish. It was not unusual in the áreas where United Fruit worked to have household help whose first language was not Spanish.