Afro Hondurans in Honduran History

Official Policies Made Invisible the Blacks of Central America

By Wendy Griffin

Some Central America countries are particularly famous for trying to hide the fact that not only are they not Black now, but they have rewritten their histories so that it would appear they never had any Blacks in the past. Rina Caceres, now one of the leading Central American investigator of Central American Blacks, said she grew up hearing that Costa Ricans were mostly descended from White Europeans. Costa Ricans sometimes use this as an explanation that they were more successful than the rest of Central America—almost no Indians, no blacks, fewer revolutions, higher standard of living, etc.

 So Rina Caceres was shocked when she began studying the colonial history of Costa Rica and found a lot of people of African descent in Costa Rican history who were active in significant ways at various points in Costa Rican history, which made her start investigating more about them. In general, Afro-descent people were the second  largest group in colonial Latin America after the Indians, and above the rather small number of Spanish.

While most Spanish speaking Hondurans traditionally called their culture “criollo”, such as “danzas folokloricas criollas” (the folkdances of the descendants of the Spanish born in the Americans),  the official census at the end of the colonial period, shows only 2,000 people in1804 in  the legal category of “Spanish”, and even the Spanish governor of Honduras said that they were structurally Spanish, for legal purposes so that they could own land and not pay taxes, but that if we looked into their family trees we would find other races. For example, for tax and land owning purposes mulato wives of the Spanish were classified as Spanish so her husband would not have to pay tax on her and her children could inherit land.

The Honduran governor also said in 1804 that the militia of “pardos y mulatos” (dark skinned people and mulatos) included people of every lineage and race.  In some places like the current Honduran departments of Yoro and Atlantida, Spanish presence was so minimal that only 3 Spanish families were reported in area in 1804 along with thousands of mulatos (mostly mixed Indians with blacks) and unconquered Indians. If there are only three white families, would you expect the Spanish culture to be the  predominant one?

In fact the areas controlled by Afro-Hondurans were the centers of the Honduran banana and plantain cultivation. The word “banana” comes from several different African languages where it means “food” or “to eat”, because in many parts of Africa eating bananas and plantains were as important as rice to some Asian cultures,like the words for breakfast, lunch and dinner in Chinese is early rice, mid.day rice,and evening rice.

El Salvador has had for at least 80 years the official policy that El Salvador is a 100% mestizo country. Mestizo is understood as the mixture of Indians and Whites. They even pride themselves on this that they do not have “the Indian problem” that some other countries like Mexico or Guatemala had, which in the 1920’s was thought to be a cause of the lack of development in Latin American countries, that they were full of traditional (i.e.,backwards) people and that these countries would never develop until they did something about this.

However, like the rest of Central America Salvadoran colonial documents are full of references to mulattos. See for example the Wikipedia story of the Isatepeque, El Salvador where the Catholic priest complains that the mulattos and Blacks of El Salvador in early 19^th century fully participated in the witchcraft practiced by the Indians of  Isatepeque.  (The Indians were probably providing medicinal plant healing as well to them, as that was one of the main sources of medical care in the 19^th century, but the Spanish did not differentiate between the two uses of  plants.) 

El Salvador tried to solve its “Indian problem” ,by a massacre in the 1930’s of an estimated 17,000 Indians, after which they made it illegal to wear Indian clothes, in schools and church it was illegal to speak Indian languages and they said, “there were no more Indians”, so they could give away their vacant lands to coffee growers.  Some speakers of Lenca and of Matagalpa still lived into the 1970’s and some speakers of Pipil still live today and some Pipils even still have the traditional skits that have been illegal for 80 years, so we know not all the Indians died, but land inequality became much worse.

Many Salvadorans ran away to Honduras and worked in the banana companies, but Honduran documents are silent as their race or ethnic group, and many lied about being Salvadoran to be able to stay  or to avoid mistreatment. Bad feelings related to Salvadorans in Honduras eventually led to the breaking out of the soccer war and forced many Salvadorans to leave and Hondurans to be displaced from the border region. The breakout of the Salvadoran Civil War which led to massive immigration of Salvadorans to the US is thought to have been exacerbated by the inequalities related to the previous conflicts related to land and race and nationality in El Salvador and Honduras. 

False Development Theories in Eugenics Conference Gave Rise to Anti-Black Immigration Laws in Central America

By Wendy Griffin

In an International Conference on Eugenics sponsored by the US but  held in Cuba in the 1920’s, but with participation of leading elites from all over Latin America, the Central Americans were told that if they wanted to develop, they would have to get a grip on this problem of undesirable races in their countries, including by controlling immigration as the US was doing with the Chinese, and by the mid-1930’s, every country in Central America had laws that prohibited the immigration of Blacks to their countries and thousands of Afro-Caribbean people were forced to return to their impoverished countries, reports the book Blackness in Central America.

 Many of those forced to leave Central America eventually remigrated to the US, like Veronica Airey, who was born in Jamaica of Jamaican parents, but her father was born in Honduras and forced to leave as a babe in arms during the forced repatriation of Afro-Caribbean banana workers in Honduras.

In Honduras between 1934 and 1949, Blacks could not legally enter the country even as tourists, which caused problems like children who were studying out of Honduras had problems reuniting with their parents still in Honduras. This time has been studied by Dr. Dario Euraque and later by Dr. Glenn Chambers of the Africana Departmant of Texas A and M. Glenn Chambers’s family members had also gone to Honduras to work during the banana boom in Honduras and then returned to the US.

The presence of US Blacks in Honduras and Nicaragua working for the banana companies has been documented and some stayed afterwards in both the Honduran and Nicaraguan Moskitia, such as the descents of the two Wood brothers from Chicago, whose family members based in Brus Laguna are now considered Miskito Indians and are very active in education, and health and in writing books and making CD’s or cassettes of Miskito music.

Some US and European white men came to Honduras during the banana boom period and formed families with Afro-Honduran women whose descendants are now considered Garifunas, Black Bay Islanders or Miskito Indians. The Honduran government often did not have effective control over the areas where these ethnic groups lived, and so some foreign born men, including Jamaicans and Belizeans, were able to form families and stay in the Bay islands or in the Mosquitia or in rural Garifuna villages, even after Honduran laws made this very difficult.

Did the US Government Purposely support the Fraudulent election of a Honduran Presidential Candidate with a strong history of Anti-Afro-Hondurans and Anti-Indians Stance?

By Wendy Griffin

In Honduras, there is a popular belief that the US helped the new government of Juan Orlando Hernandez to win in the highly contested November 2013 election, even though US Congress people had sent a formal letter to Secretary of State John Kerry, saying they were concerned about the election prior to it happening. The reports of  this candidate’s extremely aggressive policy towards Honduran Indian and Afro-Honduran controlled lands and resources has been in the news in the US, Canada and Honduras for at least the last two years.

The newly elected Honduran President who will take office in late January, 2014 was president of the Honduran Congress and head of the nationalist Party prior to the Election. He also  had fired four Supreme court Judges when they ruled unconstitutional some of  his laws that would create Charter or Model cities in Honduras, an idea started by US Liberatarians, and which according to multiple Honduran news reports will include lands now controlled by Garifunas, Miskito Indians and Black English speakers on the North coast of Honduras, all Afro-Honduran groups.

The reason that some Hondurans say the US caused this presidential candidate of the nationalist or Conservative Party to win is first they accepted the election in spite of massive fraud reports, both by Hondurans, including 6,000-7,000 Honduran university students, and by international observers, both from Canada and the US. The US also provided almost $10 million in election assistance to the Nationalist Party controlled government which they used to commit at least 3,000 legally documented acts of fraud,  which were presented to the Supreme  Election Tribunal and the Honduran Supreme Court and to  the media. See the youtube video Fraude Electoral to see concrete cases of reports from election tables in Honduras in pen and then different numbers being put in the computer for official counting, always so that there were fewer votes for Libre and PAC candidates and more for the Nationalist Party candidate Juan Orlando Hernandez who thus won.

The Honduran also used the money to pay for military security and intimidation which in some cases such as in El Paraiso, Copan was documented as  terrorizing voters and observers and where Juan Orlando Hernandez averaged over 95% of the votes counted and his party’s candidate for mayor and every single city councilmen were from his party, something that happened nowhere else in Honduras. That Mayor of that Guatemalan border area is claimed by US documents to be linked to the Sinoloa Cartel for drugs. See HondurasWeekly.com and the blogicito de la gringa out of La Ceiba for more details

 The intimidation before, during and after the election included the murder of a number of activists for the Libre party.  The person head of Social Responsibility for the two main Honduran newspapers which were reporting the fraud also was murdered in his home. Several reporters were kidnapped and murdered in the last months leading up to the election, most murders of Honduran reporters, lawyers, Indians orUS citizens are never resolved in Honduras.

Also 440 members of Delta Force of the US Army were sent to keep the peace during the Honduran election. Also to help insure peace after the fraudulent election, according to the Honduran press, the leader of the opposition party Libre, Manuel Zelaya, whose wife Xiomara Castro was the presidential candidate and he was the congressional delegate for the Department of Olancho, was required to sign a document by the international community that he would accept the results of the election before it happened. That has not happened since after the 1924 Civil War in Honduras during which the US sent in the Marines.

Joint Task Bravo at Palmerola Air Base and in the Honduran Mosquitia and now Delta Force, how much has really changed since then?  This is during the term of office of a US president who won the Noble Peace Prize? Who the Garifunas and Black Bay Islanders with US citizenship voted for as “our president”?

It is not clear that if Xiomara Castro the Libre candidate had won whether things would have been better. Her husband Manuel Zelaya was the one making decisions and statements, and he is described by Cesar Indiano in his book Hijos del Infortunio (Sons of Misfortune) as an inspired crazy person. The Libre Party was accused of having high level drug traffickers on their ballot by the Catholic priest Padre Fausto Milla. In the May Day parade in 2014 in San Pedro Sula there were some demonstrations against the extradition of certain drug traffickers which added weight to his claim.

Origins of the First World Summit of Afro-descent People in La Ceiba, Honduras in 2011

By Wendy Griffin

In 1992, when the Europeans chose to celebrate the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Island of Hispanola, now divided between the Dominica republic and Haiti, as “500 years of Contact of Two Worlds”, an outrage developed in the Caribbean and in Latin America whose effects are still being felt today.  The Indians of Latin America and English speaking countries like the US and Canada and Belize and Guyana, said it was not contact, it was genocide, it was massive cultural destruction, often of great civilizations.

The movement of 500 years of Indian, Blacks and Popular Resistance resulted in the UN declaring the UN year of the Indigenous People in1993 and two Decades of the Indigenous people and promotion by UN agencies of ILO Convention 169 on the Human rights of Indigenous People in Independent Countries which resulted in changed laws, constitutions, and international funding for  indigenous people in Latin America.

Also in the years leading up to 1992, the Blacks of the Caribbean and Latin America, including both Haiti and the Dominican Republic where the European celebration was going to take place, but also places like Honduras and Mexico,  also objected both to the word “contact” and to the idea that only two races were brought into contact.

The European discovery of the Caribbean in 1492 and later Central America in 1502, both by Christopher Columbus, was an enormous disaster both for the millions of Africans who were brought to the New World and worked as slaves, if they even survived the trip, and for the Africans left behind in Africa which often included wives, young children and elderly parents, who would have depended on the young men who were hunters, and fishermen and helped with the farming.

Even though the counter-celebrations in Latin America in 1992 were led by a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural coalition such as the 500 Years of Indigenous, Black and Popular Resistance in Mexico or CONPAH (the National Council of Autoctonous Peoples of Honduras) which included the Afro-Indigenous Garifunas and Miskito Indians and  the Canada based, World Council of Indigenous People, which also included the Garifunas and Miskito Indians, the UN sponsored Human rights agreements and new funding did not include people who were Black in the Caribbean or in Latin America, like the Black Bay islanders of Honduras, nor  the Creole English speakers of the Mosquitia in Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Belize, nor Blacks in  Jamaica or other Islands nor Columbia.

This disparity did not pass unnoticed by the Afro-Indigenous Garifunas and other Central American Blacks. Celeo Alvarez who began his career in union organizing within the Medical Worker’s union in Honduras and who had been active in OFRANEH (National organization of Blacks of Honduras), now only a Garifuna organization, chose in 1992 to found ODECO (Organization for Community Development), which has its stated goals to work with all Afro-Hondurans—the descendants of the Black slaves brought by the Spanish which he calls afro-coloniales, Garifunas, and Black English speakers of Honduras. Although this is the stated goal of the organization in Honduras, in reality it is only a Garifuna organization.

Following that Celeo Alvarez organized CABO-Central American Black Organization  (ONECA in Spanish) which joined together the Blacks of six Central American countries including Belize. These presentatives met for fifteen years in different countries, including in one case in New York City, where tens of thousands of Garifunas live. ODECO also has sponsored a course which gives a diploma on Leadership and Afro-Latin American Human rights for Afro-Latin American youth in La Ceiba, not only from Honduras but also other countries like Argentina and Guatemala. 

Finally Celeo Alvarez worked with other black organizations in the Americas, including in the US,  to hold the First World Summit of Afro-Descendent People in 2011 in La Ceiba. It is interesting that one of the principal funders was the Pan-American Health Organization.  Afro-Latin Americans have some health problems disproportionate to the rest of the Central American population. They also often have traditional health systems and beliefs which are generally ignored in health services planning and in the planning of access to where resources like medicinal plants, animals, and fish are located. The Afro-Latin Americans of Central America also  have diets significantly different from the majority of the population of the countries where they live and they often speak a language different than the doctors in their area, especially women. All of this means that special needs of these ethnic groups in terms of health are usually unmet.

Atlanta Based Professor Tries to Raise the Profile of Afro-Latin Americans

By Wendy Griffin

A new Academic Journal called Negritud  (Blackness or Group of Blacks in Spanish) was founded by Dr. Luis Miletti, who is a teacher of Spanish at Clark Atlanta University in downtown Atlanta. Clark Atlanta is one of Atlanta’s three historically Black universities.  Negritud is published in Spanish and in English and also promotes an International academic conference on Afro-Latin Americans, also called Negritud.

 Dr. Miletti is also working on starting Negritud as a book publisher so that research on Afro-Latin Americans can be published. Negritud is working on a special edition  of its journal devoted to the new research about Afro-Central Americans. There is a website about this journal and the conference.

Dr. Jorge Amaya Banegas, who has published on both Black English speakers and Garifunas in Honduras is the guest editor for this edition. One of the proposed articles is called Yaya: the Life of a Garifuna healer. Yaya’s great niece Dorina Chimilio is a special education teacher in Gwinett County in Greater Atlanta, and her grand-nephew is a merchant seaman assigned to a petroleum tanker who is also based in Atlanta.

Dr. Jorge Amaya Banegas’s doctoral thesis on Afro-Hondurans is available in Spanish for free online. His Spanish language book based on this thesis The Garifunas in the Literature won a History Prize award in Venezuela and was later published by the Honduran Ministry of culture, Arts and Sports (SCAD). Also his article in Spanish on the Case of Black English speakers of Honduras and the development of  a nation which excludes them is available for free on the Internet through the online journal of  AFEHCA (Asociacion para el Fomento de Estudios Historicos de America Central/Asscoation for the promotion of Historic Studies of Central America) .  This online journal also did a special edition in January 2013 on Afro-Central Americans, which has articles by some of the leading scholars in the area of the history of Central American Blacks.

Interesting Books about Afro-Central Americans often Available on the Internet.

By Wendy Griffin

US Garifuna authors, an Afro-indigenous group which lived primarily on the Central American Coast before immigrating to the US, have also published new books like  Tomas Avila’s “Black Carib-Garifunas: A Historical Recopilation”  which has many articles by Belize’s leading Garifuna intellectuals. Tomas Alberto Avila lives in Providence, Rhode Island and his book is available through Amazon.com.  This book also includes a lot of information on the Garifunas or Black Caribs on St. Vincent and Dominica, before they were brought to Honduras. There is detailed description of Garifuna music,dances and songs.

Tomas Avila has written two other books, Garifuna World which was published in English and in Spanish and a book of  bibliographies of Garifunas You May not Know, both of which he also listed on amazon.com. Amazon carries a relatively wide selection of Garifuna books,including two books on the Garifunas of New York.  They also have a relatively good selection of Garifuna music CD’s.

Wendy Griffin’s book  “The History of the Indians of Northeastern Honduras: Prehistory to 1800” featured on google books in both English and in Spanish includes the history of the colonial Blacks in Honduras as well. The second volume from 1800 to 1992 is also featured on googlebooks, but is only available in Spanish.  Google books helps librarians know how they can obtain books available through Interlibrary loan, as well as telling people about good books.

Honduran Garifuna authors  like Salvador Suazo, Virgilio Lopez, Celestino Green, and Santos Centeno have been incessant writers over the last 15-20 years with over 10 books each. Salvador Suazo was chosen as one of the 6 Hondurans to be included in EnCaribe a free online encyclopedia in Spanish about the history and culture of the Caribbean sponsored by universities in the Dominican Republic and Cuba.

Some of Salvador Suazo’s  and Virgilio Lopez’s  books are available through www.garistore.com which is run by Los Angeles based  Garifuna Jorge Garifuna.  This website also has available a lot of CD’s by Garifuna musicians in many genres and videos about the Garifunas. For example the History of Sambo Creek and the History of Corozal, both Garifuna towns outside of La Ceiba, can give you the Garifuna perspective of these towns to compare to the positions of US anthropologists like Keri Brondo’s 2013 book Land Grab which is based primarily on this area and Mark Anderson’s book on Garifuna identity among Youth. Keri Brondo’s book is available from the University of Arizona Press or Amazon.com.

The trilingual Spanish-English-Garifuna dictionary, the result of 20 years of research,  by the co-director and star of the Garifuna in Peril movie Ruben Reyes is available on garistore.com and amazon.com and the store section of the Garifuna in Peril website www.garifunainperil.com. Ali Allie’s first Garifuna movie,which shows Garifuna music, dances, musical instruments , and parts of some ceremonies including the dugu, and a visit to a buyei or shaman,  El Espiritu de mi mama (The Spirit of My Mother) which is in Spanish with English subtitles is also available for sale on the Garifuna in Peril website.

Central American books in Spanish are often brought to the US by two US based book distributor: Literatura de Vientos Tropicales  in North Carolina and Libros Centroamericanos in California. Both of them have websites. There is a new Internet book distributor at www.libreroonline.com that has 190 pages of Honduran books and includes books by leading Garifuna intellectuals like Celestino Green, Santos Centeno, and the new Garifuna Spanish (Lila Garifuna Chamagu) dictionary by Salvador Suazo.

Hondurans of African Descent Played Many Important Roles in Honduran History

By Wendy Griffin

 The presence of African descent people in Honduras date from the presence of an African on Christopher Columbus’s ship when he arrived in the Bay Islands and near Trujillo, Honduras in 1502 and a Black Conquistador was part of the earliest Spanish military attempts to gain control in the Trujillo, Honduras in the 1520’s, 100 years before there were Pilgrims in the US. There were joint Indian and Black slave rebellions in the Honduran goldmines, both in Olancho and in the area near where San Pedro Sula is now  in the 1540’s, which led to significant free mulatto communities on the North Coast and in Olancho, as the escaped Africans formed families with the local Indian women.

Some of the descendants of Honduran Blacks have even reached the level of President of Honduras including General Francisco Ferrera who is famous for having reached a peace treaty with the Miskito Indians, another Afro-indigenous group, after 300 years of warfare,  and Manuel Bonilla, who is remembered by the Garifunas for giving a large land title to lands in Trujillo, Honduras and by Honduran historians as giving large land concessions to banana companies like  United Fruit (now Chiquita), Hermanos Vacarros (later Standard Fruit and now Dole), and Cuyamel Fruit (now part of Chiquita).

A Central American mulatto who is shown with his hair in a short Afro in his official presidential portrait was briefly president of the Central American Federation, which Honduras was part of,  in the 1830’s, a time when most US Blacks were still slaves and most Caribbean blacks in English speaking countries were just being awarded their freedom, which prompted the immigration of many recently freed  slaves of African origin from English speaking Gran Cayman to the Bay Islands, now of Honduras but at that time mostly deserted.

The important roles of Central American mulattos at the time of Independence in Honduras was one of the factors that led to freedom of all Black slaves in Central America almost immediately after Independence from Spain in1821, significantly before the English in Belize or the rest of the Caribbean in 1839 which led to a type of underground railroad there too, where  enslaved blacks from Belize, and perhaps nearby Islands, like Jamaica and Gran Cayman, ran away to what is now Honduras and Guatemala to be free.  In the Spanish speaking Caribbean Islands, slavery continued almost another 80 years after its abolition in Central America.

Under Central American laws dating from the 1820’s it became illegal to discriminate under the law by race, significantly earlier than similar laws in the US that only came about as a result of the civil rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s.  As in the US, having these kinds of laws, and actually ending racism did not coincide. The problems related to being Black of  Blacks in Central America and Afro-Central Americans and other Afro-Latinos in the US is the subject of a new DVD called “Negro” (Black) with a series of 30 interviews including some in Honduras by an Afro-Panamanian filmmaker which was recently reviewed on the website www.afropunk.com which also included clips of this new DVD.