Descriptions of Wendy Griffin’s Unpublished Manuscripts in
US Libraries Related to Honduran Banana Companies
(Summaries were put
in the Google Books Pages)
1. Griffin, Wendy (1992) La Historia de los
Indigenas de la Zona Nororiental de Honduras tomo I Prehistoria a 1820
Books.google.com/…/Historia_de_los_indigenas_de_Honduras_nororiental:
La Prehistoria
This books begins the history of the
Honduran Indians with the arrival of Olmec influence in 1,000 BC, by which time
the Rainforest Indians of Honduras like the Pech are believed to have already
arrived in Honduras. The book looks at populations of Honduran and other
Central Americans Indians in the Classic Period (300-900 AD) and how they had
to move in the Postclassic Period due to arrival of slave and land taking
Indians from Mexico, most notably the Chorotega and Nahua speakers, known in
colonial documents as mexicanos, Pipiles, Nicaraos, Cholulatecas,Tultecas and
Acaltecas (now spelt Agalteca in Honduras due to influence of the Nicarao
dialect of Nahua). The book also covers the effects of the partial Spanish
Conquest of Honduras and how resistance of the Pech, Miskito, Tawahka,
Jicaque/Tolupan, Lenca and Nahua Indians in the unconquered parts of Honduras
differed from those Indians under Spanish control who were influenced by
Spanish Indian slavery, encomiendas, pueblos de indios, repartimiento, Spanish
government land titles, missions and missionaries, etc. The book also documents
the arrival of different Afro Descent groups such as Spanish speaking
slaves,mulattos and pardos, the Black English speakers, Blacks who intermarried
with Miskito Indians and at the end Garífunas. Many maps and explains different
linguistic, archaeological, ethnographical, colonial terms used for different
Honduran Indian and Afrodescent groups. Essential for understanding why the
Honduran government did not control the territory where they gave banana
company concessions to the Tela Railroad and Truxillo Railroad of United Fruit
and to Standard Fruit/Vacarro Brothers (now Dole owned) at the beginning of the
20th century and which groups did live there before the Banana companies. This
books is also important to put into context the current problems in the
Honduran rainforest in Olancho, Colon and Mosquitia caused by the colonization
by Honduras Ladinos as modern descendants of the Mesoamerican Indians as part
of an interethnic conflict over land use techniques and definition of
culturally important plants and trees that is already 3,000 years old. Also
includes information on the independent Miskito kingdom, its kings, its internal
administration, and the functions of the Miskito kings. The issue of why the
Pech and the Tawahkas who were neighbors of Mesoamerican Indians for 3,000
years yet deliberately chose not to adopt their heirarchical society, their
agricultural techniques, or their architecture may be essential for knowing why
they were able to live in the Honduran and Nicaraguan rainforest for 3,000
years and not destroy it and in 50 years Mesoamerican based Ladinos have done
away with it, as well as for knowing who built the Ciudad blanca or White City
in the Honduran rainforest in Pre-Columbian times. This book uses
archaeological, linguistic, ethnographic, and historic evidence and starts with
an essay on the limitations and benefits of each type of evidence. A good basic
overview of this Little known área developed for the Pech Bilingual
Intercultural Education program and as a way to make available to Hondurans
many bibliographic resources about their country which were either not in their
country or not in Spanish or not understandable because Hondurans did not know
the meaning of the classifications like Tropical Forest Tribes/Mesoamericans,
uto-Aztecans vs Macro-Chibcha, or the connection of historic names like
Mexicanos, Mexicano corupto, and Payas with modern names for Honduran Indians
like Nahuas and Pech. The errors in the Smithsonian Institute's maps for the
Central American Ceramics exhibition which closed 15 February 2015, shows this
confusión is not only in Central America. Resources used for the colonial period
include not only secondary and primary sources that have been published, but
also documents from the General Archives of Central America in Guatemala City
and oral history. Trujillo in NE Honduras is the only place in the New World
both Christopher Columbus and Hernan Cortes visited. To here my review on
Google books.
This book on the ethnohistory of the Pech (Paya), Tawahka
(Sumu), Tolupan/Jicaque, Miskito, and Nahua (Pipil, Nicarao, Mexicano,
Cholulateca) Indians of Honduras beginning in1,000 BC to the end of the
colonial period also includes the Colonial
era Spanish speaking Blacks and the English speaking Blacks . The book was written in 1992 in support of
the Pech bilingual-intercultural education project. It combines the major archaeological, lingüístic,
históric and ethnographic sources of information, and so is a place to begin to
connect the modern Honduran Indians and Blacks to anthropological, ethnographic,
linguistic, historic, and geographic classifications
and contexts. Many maps showing
different periods are included. In addition to published sources of
information, both primary sources from the colonial era, secondary sources, and
Honduran sources of Indian oral history and ethnography, documents from the General Archives of Central
America in Guatemala City were also consulted.
A lot of information on Western and Central Honduras from 1,000 BC to the Spanish conquest which
was occupied by Mesoamerican groups including Lencas, Nahuas, and Mayas is included. Vol. I emphasizes the conflict
between the Pech and other Central American Indians when the Nahuas and
Chorotegas arrived in Central America from Mexico and more conflicts with the coming
of the Spanish. Almost all Indians of
Northeastern Honduras remained free
during the entire colonial period so strategies of resistance are noted, and
where the frontier was between the Spanish and the Free Indians is documented
at different periods in the colonial period. Information on the Miskito Kings
and their Kingdom is included as is ethnographic data noted in colonial era
documents.
The situation of the
free Indians like the Miskitos, the Tawahkas, the Tol and Jicaques, some of the
Nahuas, the Rah, and the Pech is contrasted with Indians under Spanish control
such as through encomiendas, pueblos de indios, or missionary controlled towns
and the different resistance strategies of both are noted. Why the Honduran North Coast and the Bay
Islands were mostly deserted by the time the Honduran Garifunas arrived in1797
and later the English speaking Blacks who are the ancestors of today’s Bay
Islanders is included.
This book is important to understand why the Honduran
government did not control the áreas where the US owned Banana Companies like
United Fruit’s Tela Railroad and Truxillo Railroad and the Standard Fruit
Company/Vacarro Brothers wanted to establish themselves, and why the Honduran
government was anxious to gain control of the areas by adding communication
infrastructure such as Railroads, Telegraph, Radio, Ports, and Customs Houses,
in areas of the Honduran North Coast that they did not control and had no
presence after becoming independent in 1821 and which was still the case at the
beginning of the 20th century when Banana Company presence increased. None of
the current books on Honduran Banana Companies takes into account that almost
all the land given to US owned Railroad Companies for Bananas was NOT
controlled by the Honduran government at the time it was given and that the
Railroads were a strategy to gain political control and economic resources in
an área where 400 years of Spanish Conquest had not yet managed to penétrate.
This book also puts into historic perspective the
colonization front of Honduran Ladinos in entering the Honduran rainforest
which has accelerated since the 1960’s, but is part of an interethnic conflict
between Mesoamerican and Tropical Rainforest type Indians over land use and
resources that is at least 3,000 years old in North Eastern Honduras with
evidence of Olmec influence and trade in both Olancho and Colon Departments.
While US archaeologists ooh and aah over Mesoamericans, the Pech and Tawahka
Indians were their neighbors for 3,000 years and chose not to copy their style
of hierarchical societies and practices of land use and understanding why and
how the Pech and other Tropical Forest groups maintained the rainforest and did
not copy these other Indians whose practices have destroyed the Olancho
rainforest in 50 years is probably a critical point to understanding tropical
ecological systems, a how they were maintained for many millenium by their
inhabitants and current conflicts in Honduras today.
This unpublished manuscript is the basis of historical
information in published books like the 1991 “Dioses, héroes, Hombres en El
Universo Mitico Pech” by Honduran anthropologist of the UPN Dr. Lazaro Flores
and Wendy Griffin, the 2009 book “Los Pech de Honduras: Una Etnia que Aun Vive”
by Wendy Griffin and Pech informants Hernan Martinez Escobar and Juana Carolina
Hernandez Torres and also figure in her published books on Afro-Hondurans like
“Los Garifunas de Honduras” (2005) and Griffin,Wendy
(2004) The History and Culture of the Bay Islanders and North Coast English
speakers” available on the Internet at
.s114101627.onlinehome.us/files/Isleno.pdf
Many Honduras This Week articles included information from this
unpublished manuscript. There are copies of this manuscript in the library of
the Universidad Pedagogica Nacional (UPN), the Honduran Institute of
Anthropology and History (IHAH), in Pech schools in Moradel and El Carbon, and
Miskito and Garifuna high schools in Brus Laguna and Santa Fe in Honduras and
in the University of Pittsburgh library and the Vine Deloria Jr. Library of the
National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian, Washington, DC.
2. Griffin, Wendy (1994) The History of the Indians of Northeastern Honduras: Prehistory to
1820: Contact, change, and resistance Across the Mesoamerican-Tropical Forest
Tribe Cultural Fronteir www.books.google.com/.../The_History_of _Indians_of_Northeaste.html?id.
Similar to above, but it is better documented and also
includes at the end looking at how to see the presence of the Honduran
government in the áreas where the Indians of NorthEast Honduras and the
presence of these agencies at different points in the 19th and 20th centuries,
in a shift from what had been closed corporate communities to societies
inmeshed in the national structures and surrounded by the national and
increasingly globalized culture. Also includes the shift in local control from
the Indians to municipalities run by Ladinos, a process now also affecting
strongly the Garifunas of Honduras. It
looks at religión maintenance and language maintenance as the Honduran
government and the Ladinos of the center move into the Indian and Free Blacks controlled
áreas. Documents better Indian forms of
resistance in both Mesoamerican Indian towns under Spanish control and that of
the free Indians.
3. Griffin, Wendy
(1992) La Historia de los Indigenas de
la Zona Nororiental de Honduras: 1800 a 1992 Tomo II
books.google.com/books/…/La_historia_de_los_indigenas_de_la_zona.htm
This book begins with a summary of why the
Honduran government did not control NE Honduras in 1800 with a map showing
where the free Indians and the Honduran government each controled.There is also
a section on efforts of the colonial Spanish government 1795-1820 to try to
gain control including the reconquest of Trujillo abadoned in1645 and
missionaries trying to christianize Indians in NE Honduras. The rest of the
book is divided into the 19th and 20th centuries and follows five main themes.
What did the Honduran government do to try to gain political control and
uncontested title to NE Honduras which meant extinguishing in turn the rights
of the Miskito King, the rights of the British,overcome interrnal civil wars,
and the rights of the Nicaraguan goverment, a process only completed in 1960.
There are a whole series of international treaties and treaties with the
Miskito King or his representative which brought this about which make the
Honduran Indians, Garífunas and Bay Islanders have Treaty rights which is
uncommon in Central America. The second theme is economic activities in the
área,usually driven by foreign concessions or buyers, and how did the Pech, the
Tawahkas, the Miskitos, the Jicaques, the Nahuas, the mulattos, the Garífunas
and Black English speakers fit into this and how did it affect their cultures.
Also noted is the expansión of Catholic and Protestan tchurches into the área.
The ethnic composition of NE Honduras changed drastically especially after the
Wars of Olancho ending in 1865 with Ladinos exiled to the North Coast and the
coming of the Truxillo Railroad,beginning in 1914 which displaced at least 6
Pech villages, and the railroad of Standard Fruit. Extensive information on the
Truxillo Railroad and how their bananas, free rights to all hardwoods and all
hydrocarbons along their route caused issues of land loss, destruction of the
NE Honduras rainforest which did not return, and changed the ethnic composition
of the área where interethnic relations remain conflictive. Besides Honduran
ethnic groups, the arrival of new European and Black immigrants are noted, and
laws and policies to encourage or discourage their migration and investing in
Honduras are noted.
The process of how new industries moving
into the Indian and Garifuna áreas at the beginning offered Jobs, but later
these Jobs disappeared either because the Company left, the ethnic composition
of workers was changed in favor of Ladinos, or the Jobs were mechanized and so
local people were not needed or internationally some chemical product was found
to replace a locally produced natural product like dyes, chicle, rubber, etc.
and so how it came to be that the ethnic groups of Honduras have few job
opportunities in their áreas is revealed.
Hondurans tend to think that these ethnic groups never contributed
anything to local economy, but in fact they were the motor of these export industries
until the 1950’s, since cacao was the first export product of Honduras in 1,000
BC to the Olmec región of Mexico. The types of things these ethnic groups produced for the international market tended
to take advantage of rainforest resources without wiping them out, which led to
an internal ethnic group ethics to maintain the rainforest rather than to cut
it down for the selling of the hardwoods.
While this book has a map of where the
Truxillo Railroad had reached by 1933 when Jesus Aquilar Paz completed his
first map, it does not include the spur of the Truxillo Railroad going along
the Western bank (margen izquierda) of the Aguan River that went from Corocito
to Sonaguera which was built and the story of Sonaguera when the Truxillo
Railroad and the Standard Fruit’s railroad wanted to go through is beautifully
documented in John Solouri’s 2009 book “Banana Cultures”. The mulattos of Sonaguera warned don’t give
away the land and displace the cattle industry that has been our “patrimonio”
the way we made money from time inmemorial. These companies could come in and
then be gone.
The municipal government of Sonaguera did
not listen to them and zoned all of Sonaguera agricultural so that the cattle
would not bother the banana trees, thereby destroying the livelihood that had
been Sonaguera’s reason for existence since at least 1550 by which time the
native Indians had already been sold overseas as slaves. The mulatto cattle
ranchers of Sonaguera who probably had no legal land title to their grazing
lands were right. Within a decade the Truxillo Railroad had both come and gone,
but the resources were not returned to their original owners who anyway no
longer had cattle to put on the land.
Sonaguera is now full of Agrarian Reform cooperatives which do
monoculture with oranges and when it is a bad year and people do not want to
buy the oranges they rot and the people have nothing to eat, because they did
not plant part of their beautiful flat lands in beans and rice for having
listened to the siren’s song of advisors who recommend using land to produce
things of higher value for people who have money to pay more, instead of what
will feed your family and your neighbors.
4. Griffin, Wendy y Tomasa Clara Garcia Chimilio
(2012) Yaya: La Vida de una Curandera Garifuna. (Yaya: The Life of a
Garifuna Healer) There is an English versión and a Spanish versión,but only the
Spanish versión is in the University of Pittsburgh library.
Tomasa Clara García Chimilio was 91 years
old at the time I interviewed her for this book, and so she grew up at the time
of the Truxillo Railroad in Trujillo itself.
Her father at first worked bringing contraband goods and some people
from Belize by three sail canoe for the foreign merchants who sold in Trujillo
for the local population and to the workers of the Truxillo Railroad. Then he
switched to working on call for the Truxillo Railroad as one of the dock
workers for Puerto Castilla, a common job for Garifuna men in Trujillo at the
time. Clara’s mother had a farm and sold produce from her farm and breads in
Puerto Castilla to the Truxillo Railroad’s workers there, and sometimes Clara
went with her to sell. She herself was a
midwife and healer and her stories and those of other older Trujillo Garifunas
are full of interethnic stories of healing, birth attending, and of witchcraft.
Her life which included working as
domestic help for other people in banana towns like La Ceiba and Olanchito for
a number of years is fairly typical of other people’s remembrances of Garifuna
life at the time of Truxillo Railroad in Trujillo itself. I am working on
improving this manuscript for publication.
In the versión at the University of
Pittsburgh there are modern photos of Doña Clara a buyei, including in her guli
or sanctuary where she communicates with the ancestor spirits who help her by
David Flores Valladares and there are 4 photos of the series of photos by Cajun
engineer Antime Landry from 1928-1930 of the Truxillo Railroad era in the área of
Trujillo and Puerto Castilla, used with permission. Hopefully I will get the stories related to Growing
Up in the Shadows of Honduran Banana Companies: An Oral History Project in
Honor of the 100th Anneversary of the Truxillo Railroad written and published, a
Project for which I have permission to use the photos of Antime Landry from his
inheritors, his children and grandchildren.
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