Film Garifuna in Peril Highlights Modern Problems Past History US Immigrants

2012 Film Garifuna in Peril Helps End Garifuna Immigrants’ Invisibility in the US, Highlights Modern  Problems and Past History

By Wendy Griffin

In the blog Being Garifuna (www.beinggarifuna.com) New York Garifuna blogger Teofilo Colon wonders whether US audiences are ready to watch the film Garifuna in Peril, which is about a Central American people the Garifuna living in the US, that most people in the US, even most Latinos know nothing about. The film  was produced by Ali Allie and Honduran born Garifuna Ruben Reyes. Reyes also plays the starring role. It made its US premiere in December 2012 at the 2012 African Diaspora International Film Festival in New York City to appreciative audiences, according to Teofilo Colon’s and the Garifuna in Peril the movie websites (www.garifunainperilmovie.com). Its World Premiere was in London, England.  Honduran, Belizean, and St. Vincent dignataries attended the New York and London premieres. After opening two days in New York, the movie was also shown at the Santa Fe Film Festival in Santa Fe, New México. It got favorable reviews in all three places.  Just prior to Martin Luther King Day, on 18 Janauary 2013, the film played again in New York City.

 On Februry 2, 2012 during Black History Month, the film made its West Coast premiere in San Diego, California.  The producers scheduled additional showings such as in Los Angeles, Miami, Cannes, Berlin, Zanzibar, Bogatá, Columbia, the Bahamas, and New Orleans. Eventually it won prizes in Tuscon, Arizona, Boston, Houston, and in Trieste, Italy. The Spanish language premier was in Livingston, Guatemala, a Garifuna community. It played in Honduras in Garifuna towns and big Honduran cities, eventually being shown on Honduran TV. It played at a Belizean film festival and then in several Garifuna towns in Belize. Several US universities arranged to show it after Latin American librarians heard about the movie at the SALALM Conference. The producers of the movie did not find a commercial distributor, but distributed and marketed the movie themselves using Facebook, a website, blogs, Amazon, direct mailings, articles in the ethnic press,  etc. Wikipedia articles were written both about this movie and Ali Allié’s previous Garifuna movie El Espiritu de Mi Mama, which also saw increased sales as a result of the release of his second award winning movie. The movie Garifuna in Peril is still for sale, plus it is now available on Youtube.com.

The fact that few Latinos or other Americans have even heard of the Garifunas is echoed on other websites about the Garifuna.  For example, on the website about folk life in New Orleans, the writer Amy Serrano says that Hondurans were the largest immigrant group in  the New Orleans  area prior to Hurricane Katrina, and many of these Hondurans were Garifuna, yet most people in New Orleans, even other Latinos had never heard of them, but were interested to hear about them. (http://www.louisanafolklife.org/LT/articles-Essays/garifuna.html).  According to this report, many Garifunas came to New Orleans legally during the era of the Alliance for Progress in the 1960’s and still others to help with rebuilding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.  Others report that there was also significant legal Honduran immigration to the New Orleans area during the years of the banana boom in Honduras when ships of United Fruit (now Chiquita), Cuyamel Fruit of New Orleans resident Samuel Zemurray(now part of Chiquita), and Standard Fruit (now part of Dole) connected New Orleans to the northern Central American ports of Honduras, like Puerto Cortes, Tela, La Ceiba, and Trujillo, all near traditional Garifunas communities. 

 The organization that represents the Garifuna in New York the Garifuna Coalition USA and Dr. Sarah England’s book on Afro-Central Americans in New York also say that even though Garifunas had lived in New York at least since the 1930’s, when they often came legally as merchant seamen with their whole families, they were mostly invisible in New York until the Happy Land Social Club fire in 1990, where 87 people died, 59 of the victims were Hondurans and 70% of them Garifunas.  New York is home to largest Garifuna population outside of Central America, with estimates of between100,000 and 200,000 Garifunas living in New York City, particularly in the Bronx (www.garifunacoalition.org). That makes the population of the Garifuna in New York possibly larger than the entire population of the country of Belize. The Garifunas in New York include immigrants from Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, and Nicaragua. In addition to a New York Times video noted below, the Wall Street Journal had identified the Garifunas as one of the immigrant groups changing Harlem in New York. The New York Daily News has reported on the blog BeingGarifuna.com. Other US cities with important Garifuna populations include Miami, Houston, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Partly due to the high cost of living in New York City, educated legal Garifunas are now spreading to other US cities such as Atlanta and Seattle.

 At Stanford University, they started the Garifuna Immigration project to tell bilingual education teachers and others interested in this migrant group about them, mostly through website links and summarizing articles about them, because few people knew anything about them(“Honduras Teacher’s Corner—http://www.stanford.edu/group/arts/honduras/links/).

The basic book about the Garifunas by an academic is Nancie Gonzales’s Sojouners of the Caribbean, published in 1988 and widely available. It was recently translated into Spanish and published in Honduras with the title “Peregrinos del Mar”. A good basic book about the Garifunas by a Garifuna is Black Caribs-Garifuna Saint Vincent’ Exiled People and the Origin of the Garifuna: A Historical Compilation edited by Tomas Alberto Avila who lives in Providence, Rhode Island (Avila, 2009).  Avila’s book is available from Amazon.com. It contains articles both by foreign researchers and by leading Garifuna and St. Vincentian intellectuals.

Garifunas are hard to classify, as noted in the New York Times video Being Garifuna ( www.nytimes.com/video/2012/01/13/us/.../being-garifuna.html).   Many come from Spanish speaking countries like Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua, and speak Spanish in addition to sometimes speaking their native language Garifuna, so they often  are considered Hispanics. The Garifunas, traditionally called morenos or Black Caribs,  are as dark as many sub-Saharan Africans, so sometimes they are classified as Afro-Latino.  However, in Los Angeles, the majority of the Garifunas there are from the English speaking country of Belize, and speak English as well as Garifuna. The Garifuna language is primarily an indigenous language of the Arawak Indians who lived in the Caribbean Islands, with some Carib Indian, French, Spanish, English and African languages derived words. (In other parts of the Caribbean the Arawak speaking Indians are often called Tainos, and  many Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and some Cubans also consider themselves partially descended from Arawak or Taino Indians, although few speak the language.) So Garifunas are sometimes considered an Afro-Caribbean culture or an Afro-Indigenous culture from both English and Spanish speaking countries.

Garifuna foods, like the Garifunas themselves, are a mixture of influences of the Indians of the Caribbean islands, with African influence from Africans who intermarried with the Indians on the island of St. Vincent in the Caribbean. Before 1797, the ancestors of the Garifunas lived on the island of St. Vincent in the Lesser Antilles north of Venezuela, where Africans destined to be slaves on a ship or several ships which shipwrecked, and escaping African slaves from nearby islands like Barbados, mixed with the local Arawak and Carib Indians. (The Garifunas have a tradition that the European sailors slept with the African women while crossing the Atlantic and these women got the keys to release the men, who then took over the ship and ran it aground in the Grenadines.)

Many Garifunas also believe there were Africans who had mixed with the local Indians before the Europeans came (Avila,2009), perhaps from the expedition of the King of Mali (See the Wikipedia article on Mali Empire, and Garifuna writer Sabas Whittaker’s book Africans in the Americas.).  The Caribbean Sea is named for the Carib ancestors of the Garifunas. After losing a war with the British, some scenes of which are in the Garifuna in Peril movie,  they were taken to Honduras in 1797.  From there they spread out to the neighboring countries.  In New York, a city with significant Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Cuban, Jamaican and other West Indian populations, the Garifunas are often considered as an Afro-Caribbean people as well as Central American. On the US 2010 census, when faced with the choices of Hispanic, Indian, African American or Other, many US Garifunas chose Other and wrote in Garifuna.   The 2001 census in Honduras let them choose Garifuna, but the 2013 Honduran census had the classification Afro-Honduran, which could include up to 30% of the population of Honduras. This new classification, actually requested by the First World Summit of Afro-Descent People, led to legal problems for the Garifunas as the Honduran government said in an Inter-American Human Rights Court case the Garifunas were not indigenous, and thus their lands were not protected by International Labor Orgranization (ILO) 169 which protects the Human Rights of Indigenous People. The Inter-American Human Rights Court did not buy into the Honduran government’s argument and felt the government had violated the Garifuna’s human rights in two cases—Garifunas of Triumfo de la Cruz and Punta Pierda vs. the Honduran government. There are additional Garifuna Human Rights violation cases in the pipeline, and the Court has ordered Honduras to take preventative measures to ensure the life of Garifuna leader Miriam Miranda. See Ofraneh’s blog for more details www.ofraneh.wordpress.com.

The movie Garifuna in Peril produced by Ali Alié and Garifuna Ruben Reyes is about a Garifuna language teacher Ricardo in Los Angeles, played by Honduran born Ruben Reyes, who is concerned about the loss of his ancestral language Garifuna both in Los Angeles and in Central America. Even his own son does not speak Garifuna.  Attempting to rescue the language, he tries to start a Garifuna language school in a Garifuna community on the north coast of Honduras. The Garifuna men were traditionally fishermen, and their villages from Belize to Nicaragua are located within a few meters of the white sand beaches of Central America’s Caribbean Coast.  His plans run into trouble, because of proposed tourist development expansion in the area among other problems.

Although the film is a fiction, the problem of tourism development near or on Garifuna lands is very real, particularly in Reyes’s Honduran hometown of Triumfo de la Cruz where at least 2 Garifuna have been murdered relating to land disputes, according to the Committee for Defense of the Lands of Triumfo de la Cruz, near the resort town of Tela.   The land problems of the Garifunas have been reported in the US press, such as an article by Detroit Free Press writer Gerry Volgenau “In Honduras, the Garifuna culture fights for survival” and in the Honduran paper Honduras This Week Online (http://www.marrder.com/htw).  The film is shot both in Los Angeles and Honduras, particularly in Triumfo de la Cruz near Tela(www.garifunainperilmovie.com). One film critic called it one of the top 25 foreign films produced in 2013.  As the directors, producers, writers, most of the actors, and even the musicians primarily live in Los Angeles, California this makes us wonder about inclusion/exclusion in what makes a film foreign or American.

For most of the actors, this is their first film.  The majority of the actors are Garifunas and the majority of the dialogue (55%) is in the Garifuna language, with the option of English or Spanish subtitles.  The rest of the dialogue is in English or Spanish(www.garifunainperilmovie.com).  The Garifunas are the largest Afro-descent people in the Americas who speak their own non-European language, although some of other groups of mixed Indians and former African slaves like the Miskito Indians of Honduras and Nicaragua and some Black Seminoles or Black Cherokee of the US, also have their own languages.

According to an ABC special on “Black Indians: An American Story”, now available as an award winning DVD, people who are a mixture of Indians and Blacks in the US are often marginalized both even within those cultures and by the general US population, “their heritage ignored and their contribution denied. They are all but invisible at the dawn of the new millennium.” (www.richheape.com/black-indians-american-story.htm).  According to the website www.afroprescencia.com, based in New York which writes about the issues of Afro-Latinos,   Afro-Latinos are often marginalized within the larger Latino community in the US and in their own countries. 

The issue that Latin America Indians, with separate cultures, religions,  and languages within the larger US Hispanic community, such as the significant Maya and Mexican Zapotec population in the US, has only recently begun to be addressed by researchers like Dr. James Loucky of Western Washington University and linguists like Pam Munro at UCLA and Gabriela Perez-Baez at the Smithsonian Institute. Latin American Indians are sometimes found within US Indian organizations and events, such as in 1991 the president of the Board of the Council of Three Rivers American Indian Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania  was a Taino Indian shaman from Cuba, Miguel Seguey, and  their  Pow Wow was opened by a ceremony by Seguey. There were also Indian vendors from Ecuador and Aztec Indian dancers from Mexico. Other times Latin American Indians work within Hispanic organizations like when I worked for The Center for Central American Refugees in Plainsfield, NJ, some of the clients were Maya Indians fleeing from the civil war in Guatemala.

 This marginalization seems to affect the Garifunas, both in Honduras and in the US.  For example, in the 1990’s the Honduran elementary school textbooks series “Serie Mi Honduras”, paid for by USAID, taught “we are all descended from Lenca and Maya Indians”.  In Tela, Honduras I asked university students who included Garifunas, Afro-mestizos, Black English speakers, and Mestizos, and who were  public school teachers in equally mixed communities, how they felt about that. One just said, “Do we look like the descendants of the Lencas and the Mayas?”.  There were no Blacks in the entire Honduran textbook series for grades 1-6, even though Garifunas and English speaking Blacks make up about 3% of the population of Honduras, and there are thousands of dark skinned Miskito Indians and Afro-Mestizos, according to the 2001 Census of Honduras (Davidson, 2011) and my personal experience there.  Honduras now recognizes nine Indian or Afro-Honduran groups in Honduras, including the Garifunas, according to the website of the recently formed Secretaria de Pueblos Indígenas y Afro-Hondureños (Ministry of Indigenous Peoples and Afro-Hondurans) (www.sedinafro.gob.hn) whose former Minister Luis Green was a Garifuna. The Minister of Culture of Honduras under Honduran President Pepe Lobo Dr. Tulio Mariano Gonzales was also a Garifuna from the community of Barrio Cristales, Trujillo, Honduras.  Under the current presidency of Juan Orlando Hernandez in Honduras both of these ministries were cancelled, and a smaller Department of Honduran Indians and Afro-Hondurans now exists inside the Ministry of Social Inclusion, still with some Garifuna staff.

 In New York, there are also English speaking Blacks from northern Honduras, many of whom settle in Brooklyn near other  Anglo-Carribbean groups, according to Mr. Addington, an English speaking Black native of Tela, Honduras. There are also Spanish speaking Hondurans in New York who not only settle in  neighborhoods close to each other, but also whole apartment buildings will have primarily Spanish speaking people from one  Honduran town like Tela, according to Geovani Maradiaga of Tela. But except for a few community wide events, like the annual parade, these different  Honduran groups in New York seldom see each other or mix socially.

People who see the Garifuna in the streets and subways of New York often do not recognize them as Central Americans or Hispanics. Some assume that they are US African Americans, because of their dark skin.  If people hear them speak Spanish, they assume they are from some Spanish speaking island in the Caribbean like Cuba, Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic.  If they are speaking Garifuna among themselves, sometimes people think they must be speaking an African language and that they are Africans. Most non-Honduran Hispanics if they have heard of the Garifunas of Honduras , it is usually because many Honduran soccer players, including the majority of the “Selección Nacional” which plays soccer with other countries to see who goes to the World Cup, are Garifunas (Amaya Banegas, 2012).  Some Garifuna soccer players have even been traded to European teams like Honduran Garifuna David Suazo who played in Portugal.  While most Black Honduran soccer players are Garifunas, a few are from English speaking Black families, often called Bay Islanders or Isleños (Amaya Banegas,2005).

The Garifunas in Ali Alie films

 This is Ali Alie’s second film about the Garifuna.  The first film “El Espiritu de Mi Mama” (The Spirit of My Mother) released in 1999 was about a Garifuna woman in Los Angeles bothered by dreams of her mother who goes home to the Honduran North Coast to see if her mother needs a traditional Garifuna ceremony.  The film shows her consulting a buyei or Garifuna religious leader about the dreams, and preparing for the ceremonies of the bath of a soul and a dugu.  This film was favorably received by Garifunas who sold it on the Internet on a Garifuna e-commerce store (www.garinet.com) and by video distributors like Blockbuster Video and Amazon.com. It is still available on Amazon.  When I reviewed the film  for the Honduran English language newspaper Honduras This Week Online in 2002, I recommended it to people interested in a video showing Garifuna dances, drumming and ceremonies including the most important one dugu, as well as the striking contrast between the Garifuna’s homeland in Honduras and the grafitti covered streets of Los Angeles where they have ended up in search of better economic opportunities (www.marrder.com/htw/2002jul/cultural/htm).. I know some US universities that teach about Afro-Latinos and Afro-Caribbeans like Tulane University of New Orleans have bought the film. In WorldCat it is also classified as a different kind of mother-daughter story, and a film about domestic help workers in Los Angeles.

In Ali and Ruben’s new film Garifuna in Peril, in addition to the struggle of Ricardo to open his language school, there is also a play within the movie.  Garifuna children reenact the story of the Garifunas on the island of St. Vincent and how under their chief Joseph Chatoyer they fought against the British, before being exiled to Central America. This moment is so central to the Garifuna people, that the song Yarumein (Saint Vincent in Garifuna) about their struggle against the English and coming to Honduras is considered like the national anthem of the Garifuna.  A version of this song, sung by Honduran Garifuna Aurelio Martinez and accompanied by the traditional Garifuna band Lita Ariran (Black Rooster) is found in music section of Garifuna Coalition’s website (www.garifunacoalition.org), together with the national anthems of Honduras, Guatemala, and the US translated into Garifuna by Ruben Reyes. One of the Garifuna Dance groups of New York is named for the Chief Joseph Chatoyer, as is the Satuye Center, the building of the Garifuna NGO ODECO in La Ceiba, Honduras. On St. Vincent and other nearby islands in the Caribbean, pictures of Chatoyer are so common that they even appear on phone cards and there is a national monument to him on St. Vincent (Avila, 2009). 

When Ali and Ruben’s film made its World Premiere in London, England, many of the people who attended were St. Vincentians living in London who liked seeing their nation’s history on the big screen (www.beinggarifuna.com, www.garifunainperilmovie.com). The Garifunas have remade contact with St. Vincent and offer training in the Garifuna culture, music, and history to St. Vincentians.  The government of St. Vincent has sent a letter to the British government requesting reparations for the attempted genocide of the Garifuna people of St. Vincent, according to the Garifuna Coalition in New York.

The touching movie Yurumein Homecoming is about Honduran Garifunas and a St. Vincent Carib living in Los Angeles returning home to St. Vincent for National Hero’s Day and to visit the islands where about half the Garifuna population died due to poor conditions and maybe even poisoning by their British captors prior to exiling them to Honduras. That film also refers to this time in Garifuna and Carib history as genocide. The typical narrative of English colonization of the Caribbean is that all the Indians died out early, thus requiring the importation of Black labor. The fact that the Indians did not all die out, but in fact continued to fight bravely until 1797 (after the US revolution) and then many were exiled where they flourished in Honduras and the rest of Central America, shows that the original colonial narrative was simply not true.   The movie shows the Caribs who remained with the British on St.Vincent did not fare well.