Changes in Garifuna Material Culture Caused by Wage Labor in Banana Companies

Changes in Garifuna material Culture Caused by Wage labor in the banana companies

By  Wendy Griffin

It has been very interesting to compare the timing of changes in the Garifuna material culture with similar changes in the Lenca culture (as identified by Doris Stone’s 1943 article) and the Pech culture, through oral interviews with older Pech women in the Trujillo area. I think these changes help explain why the Garifunas felt the need for cash and when the jobs which had provided cash disappeared in the Garifuna region, this led to their immigration.

Already in 1919, The Garifunas used hammocks of azulon, blue denim from Guatemala, instead of traditional Garifuna hammocks woven from the bark of a tree called weñu in Garifuna and majoa in Spanish. The Pech were still making hammocks of majoa in the 1980’s when I began to work with the Pech.

Already in 1919, the Garifunas were using either cast iron griddles (budauri) for making cassava bread or “laminas” pieces of zinc roofing to make traditional Garifuna breads. These breads were made in cast iron  skillets among both the Garifunas and the Bay Islanders. Some high up Garifunas in the fruit company even had American style cast iron wood burning stoves that the Truxillo Railroad imported from Pittsburgh, PA.  They bought them on credit. These type of stoves were necessary in houses with wood floors and wooden walls like the Fruit Companies built, because you can not start a fire to cook cassava or to cook food on a wooden floor as you do in a traditional Garifuna house with a dirt floor. Other people made kitchens besides their wooden houses.  The Pech and the Lenca were still cooking in clay pots and clay frying pans and over three stone fires in the 1940’s. The Garifunas were eating off of plastic or metal or china (loza) dishes in the 1920’s while the Pech and the Lencas were still using guacal gourds. The Garifunas were also cooking in metal pots in the 1920’s and hauling water in factory made containers.  The Pech and the Lencas were cooking in clay pots they made themselves, except for cast iron pots for cooking sugar cane juice for making rapadura or “dulce”, which they walked from Olancho to Trujillo to obtain.  The Lenca and Pech hauled water from creeks in cumbos or calabazas, a large gourd like plant that grows on a vine, cut open at the top instead of in the middle like a barco or a guacal. The Garifunas make no mention of even knowing of this plant, but the Miskitos mention it in their stories.

In the 1920’s everyone in Honduras was wearing cotton clothes made from manufactured cloth. This manufactured cloth was imported. In the 18^th and 19^th century, England had been the big source of imported cloth, but in the 20^th century, the US becomes the big supplier of cloth for Honduras. Different ethnic groups became associated with different types of cloth. The Pech women usually wore zarasa, which is calico in English, and usually has small flowers. The Garifuna women typically wore gingham, with a print of checkered squares in one color on top of white, often contrasting with a solid color cloth. Garifuna and Bay Islander men wore all white clothes in the early 20^th century, a style known as tropical whites, although Garifuna men has black suits for funerals and Good Friday.  The Lenca and Chorti Indians were associated with manta, a white cotton cloth. The Pech and the Lencas still made their own thread into the 1920’s for the Lencas and into the 1960’s for the Pech, but the Garifunas wore clothes sewn by machine made thread and bought sewing needles which were imported. The Pech and Lencas wore caites, homemade sandals in the 1940’s, but the Garifunas in the 1930’s were barefoot (chuña) reported Doña Clara. The stores of the United Fruit Company were famous for their fine shoes, and there are contemporary reports of campeños people who worked in the fields with great shoes that they bought in the ports.

A Pech man mentioned that they walked 10 days with fat pigs in the forest to reach the Coast to sell the pigs in Trujillo during the time of the Trujillo railroad specifically to buy underwear.  The Pech and Lenca women still made their own camisoles and slips into the 1950’s, cutting the cloth with a machete, but underpants, (called bloomers in Honduran Spanish) were bought factory made in Trujillo. So the issue of getting cloth to make clothes, after the local people had lost the technique, was a significant motivator to get people to travel great distances in Honduras. The Lenca men of Guajiquiro, La Paz sometimes traveled on foot to Esquipulas, Guatemala to buy wedding clothes for their wives. The Ladinos of Copan Ruinas took mules to El Salvador to sell and cloth and a sewing machine in El Salvador.

The Garifuna mothers of the 1920’s also slept on beds bought in stores, usually cots made of sail cloth (lona) stretched over a frame. The Pech and Lencas were still sleeping on wooden beds, like tapescos. The Garifunas started fires with matches (the word in Garifuna is machi, and becomes introduced at this time). The Pech of the 1960’s still knew how to start fires with fire stones and cotton, the same used by the Lencas of the 1940’s.

The Garifuna men hunted with rifles at the time of the Truxillo Railroad. Some men still hunted at the time, bringing home tepescuinte, deer, guatusa, quequeo (white colloared peccary), jagüilla (another kind of peccary), armadillo which the women cooked in coconut milk (Garifuna food said one woman whose father hunted).  There are no reports of Garifunas hunting with bows and arrows, but the Pech and Lencas would still hunt with bows and arrows at that time if they had no money for bullets or a gun.

Old style Garifunas who farm and who cut firewood and cleared fields are known in Spanish and in Garifuna as “Garifunas de hacha y azadon” (Garifunas of an axe and a hoe).  The Pech report even going to Nicaragua on foot to work in cutting mahoghany to be able to earn to get an “hachuela” (a curved wood cutting tool used for making canoes) and axe.  In the early days, companies paid in goods rather than in cash, since there were no stores in the rainforest, what good was cash?  The Garifunas clearly also used machetes as cooking tools and agricultural tools in the 1920’s.

Garifuna men even then were very cash economy oriented. They make crafts to sell. Of the over 40 Garifuna crafts only 3 types of crafts are made by Garifuna women.  They fish and sell the fish, sometimes even requiring their wife to pay them for the fish if she sells fried fish.  The Garifuna men liked to eat pork and beef, which they usually did not raise themselves so they sold things like crafts or fish, or their wives and daughters sold things like firewood and breads and fresh crops to be able to buy beef and pork and other necessities. In the 1930’s, many Garifuna men still fished and while they were out fishing away from shore, they would get water from the sea, and the Garifuna women would boil it down and make salt. The Pech also made their own salt at this time, but from burning vines and trees known as “sal de tierra”.

The Garifunas now have a variety of foods made with wheat flour which is imported from the US.  The most famous is pan de coco (coconut bread), but they also make gingerbread (caballitos), cinnamon rolls (enrollados), they add flour to all the “pot cakes” or breads like pumpkin bread (pan de ayote), yuca bread, ripe banana bread, etc.  These foods and the related atols are of African origin, but the Garifunas have substituted traditional African flours (yam flour, banana flour, plantain flour, yuca flour etc.)  for wheat flour. This is also probably what happened in the soup base “takini” (harina quemado in water), and the ceremonial food “beili” which is now made of wheat flour, water and salt. The Garifunas and Bay Islanders report having made banana flour, Chata, and plantain flour in the 1960’s still, but they do not make them now. Even in Africa, these flours which are used to make atols or porridge have become scarce. This substitution of wheat flour for traditional Mesoamerican flour of corn also happened in the banana camps which gave rise to the Honduran food baleadas (wheat flour tortillas filled with beans and cheese and sometimes other ingredients) which banana workers took to eat at “lonch” in their “loncheras” (lunch boxes). Garifuna breads made with wheat flour require other imported ingredients like baking soda, nutmeg, cinnamon, too. Garifunas and Ladinos have both adopted the custom of making cakes for birthdays and especially for New Years. Bay islanders are infamous for their habit of making cakes almost every week. During the time of the Banana companies, the Garifunas of Trujillo danced Gunchey every Sunday from Christmas to Saturday of Holy Week, and they made a cake with a bean in it and the person who got the bean had to make the cake the following week. This custom of putting the bean in the cake, comes from the Spanish, who called these cakes “el roscon del rey” because they did it for Three Kings Day.

The Garifuna men fish. They either use nets which they weave from silk which is imported or they fish with fish hooks which are imported. The Garifuna men have not made weñu which can be used to weave nets or to fish with fish hooks for almost a century.  The Garifuna men also clean fish with knives. Garifuna women also use imported knives to prepare bananas and plantains and yucca, etc. The Garifunas already used silverware during the time of the Truxillo railroad, the Pech and Lencas generally did not.

The Pech in the 1960’s still made their own soap. The Garifunas so preferred the blue soap made by Belizeans that Garifuna men like Yaya’s father brought it from Belize by canoe as contraband to the big white store owners like the Glynns and the Melhados who sold it to the Garifunas. It was a three week round trip canoe trip from Trujillo to Belize. The Garifunas also like to make their clothes whiter with indigo, which in Honduras is usually imported from El Salvador. Some Garifuna women knew the use of a plant you could use if you did not have money for soap, but others did not.  Unlike the Bay Islander men who were very particular about starching their clothes, and the Bay Islands women had to spend a whole day making starch, boiling the clothes, drying them and ironing, this custom does not seem to have been popular among the Garifunas or the Pech.  The Lencas at this time knew how to make starch to starch clothes from yucca. Cast iron irons were imported.

The Honduran government made the selling of chicha or corn beer illegal. The selling of homemade sugar liquor, known as cucusa in Honduran Spanish and mamara in Garifuna is also illegal under Honduran law. The purpose of this law, is to try to get taxes generated by guaro (sugarcane liquor) and by beer (cerveza), the same as laws which generated G-men, the Whiskey Rebellion and songs about selling white lightening in the hills of Tennessee like Thunder Road in the US. 

Among the Garifunas in addition to being accustomed to drinking alcohol socially, alcohol is a necessary component of all rituals associated with death—wakes and burials, fin de novenario one year after death, lemessi, chugu, and dugu and all of its associated rites like mali and gusiri gayu. Guaro is used as medicine internally and externally, as a purifier, usually sprayed, is put on the hands of the drummers, singers drink it to make finer their voices after singing a while, it is shared with guests, and offered ceremonially to the ancestors at ceremonies and to the spirits which help the buyei daily. The amounts of guaro needed for a dugu can be quite high-one dugu bought 500 liters of guaro and had to rent a house just to keep the guaro in. Beer is also drunk at wakes and offered to ancestors. The decision of the government to require Garifunas to use bought alcohol as opposed to alcohol they made themselves has added considerably to the cost of these ceremonies. These ceremonies often require other bought things including candles.  These rites did not used to be so expensive as the men of the families collaborated with making the house for the ceremony and the drumming and making the alcohol and the women collaborated with crops and  cooking and singing and a pig and chickens, but since immigration all of this is paid for, making some dugus cost $10,000.

The railroad companies also introduced new games—tops (trompos), marbles (mables), jump rope (suiza) among Garifuna kids and these games required buying toys for children and some children feel sad if they do not have them. It is not clear if Garifunas had the custom of making rag dolls before the children were introduced to rag dolls made in the US like Raggety Anne. In all of Trujillo only one older Garifuna woman knew how to make rag dolls  in the 1920’s and she would trade them for firewood with the younger girls who wanted a doll.  The adoption of having dolls among the Pech is only in the last few years, and is a result of being given free clothes and toys usually by missionaries.

During the time of the railroad company, water pipes were introduced and the Garifunas of Trujillo and Puerto Castilla paid for water. At first they used kerosene lamps for light, but then the banana company introduced a dynamo or turbine for making electricity. So the Garifunas had to pay for water and for electricity before the railroad company left.  The Honduran municipalities were also implementing systems of taxing land, which in the case of the Tela Garifunas caused them to lose their land, because they did not put up fences and they did not pay taxes as required by the municipal government, because they were cash poor. The Tela Garifunas used to live where the customs house is right on the beach in Tela, reported Sebastian Marin. They fled to villages outside of Tela like Triunfo, la Ensenada, San Juan, etc.

By the time the Truxillo Railroad left in 1945, most Garifunas had lost the ability to make the things, de primera necesidad (of first necessity) which they had substituted by buying everything from furniture, to pots and pans and griddles for baking, to agricultural tools and rifles, to matches, to flour, to salt and “Manteca” (lard), soap, alcohol,  to clothes and shoes.  They also had costs in cash of things that they also thought of as of first necessity—light and water and taxes for the houses, medicine, schooling for their kids, etc.

When I asked Don Sebastian Marin about why he became a sailor and worked as a sailor of 35 years, he said when he finished school he worked for Banco Atlantida as a teller in Tela, but he only earned about $1 day and he eventually had 10 kids.  It was not possible to support these kids on $1. Agricultural workers report wages of L1 a day into the 1960’s. The Garifunas became involved with sending kids to school much earlier than most other Honduran ethnic groups, and currently the Garifunas have the highest literacy rate of any ethnic group in Honduras. But to go to school you need cash for uniforms, notebooks, pencils, homework assignments, paying matricula (registration). The Garifunas also got used to going to hospitals to buy medicines and to have babies. They got used to travelling by train or by bus or even by airplane at a time the Pech were still walking 10 days to the Coast.

So the Garifunas had very little possibility to get a significant cash income as the banana and coconut and the mahoghany cutting and contraband industries changed. To say that they began migrating not because of poverty but rather because of the desire to buy certain manufactured goods seems to me to not embrace the reality that they no longer had the ability to make these things themselves, they needed to buy them and they were not frivouslous things but rather clothes, shoes, pots and pans,  agricultural tools, etc.. Poverty was a significant problem, not so much for lack of food, but rather tools, things to cook with, how to sleep, etc. which affected the decision of some Garifunas to immigrate. The making of concrete block houses in the Trujillo began after hurricane Ana in 1959 and excelerated after Hurricane Fifi. Immigration affected this decision because when the men did their own roofs, it did not matter that they had to replace a manaca roof every 3 or 4 years. But if you have pay someone to do it, as most Garifunas have to now, it is cheaper to build with zinc I am told. Also since the men immigrated, the young men did not know how to repair clay houses, or cut yagual to make yagual houses or make viscoyol houses. People who wanted to rebuild with traditional materials often could not after Mitch due to loss of knowledge of how to build with traditional materials.  I have seen women with holes in their clay walls the size of various rats to get in, but they have not repaired it for the combination of issues that men should build clay walls among Garifunas, and there were no men, and the women did not know how to do it or were not willing to do it and could not direct their sons to do it. (Among the Pech clay walls are the responsibility of the woman and she is active every month repairing them.)

The Garifunas in Trujillo consider water, which they must pay for, electricity which they must pay for, medicine which they must pay for, taxes so they do not lose their houses, as necessities. They consider sending kids to school is important, even though it is a leading reason why Garifuna culture is being lost. My friend Angelica who is very sick with arthritis and depends on money sent back by a daughter in the US even considers the refrigerator a necessity, that the telephone is not a luxury at her age if she falls, the cable TV is important because she is home by herself most of the time and she uses to distract herself “distraerse”.