Garifuna Music Punta Rock Takes off in Belize Punta and Paranda in Honduras

Garifuna Music Punta Rock Takes off in Belize Punta and Paranda in Honduras

Around 1981 a Belizean male Garifuna musician Pen Cayetano with his band The Original Turtleshell Band began playing Garifuna punta music with electronic instruments like an electric guitar. This was around the time of Bob Marley’s death, and the music may have been a tribute to him.  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_palacio).  Other electronic instruments were added later, like keyboards and now a drum machine replaces the traditional segunda Garifuna drum.  This style was known as punta rock. While traditional Garifuna punta music is composed and sung by women, punta rock is composed and sung entirely by Garifuna male groups (Avila, 2009)  Some say this music is influenced by West Indian Soca and Reggae, as well as Garifuna paranda and punta music. (Avila, 2009). Others say it is influenced by jazz, R and B, and rock and roll.  A number of young Garifuna men, especially from Belize,  such as Andy Palacio, who was recorded by Stonetree Records, Belize’s only record company, became famous for playing punta rock(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Palacio, www.stonetreerecords.com).

Palacio’s career started with a short lived project known as the Sunrise recording project  which was the first attempt in Belize to record, document, preserve and distribute Belizean roots music. In 1988 his career took off due to widely circulated cassette recordings of his music by the Sunrise project.  After this he was invited to represent Belize in music festivals in Mexico, Trinidad, St. Kitts-Nevis, Malaysia, Belgium, Japan, and many concerts in France, Germany and Great Britain. His first album was Nabi in 1990. The words and original music were by parandero Paul Nabor, but Andy Palacio changed it to a punta rock style.    He received the award for “ Best New Artist” at the Caribbean Music Awards in 1993. In 1995 his CD Keimoun with Belizean and Cuban studio artists was the first CD produced in Belize.  Keimon is listed by The Rough Guide as one of 100 essential recordings from Latin America and the Caribbean.  In 1997 he released til Da Mawnin accompanied by Belize’s top instrumentalists and singers. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Palacio).

In 1999 the Belizean government recognized the National Garifuna Council as the representative of the Garifuna people in Belize.  A number of leading Garifunas formed the council, including Roy Cayetano, linguist who wrote the People’s Garifuna Dictionary (Garifuna-english, English-Garifuna in 1993), Jessie Castillo, author of two collections of Garifuna stories published in Garifuna and English in New York, a buyei and Wanagua dancer (Jankanu) John Mariano, Andy Palacio and others.  The goals of the Council was to promote the well being of the Garifuna people, and to nurture and promote the Garifuna culture and identity, among other goals. The National Garifuna Council began to work towards in applying for the UNESCO “Masterpiece of the oral intangible heritage of humanity for the Garifuna language, dance and music, a process that required many hours of taping Garifuna music and dance around Belize, producing a video summarizing the information about Garifuna music and dance with examples of each, and a written application(Avila, 2009).

.  UNESCO declared Garifuna language, dance, and music in Belize to be a masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2001 (http://www.louisanafolklife.org/LT/articles-Essays/garifuna.html , http://www.unesco.org/culture/intagible-heritage/masterpiece.php).  In 2008 the UNESCO convention for the safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage took effect, and those intangible cultural elements previously designated as “masterpieces” were made part of the Representative List of Intangible cultural heritage of Humanity in 2008.  This time the Garifuna language, dance, and music in Belize, as well as in Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua were part of the list.  The purpose of this list is to identify cultural practices and expressions that help demonstrate the diversity of this heritage and raises awareness of its importance.  Although about 90 elements of popular culture from around the world had been approved as part of this World Heritage program of UNESCO, as of 2008, and only two are of Afro-Latin American cultures, and the declaration for the Garifunas was the first for an Afro-Latin American group (www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNESCO_Intangible_Cultural_heritage:Lists). The written information that accompanied the application is in Tomas Alberto Avila’s book Black Carib-Garifuna (Avila,2009) which is for sale through Amazon.com.  The video of Garifuna dances and songs which accompanied the application is for sale on the Garinet website, video section (www.garinet.com)..

Andy Palacio was named Deputy Administrator of the National Institute of Culture and History in Belize in 2004.  He devoted himself to the preservation of Garifuna music and culture.  He was involved with Stonetree Records’s Garifuna All Start Project, whose music was released on the CD Wátina.  It included a multigenerational crew of Garifuna musicians from Belize, Guatemala and Honduras, including Paul Nabor, the parandero now over 80 years old. The album garnered worldwide attention for the Garifuna people, culture, and language.  Thanks to Wátina, Palacio was named UNESCO Artist for Peace and won the Womex World Music Award together with Stonetree Record producer Ivan Duran in 2007. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Palacio). Womex is a large World Music expo organized in different European countries to promote World Music, which includes traditional, quasi-traditional, and music that combines influences from more than one culture(http://en.wikipeida.org/wiki/world_music).  The Womex or World Music Expo Award was started in 1999  to acknowledge musical excellence, social importance, commercial success, political impact, and lifetime achievement. (http://en.

Wikipedia.org/wiki/womex_award). He was considered after that one of the top World Music musicians, and when he was interviewed he spoke of his desire to rescue Garifuna culture and music.

 After the release of Watina, Andy Palacio toured including in the US with the Garifuna Collective.  Videos of Watina and other Andy Palacio music, including one with him and Paul Nabor in Chicago,  can be seen on YouTube. Andy Palacio was the first artist from Belize to have a video on International television. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/andy-palacio).  On the Wikipedia article about him, there is a link to the interview with Andy Palacio by AfroPop Worldwide, a weekly radio program on World Music from the African Diaspora in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, hosted by a West African Georges Collinet from Cameroon, started in 1988.  The interview was aired by 100 Public Radio stations across the US and also aired in Europe and Africa (www.pri.org/afropop-worldwide/html), adding to his worldwide reputation. 

Tragically Andy Palacio died the year after he received the Womex Award of a stroke and a seizure..  He was awarded posthumously the  BBC3 Awards for World Music in the Americas category by British radio station BBC3  in 2008.  This was the last time this award was given as it was cancelled in 2009.  His death was reported by radio stations around the world and obituaries celebrating his life’s achievements  appeared in both The Times and The Guardian in London, England.   (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/andy-palacio).

Punta and Paranda in Honduras

In the 1980’s in Honduras, some Ladino meringue bands who mostly travelled around the country playing at street fairs held for Patron Saints, also began to  incorporate Garifuna drums and punta style into their music.  

One of the few Honduran songs to become famous is “Sopa de Caracol” (Conch Soup). The song was originally written in Garifuna by Hernán Chico Ramos.  The Ladino head of a Honduran meringue band La Banda Blanca heard the song, translated it to Spanish, rearranged the music for a meringue band, and recorded “Sopa de Caracol” which eventually sold over 3 million copies. At first Banda Blanca’s leader Juan Pompilo “Pilo” Tejeda Duarte filed for a copyright for the song and the music. After a lot of controversy, he filed a supplement saying Spanish words and music Juan Pompilo Tejeda aka “Pilo Tejeda”, Garifuna words and music Hernán Chico Ramos. It stated in the supplement, the original song was in the Garifuna language. 

Perhaps even more disturbing that the stealing of the song was the introduction of a Ladino way of dancing punta, with girls in very short skirts and sometimes abbreviated blouses up on stage trying to show off sexy moves.   Punta became a dance done in discos by young people in pairs, losing all of its ceremonial context. Instead of the competitive spirit of traditional punta dancing, where the women try to show elegance, grace, and style, while dancing and listening or singing to lyrics that were often very sad and about sickness and death, it became an opportunity to show how “sexy” the girl was. The Garifuna organization in Honduras OFRANEH actually tried to sue the Banda Blanca for violation of Intellectual Property Rights regarding the use of a Garifuna ceremonial dance as part of a show without permission.

In Trujillo, Honduras parandas accompanied by a guitar, first and second drums, and maracas and sung by the male guitarist Francisco “Pancho” David  were previously played live by the Garifuna musical group Los Menudos at a Garifuna dance club near the beach in Barrio Cristales.  As with the other paranderos, Pancho is older, probably over 70 by now. In clubs, young Garifunas dance punta to paranda songs in many male and female couples instead of the traditional way of forming a circle and going and dancing in the center one by one.   The Los Menudos group also plays punta music without guitar. Examples of the music of Los Menudos with dancing done by family members are found on YouTube. 

In Trujillo, punta songs without guitar are sung at wakes and at the ceremony held one year after a person who has died (fin de novenario or veluria) punta and paranda songs without guitar can be sung and the people dance punta in the traditional way of forming a circle and a woman goes into the circle and dances, usually alone, but sometimes a man will dance around her. Unfortunately, often there are not enough women who still know how to sing punta songs who go to the wakes now in Trujillo.  Besides singing punta at wakes, Garifuna women used to sing punta while they worked in their agricultural fields, saying it makes the work go fast.  Now that few Garifuna women farm in the area around Trujillo, they no longer practice punta songs as often. Several attempts to form dance groups among the Garifuna young people in the Garifuna neighborhoods like Rio Negro and Cristales have failed, because the young women do not speak enough Garifuna to understand the songs. When I worked at the UNAH in Tegucigalpa, a similar fate met the attempt to form a Garifuna dance group among the students of the UNAH.  Young Garifuna girls learn to dance a very vulgar form of punta, as influenced by the Ladino version, in Garifuna schools in Trujillo and they are accompanied by only drums, since no one can sing. The Garifuna boys in Trujillo schools are not learning to dance punta. At inter-dance presentations, other schools do show Garifuna boys dancing punta, but they violate the first rule of punta dancing, that the man does not touch the woman, because she probably has a boyfriend or husband and it could cause problems. 

Now in the Garifuna disco in Trujillo or for the fair, occasionally live Garifuna music groups that play punta are brought in from other villages like Santa Fe.  At other times, recorded punta, or usually punta rock, is played at the Garifuna disco in Trujillo.  But now all kinds of recorded music are played in Trujillo discos by DJ’s with reggae in English or Spanish and reggaeton, seeming to have replaced the previously popular meringue songs. A live reggaeton band was brought into the Garifuna neighborhood fair in Trujillo the last time I went.  Wikipedia has an excellent article on the roots of reggaeton.