Short Biography of Wendy Griffin, owner of this blog, and her work with Honduran Blacks

Pittsburgh Woman Works to Document The History of Central American Blacks

By Wendy Griffin (2013)

According to the research of University of Pittsburgh History Professor Dr. Reid Andrews, author of the book Afro-Latin America,  if we look at where most slaves taken from Africa were sold, there were many more African slaves sold in Latin America and the Caribbean than in the US.  In most countries of Latin America during the colonial period, African descent people were the largest non-Indian ethnic group. Yet many people in the US and sometimes even in their own countries are unaware of the existence, history or cultures of these Latin American Blacks.

 Wendy Griffin, whose sister Pam Lawrence lives in Alpharetta and works for Morgan Stanley, was studying her Master’s in International Development Education at the University of Pittsburgh in 1985, she had the opportunity to go to Honduras to train English teachers from 1985-1987 at the National Teacher’s College, now the UPN, in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa through a program of the US government called English Teaching Fellows.   

While there she noticed that Honduran history books or books about Honduran culture made almost no mention of Honduran Blacks or Honduran Indians. In the US, the topics of Black history and ethnohistory of Indians were already being well researched, partly as a result of Black History Month and similar initiatives following Black and Indian Civil Rights movements.

As an undergraduate, Griffin had majored in History,  as well as in foreign languages, at Western Washington University. Her studies included a final course in US Indian History which she found very eye opening. For example, she found out Pennsylvania had an Indian Reservation until 1964, when it was put under water by the Kinzua Dam, while she had never heard one word about modern Pennsylvania Indians while studying at Liberty School in Shadyside or Peabody High School in East Liberty. She became angry to realize that Makah Indians in Washington State knew about the situation of these Indians, but in Pittsburgh, not one word was mentioned when she was young. In fact, the Pittsburgh museums gave the idea that the Indians had died out after the French and Indian War instead of  explaining the 39 broken treaties that led to most Pennsylvania Indians being in Oklahoma and others having run away to the hills of West Virginia where they often intermarried with Blacks.

A Honduran  anthropologist, Lazaro Flores,  who was coordinating a program of bilingual- intercultural education for Pech Indians at the UPN asked her help to research the history of the Pech Indians when she returned to Pittsburgh to finish her Master’s degree at the end of 1987, because the only history of the Pech then in Honduras was 7 pages long and written in 1932.

The University of Pittsburgh has one of the top 12 Latin American libraries in the US. To study the history of the Pech, it was necessary to study their relationships with other ethnic groups, which resulted in a lot of information on Blacks in the colonial period in Honduras and afterwards. In her two volume book The History of the Indians of Northeastern Honduras, she documented the arrival of the African slaves to work in the gold mines together with the Indians in the 1540’s, over 80 years before the Pilgrims came to America. Trujillo, Honduras was one of the first places Blacks came to the Americas, sometimes as free sailors or conquistadores.

The Honduran Indians and Blacks joined together to throw the Spanish out of the goldfields in 1542 and 1544, and in many parts of Eastern Honduras the Spanish were never again able to control the goldfields there  during the colonial period, and they had to give up gold mining with black slaves as the slaves ran away. Those enslaved Africans who had worked in the goldfields escaped into the mountains and the coastal jungles, forming communities there.  A number of important communities in the colonial period in Honduras were known as primarily mulatto towns—Choluteca, Yoro, Olanchito, Juticalpa, Cano, Sonaguera, San Pedro Sula, etc. For example, there were only 3 Spaniards in Yoro at the end of colonial period and hundreds of mulattos.

 At the end of the colonial period, there were only 2,000 people in Honduras considered “Spanish” and the author of the census said that even they were probably only “structurally” Spanish because if we looked into their family trees we would find Blacks and Indians. The rest of the population of Honduras was either Indian or mixed race, with mulattos (mixed Indians with Blacks or Blacks with whites or any mixture thereof) making up about 30% of the Honduran population, according to estimates of Dr. Dario Euraque. Hundreds of unmixed blacks also lived in Honduras then, such as in the town of Omoa, where the Spanish king had slaves to build the fort, in Trujillo, in the Mosquitia, where the British had African slaves. There were also Garifunas in Honduras, Guatemala and Belize at the end of the colonial period in Honduras in 1821.

The current capital city of Honduras Tegucigalpa had an important neighborhood or Barrio of mulattos and “pardos” (dark skinned people), known now as Barrio Abajo. One of the most beautiful churches in Honduras, La Iglesia de Los Delores (The Church of the Virgin of Sadness or Pain), says carved above the doorway, this was the church of the mulattos and “pardos” of Tegucigalpa.   In San Pedro Sula, every traveler who went there said there was nothing to eat but plantains, probably planted by mulatto descendants of escaped gold miners. The town that is now Puerto Cortes, Honduras’s biggest port, was inhabited principally in the colonial period by a few mulattos who told the Spanish in San Pedro when the ships came.

 In Spanish colonial documents these African descent people were called different names—bozales (people who arrived directly from Africa) or by the name of the country they came from like Angoleños (people from Angola) or Congos, mulattos (which in Central America often  referred to both the mix of Indians with Blacks and Blacks with the Spanish), pardos (dark skinned people), sambos (the mix of Indians and Blacks), ingleses negros (Black English speakers), negros franceses (French speaking Blacks, exiled from Haiti) and morenos (Blacks, in Central America these are usually Garifunas).

 “Cimarones” is also a common word found describing Latin American Blacks, and refers to Blacks who have run away and live free in the jungle or in the mountains. Since the Spanish did not control at least one third of what is now Honduras, there were a lot of places to run to.

 In both Central America and the Caribbean it was common that Blacks mixed with the local Indians, in part because the slave traders generally brought Black men as slaves, and to form families these Africans had to marry the local Indians.  Colonial documents refer to some of these mixed people with mixed names  like Sambo-Miskitos (The mixture of Black with Miskito Indians of Honduras and Nicaragua) or Caribes Negros (Black Caribs—the mixture of Carib and Arawak Indians with Africans, now known as Garifunas). While in some countries Sambo or Zambo means mixture of Blacks and Indians, in Honduran colonial documents it may have meant Black people, perhaps especially from Zambia or from the West African area known as Guinea. The feminine form of sambo is Samba, and is the name of the dance done by Black women in Brasil for Carnival. One subgroup of Miskito Indians is called Sambul in the Miskito language, and these people are typically built like linebackers, very heavy set among both men and women.

Similar situations happened in the US, such as among the Seminoles in Florida.  Black Indians were the subject of an award winning video shown on ABC, and  is still available on the Internet. Also the topic of Black Indians is an important part of the video about the Pittsburgh Indians of the Council of Three Rivers American Indian Center at the Carnegie Museum’s Alcoa Hall of the American Indian in Pittsburgh, PA.  Wendy Griffin introduced the curator of that exhibit to the members of the Council of Three Rivers when she was cultural presentation bureau coordinator there in 1991.

In her 1992 book on the History of the Indians of NE Honduras, Wendy Griffin notes the formation and expansion of some of these mixed Indian-African groups like the Miskitos and the Garifunas, as well as the mulattos descended from colonial Spanish speaking slaves and the Black English speakers, the descendants of English speaking slaves who immigrated to Honduras either with English speaking masters or after slavery ended in nearby British colonies like Gran Cayman, Jamaica and Belize and in the Miskito Kingdom .

Honduran laws changed in 1992 which made bilingual-intercultural  education legal in the country.  Griffin, the only bilingual education specialist in the country at the time, began volunteering with most of Honduras’s 9 recognized Indians and Afro-Honduran groups to train them in bilingual and intercultural education and to help get funding for the programs while teaching at the UNAH, a Honduran university in Tegucigalpa. Some funding from the World Bank, UN Development Programs, US Agency for International Development (USAID), US Information Agency (USIA), UNESCO and UNICEF  was obtained by 1995 and the Honduran government approved laws and UN sponsored Conventions like ILO Convention 169 making  bilingual intercultural education the law in Honduras. 

For health reasons, Wendy Griffin was unable to continue teaching fulltime in Honduras and returned to Pittsburgh in 1995.  After a year in Pittsburgh, she returned to Honduras in 1996, but instead of living in the capital city she went to live in Trujillo, a town on the northern Caribbean coast of Honduras which has several Garifuna neighborhoods.  She began volunteering with the Garifuna bilingual education, training teachers, writing curriculum, working in oral history projects and documenting the culture, and teaching anthropology at the UPN on the weekends in the nearby city of La Ceiba where she had several Miskito and Garifuna students.  Some of her research was published by the Honduran English language newspaper Honduras This Week between 1992 and 2006. After 1995 Honduras This Week had an online version, but these articles are no longer on the Internet.

Her health deteriorated and she lost her permission to live and work fulltime in Honduras, called residencia, because she was too ill to work.  So she went back and forth between Honduras and Pittsburgh for many years, especially after the Garifunas, Miskitos and Black Bay Islanders were hit by Hurricane Mitch in 1998. In Pittsburgh she has worked with the Council of Three Rivers American Indian Center as a Cultural Presentation Bureau Coordinator, as a grant writer for programs for at risk youth and homeless people with East End Cooperative Ministry, Graduate Research Assistant at the University of Pittsburgh, and administrative assistant or paralegal at the Corporate Word, Equitable Resources, Westinghouse, among other places.

In Honduras, Garifuna agriculture and many houses were destroyed after Hurricane Mitch in 1998. The Garifunas of Trujillo formed the Garifuna Emergency Committee of Honduras (CEGAH) to look for funding to rebuild houses and the agriculture.  They eventually branched out including medicinal plant projects, reforestation of trees for wood for Garifuna crafts and houses and other craft plants like the vine belaire, craft and sewing projects, land rights struggles,  videos about the Garifunas’ situation, and children breakfast programs, which Griffin helped them get money for and helped prepare reports for funders, who were mostly in English speaking countries like the US.

These projects have been recognized internationally, including being one of the 26 finalists for the Equator Prize of UNDP for sustainable development projects.  The Garifunas of CEGAH were chosen to give advice to the victims of the tsumani in India and Sri Lanka about how to rebuild after a disaster, advice which they repeated to representatives of the World Bank and UNDP in New York.

CEGAH also got involved with bilingual-intercultural education . They published  Griffin’s 10 year study Los Garifunas de Honduras (The Garifunas of Honduras) and donated it to Garifuna schools with funding from the Edwards Foundation.  With funding from St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Highland Park in Pittsburgh, Griffin and the Garifunas of CEGAH gave bilingual-intercultural education seminars and  copied and distributed books to teach reading and writing in the Garifuna language to Garifuna schools.

The official Honduran government program for bilingual-intercultural education for Honduran Indians and Afro-Hondurans was approved as a pilot project in 1992 and nationally approved and funded since 1994, but for almost 17 years the teachers did not teach bilingually in the classrooms, waiting for the development of alphabets, dictionaries, grammar books, textbooks, teacher’s guides, curriculum, teacher training, etc.

 Many times the Garifunas in Trujillo would ask Griffin, “Isn’t it true that bilingual education has been cancelled?”  She would say, “No, it still exists. It is still funded.”  One study recently found that 30% of Garifunas spoke no Garifuna, and the situation is worse among chidren among whom in some places like Trujillo over 90% do not speak Garifuna.  One retired Garifuna teacher felt that this loss was directly a result of the lack of the implementation of the Garifuna bilingual intercultural education program in a timely manner.

 But when the teachers finally had all these materials, and especially training, and the Minister of Education was actively working in favor of the project, most of the teachers began teaching bilingually in Garifuna schools about three years ago. Visits to Pech, Chorti, Bay Islands, and Miskito Indians show teachers there are also actively working in bilingual education.

While the government program has been active in producing bilingual materials, there has been little attention to the area of intercultural education. It is up to individual school principals if they chose to be active in doing things like forming folkdance groups, or forming choirs to sing Garifuna or Indian language songs including the National Anthem of Honduras, or giving talks about the history of the Garifuna people. Topics like Garifuna traditional medicine or Garifuna traditional folk tales or how to make traditional Garifuna crafts or foods are not included in the classes, and these elements of Garifuna culture could soon be lost.

While Griffin has worked closest with the Garifunas, because she lives in the same city with them, her published research has included 3 books on the Miskito Indians, 1 book on Black English speakers, a book on the folkdances of all the Honduran Indians, Blacks and Spanish speakers, called Ladinos, 3 books on the Pech Indians, and over 300 Honduras This Week articles mostly on Honduran Indians and Afro-Hondurans. She also has a number of unpublished works on Garifunas, Black English speakers, and the Pech.

She was also filmed as an ethnohistorian for a video on the Ciudad Blanca, a mysterious ruin in the Honduran rainforest near the Pech Indians. This video is now on YouTube. Search for Ciudad Blanca Honduras.  The English version is in 4 parts and the Spanish version is in 1 part. There was a website about this video and the ruin, www.roatannet.com/ciudadblanca,  but that website is now down.  Other documentaries have also been filmed about the Ciudad Blanca (White City) in Honduras, including one by A and E TV, and most recently by National Geographic.

She is currently working with Honduran co-authors to produce on books on the crafts of all Honduran Indians and Afro-Hondurans, a book on the History of Folkdance Clothes, a book on the Interethnic relations of the Maya-Chorti Indians,  a new version of the book on the Bay Islanders and Black English Speakers of Honduras, and The African Origins of Afro-Honduran foods. She is also working with an Argentinian researcher on Afro-Honduran and Honduran Indian traditional games. She has been collaborating with Dr. Luis Miletti of Clark Atlanta University, the editor of Negritud, a journal on Afro-Latin Americans, since 2013, such as writing about the life of a Garifuna midwife, healer, shaman and message therapist, known as Yaya. Her biography is on this blog.  Several members of Yaya’s mother’s family, the Chimilios, live here in Atlanta, including a special education teacher, her brother and husband who are Garifuna sailors, a bilingual newspaper editor, and other professionals. There are now enough Hondurans in Atlanta that there is a Honduran Consulate here.

Copies of most of Wendy Griffin’s published and unpublished books are at the University of Pittsburgh library and at Tulane, and so are available through Inter-Library loan all over the US, but many are in Spanish, because that is the language of the people themselves and the language of the teachers and students who need to study about them in Honduras. She does have books about Bay Islanders and Garífuna in English, including children’s stories. The book on Black English speakers is on this blog.  The Pittsburgh Tribune, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, and Honduras This Week have all done articles on her work in Honduras among Honduran Indians and Afro-Hondurans.

 Recently in 2013 she began writing for the new English Honduran online newspaper Honduras Weekly.com which ceased publication in 2015. Also she has helped with the marketing and public relations campaigns of the new Garifuna movie, Garifuna in Peril, which was written, directed, and produced by a Los Angeles Garifuna Ruben Reyes together with American independent film producer and cinematographer Ali Allie. Ruben Reyes is also the star of the Garifuna in Peril movie, the first movie with the majority of its dialogue in Garifuna. The Garifuna in Peril movie played in Atlanta at the end of September and the directors hope to schedule another performance of the film in Atlanta in November. The film won four awards at film festivals. Worried about the Garifunas and US policies in Honduras, Griffin sent a copy of the movie to President Obama,outlining her concerns. President and Mrs. Obama sent back a thank you note on official White House stationary which they signed, Saying your compassion shows the spirit of the American people.  

Wendy Griffin is also helping with a project to promote cultural things made by the Honduran Indians and Afro-Hondurans. This project includes making contacts to have sales-exhibitions of crafts and paintings in both Honduras and in the US. For example, upcoming sales-exhibitions, called expo-ventas in Spanish, were scheduled at the University of Kansas and at St. Andrews Church in Pittsburgh in 2013, as well as in La Ceiba, Tegucigalpa, and San Pedro Sula in Honduras.

She is also helping the craft people, painters, authors, and musical artists, learn new technologies to promote their crafts and their culture. There are already new photos of Honduran crafts on Wikimedia Commons. the Pech Indians have their own blog www.culturapech.blogspot.com and the Garifuna craft people all have email addresses so that they can be invited to sales.

She has also helped the Afro-Honduran and Indian authors and researchers about them make connections to US librarians that buy books, CD's and videos in Spanish and special buyers/distributors of Central American books in Spanish known as “libreros”. She is also making connections to Wikipedia for the indigenous and Afro-Honduran authors, craft people, musicians, painters, so that people can see that in fact they produce many things of value and beauty.  

In Los Angeles, California there is a Garifuna Museum, but they currently have no Garifuna crafts for sale in their gift shop. There is also a Garifuna e-commerce site www.garinet.com or www.garistore.com based in Los Angeles, but they have no Garifuna crafts for sale, so she is trying to help the artisans, painters, and authors,  connect with them and figure out how to set up the distribution network.  

The Smithsonian Museum is planning an upcoming exhibit on the Indigenous Traits in Caribbean peoples, which will have to include the Garifunas because they speak the Caribbean Arawak language and make most of the crafts, and do some of the dances, yet the Smithsonian only has one Garifuna drum. They will need more crafts to include in the exhibit and to sell in the giftshop and Wendy Griffin tried to help to make these connections, so that the Central American Blacks and Indians will not be so invisible.

Other Afro-Latin American groups are interested in the use of these new technologies to share information among the different Afro-Latin American groups such as by improving articles in Wikipedia, especially in Spanish. Not only have Afro-Latin Americans been invisible to the other people in their own countries, but they have been invisible to each other.  Being able to connect to each other by Internet and inform each other through blogs or Wikipedia pages would help improve communications in countries where mainstream publications often have Afro-Latin Americans, their cultures, their achievements, their difficult land situations, damage to the environment in their areas, covered up or invisible. The Garifuna organization in Honduras OFRANEH has an excellent blog
www.ofraneh.wordpress.com. 

 Both the Pittsburgh Post Gazette and the Pittsburgh Tribune Review as well as Honduras This Week have all done articles on her work with bilingual intercultural education in Honduras. The Allegheny Valley Dispatch Review also did an article on her work with US Indians at the Indian Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.