Garifuna Organizations in US Garifuna Artists Garifuna Plays Singer Aurelio Martinez

Garifuna Organizations in the US

In Los Angeles, the Belizean Garifunas have founded numerous organizations, some working for economic well being, some working on cultural rescue, such as the Garifuna American Heritage Foundation United (GAHFU) which has a website www.garifunaheritagefoundation.org. 

It was the work of Belizean Garifunas of the National Garifuna Council of Belize in working countless hours recoding Garifuna music and dance that resulted in UNESCO declaring Garifuna language, Music and Dance a Masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity in 2001, mentioned above.  Members of the Belizean National Garifuna Council like Andy Palacio also worked documenting Garifuna music which resulted in many Stonetree Record company productions that became world famous like the Paranda Project with old Garifunas like Paul Nabor and Junior Aranda as well as younger Honduran Garifuna Aurelio Martinez, Umalali the Garifuna women’s Project, as well as the many punta rock records, including Andy Palacio’s own prize winning, world famous Watina. Palacio was Cultural Ambassador of Belize and a head government official working in culture when he died.

 The music and the success of Belizean Garifuna artists encouraged  Garifunas in Belize to work towards cultural revival in their communities.  It also developed ethnic pride and encouraged Guatemalan, Honduran, Nicarguan and US Garifuna and the Karibs of Dominica and St. Vincent  to promote and rescue their language and culture.   For example, after the fame of Belizean Paranda singers and composers like Paul Nabor, the Honduran Garifunas have produced a video as a Tribute to Don Marasa (Marcelino Fernández), a 90 year paranda composer and player who was born in Stann Creek, Belize and then moved to Honduras when he was 8 years old. He formed a group Libana Marasa. Now it is his grandchildren who play Garifuna music in Santa Fe, Honduras. Recently a tribute concert was held in New York of Don Marasa’s music with him present.  The video tribute on Don Marasa was one of the top 5 Garifuna videos selling in the Bronx,, according to www.BeingGarifuna.com.  US Garifunas also made  a CD of the music of Los Menudos, a traditional Garifuna music group in Trujillo, Honduras led by paranda guitar playing Francisco “Pancho” David.  There are numerous videos of Los Menudos, Andy Palacio, Paul Nabor, Aurelio Martinez, and other Garifuna musicians on YouTube.

In New York, the Garifuna organization that is responsible for safeguarding, preserving, and revitalizing the Garifuna language, music, and dance in the US is Garifuna Coalition USA, Inc. which works with 20 smaller Garifuna organizations. They are also a social service and referral agency that helps the Garifuna working poor find help, such as ESL classes.  In New York since 2010 there has been a Miss Garifuna NY Pagent, reports Teofilo Colon of BeingGarifuna.com. (There is also a Miss Belize California pagaent in Los Angeles).  The New York premier of Garifuna in Peril was sponsored by the Garifuna Coalition  which included a special performance by the NYC Garifuna Dance Ensemble.  The event was supported with funds from the New York Foundation, Simon Bolivar Foundation and the New York Community Trust(www.garifunacoalition,org). 

Garifuna Culture Becomes World Famous through Live Performances

The beauty of the Garifuna culture, especially its music and dance, has led to them being known around the World,  Besides commercially produced music, the Honduran government has sponsored a National Garifuna Folkloric Ballet in Tegucigalpa for over 40 years.  This Ballet performs choreographed dances using moves from Garifuna traditional dances like Wanaragua (Mascara, the Dance of the Warriors)  and Punta accompanied by songs in the Garifuna language and using Garifuna traditional instruments.  The costumes and the dances themselves are often not as the dances are done in the communities.  Garifunas in the communities have mixed feelings about this dance group. On one hand they are thankful that they make Garifuna culture visible and known at the local and international level.  .Partially thanks to this dance troupe which presents at festivals and other cultural events around the world, Honduras is more famous for the Garifuna dance  punta than for the Ladino folkdances, notes David Flores,  the former head of the National Folkdance Group (Cuadro Nacional de Danzas Folklóricas)  which presents the folkdances of Honduras’s Ladino majority (Flores, 2003).  On the other hand, some people are unhappy that the way the dances are presented, particularly punta,  as if that is the way Garifunas traditionally danced them, when that is not true. There are videos of this dance company on Youtube, including a presentation in the UCLA library in coordination with  the Garifuna American Heritage  Foundation United, a Los Angeles Garifuna organization (www.garifunaamericanheritagefoundation.org).

In New York and in Los Angeles, Garifunas have also formed live traditional Garifuna dance groups with handmade instruments like drums and maracas.  These groups present several times a year during community events like the Honduran Central American Parade in the Bronx, Garifuna-American Heritage month celebrations in New York, and Christmas shows.  Videos are often made of these and are sold.  For example, the video of the Honduran Parade of 2010 was one of the top 5 best videos sold in the music store in the Bronx that carries Garifuna videos according to BeingGarifuna.com. People also like to take photos of Garifuna music and dance, with over 8,000 Garifuna photos on www.Flickr.com.

Honduran Garifuna Musician and Congressman Aurelio Martinez

Non-Garifuna Honduran artists also include Garifuna culture in their music and plays which has also made Garifuna culture  better known around the world. The most famous Honduran musician internationally and Honduras’s cultural ambassador is Guillermo Anderson from La Ceiba. Although not Garifuna, the songs he sings and plays the acoustic guitar to is accompanied  by a Garifuna percussion ensemble who include traditional Garifuna rhythms like punta and paranda, as well as international rhythms into Anderson’s music. Anderson also includes other ethnic music from Honduras in his music like Miskito Indian rhythms and different  traditional instruments like the caramba, a musical bow. Since the 1990’s he has toured in Europe, South, Central, and North America, Europe and  Asia and has recorded a number of CD’s on Honduras’s principal record label Costa Norte Records(www.guillermoanderson.com). 

The most famous Honduran Garifuna musician in Honduras Aurelio Martinez began his paid musical career as a musician for non-Garifuna groups including Guillermo Anderson.  Aurelio Martinez’s first band Lita Ariran (Black Rooster) was mostly made up of other percussion members of the Guillermo Anderson’s band, said Guillermo Anderson. In the US the Lita Ariran CD Black Turtle with Aurelio Martinez was rereleased by Alula Records reports Teofilo Colon of BeingGArifuna.com. Aurelio Martinez went on  to sing on the Belizean Stonetree Records  album Parranda and then in 2004 released his own record with Stonetree Garifuna Soul. Afropop Worldwide, the Brooklyn, New York weekly radio program produced for 100 US public radio stations, as well as distributed in Europe and Africa, named it one of the top 10 Albums of 2004.  He was named “newcomer of the year”.  Most recently in 2011 he has released a record with a World Music record company from England  Real World Records “Laru Beya”.(www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/aurelio_martinez)  He has performed in the US, and when at the end of the show, he sang the song “Africa” in Garifuna about how I will never forget my culture and where I come from, “the crowd came to its feet, danced in the aisles and rushed to stage.  You should have been there”,  reported Teofilo Colon, of BeingGarifuna.com.

After Aurelio Martinez became Congressman in Honduras for the Department of Atlantida (Honduran Departments are like States in the US) where the Garifuna are not the majority, a Spanish TV station came and made a documentary of his life.  Although Wikipedia says he was the first Black to become Congressman in Honduras (www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/aurelio_martinez), this is not true.  There have been a number of Black Congressmen in the history of Honduras including Garifuna Sixto Caucho and Black Bay Islander Thomas Green. But at least twice in the twentieth century,  Garifunas were elected to Congress, and then not allowed to take their seats, according to the research of Garifuna Meliseo Gonzales. Also since I have lived in Trujillo, a Garifuna woman has won the “internal elections”, like a US primary election, to be her party’s candidate for Congress in  the general election, and then during the general election, she was not the candidate on the ballot. So it is still an achievement to become elected as a Black Congressman in a department in Honduras where Garifunas are not the majority and to be allowed to take your seat. That he came from such humble beginnings makes it all the more remarkable.

 Aurelio Martinez was born in a remote Honduran Garifuna village Plaplaya in the Department of Gracias a Dios, generally known as the Mosquitia that still has no electricity or running water and the only way to reach it is by canoe. He began by playing traditional Garifuna music very young, even sacred Garifuna music in ceremonies where children usually are not allowed.  His first guitar he made himself from wood and fishing line. His father immigrated to the States when he was young and one of his famous compositions is “Yalifu”(the pelican)  which is about how he would like to have wings like a pelican so he could fly to where his father was.  He did not see his father again until he was over 20 and singing in a concert in New York and told the story of the song.  He said the man who is responsible for that song is here tonight.  (http://www.rtve.es/alacarta/video/todo-el-mundo-es-musica/todo-el-mundo-es-musica-honduras-y-belize-la-aventura-garifuna/1070122).  He has also played in Los Angeles at one of the best of the best concerts organized by Aziatic (www.belizeanartist.com).

In the Spanish TV video he travels to Punta Gorda, Belize  to meet again Paul Nabor, the over 80 year old Paranda musician with whom he had played on Stonetree Records’s Paranda album. They trade some stories about some of the problems of recording of the CD in Garifuna village like mosquitos eating them alive at night and play music.  But a lot of what of they talk about is how the Garifuna man’s life has changed.  Now there are few fish in the sea, and the men just can not make a living as a fisherman as they used to. Now all the people want things. The young people all say, I am going to the United States.  Paul Nabor says if there were fish in the sea, if you could make a living here, they would not go.  Those Garifunas working in the US are up all night working just to be able to send back $100 or $200. He said he has never liked life in the US.  (http://www.rtve.es/alacarta/video/todo-el-mundo-es-musica/todo-el-mundo-es-musica-honduras-y-belize-la-aventura-garifuna/1070122). BeingGArifuna.com did a review of the video.http://www.beinggarifuna.com/blog/2012/01/19/garifuna-singer-musician-aurelio-martinez-is-subject-of-la-aventura-garifuna-documentary-on-paranda-music).

Garifuna Play tells the World about Garifunas, their history, and their language

Another example of including Garifuna language, dance, history and culture in a work by a non-Garifuna is a play by Rafael Murillo Selva.  He is considered Honduras’ most famous playwright and although he wrote several plays, his masterpiece is a play he wrote with the Garifuna, Louvagabu or the Other Side Faraway in 1980. The actors are all Garifuna originally from the village of Guadelupe about 14 km west of Trujillo.  They formed a theater troupe called “Superación Guadelupe”.  The play shows the story of the formation of the Garifunas on Saint Vincent with the Indians intermarrying with the Africans and having Black children. Then it shows how they were forced to leave San Vicente after their defeat by the English.  There is a Garifuna wake and the women sing and dance punta and the men drum and dance around them.  There is an ongoing story about how the Garifunas of Guadelupe are trying to get a road.  They visit Honduran government officials who are corrupt and want bribes and even their secretaries are corrupt. A son in the States sends a letter to his illiterate mother delivered by a postman who travels on foot from village to village and so can not stop to read the mail.  The son says in the letter “I am sending money for the road.”  The mother says, “The road! What about me?”  Over half of the dialog is in Garifuna.  A video was made of the play, the first video in Honduras about the Garifuna.

For over 18 years this play toured the world being shown primarily at theater or other festivals. Over 1,000 presentations were done before the playwright decided to retire the play.  The Honduran government gave new cement block houses to the participants in the play in Guadelupe to show appreciation for their many years of work.  But people still wanted to see the play after it had been retired.  Even though Guadelupe was previously considered a traditional village, and the actors and actresses had worked for 18 years presenting in Garifuna, when the playwright went back to recruit their children or grandchildren to be in the play, most of the young people did not speak enough Garifuna to be able to act in the play. The road had been put in, Ladinos now lived all along the road and between the Garifuna villages near Guadelupe and on their agricultural lands and in the hills behind them.  Finally the director  was able to find enough actors and actresses to put on the play, as the new cast was able to put on the play for the presentation of Honduran Garifuna Salvador Suazo’s new Garifuna-Garifuna Garifuna-Spanish dictionary in San Pedro Sula in 2012.  But in real life, as in the fictional story of the movie ”Garifuna in Peril”, the beautiful and famous traditional culture and language of the Garifunas is indeed threatened and in peril.

Important Garifuna Artists in Other Genres

Although Garifunas are most famous for their music and dance, they are also active in other styles of music and in other arts besides music.  This practice of Garifuna men to learn other music genres is apparently fairly long standing.  The first Garifuna doctor in Honduras Dr. Alfonso Lacayo did not have enough money to live in a town where there was a high school without a job, but if he went to school, how could he work?  So in the 1930’s he thought of the idea to learn a musical instrument and play in a dance band orchestra and play music at night and study during the day.  He was successful in getting a job with a Honduran dance band and played at night in Olanchito, Yoro, a center of banana production for the Standard Fruit Company.  Unfortunately he could not keep up with his studies because he was so tired during the day, so he had to find another way to make money, reported his daughter. Many Garifuna men used to play brass instruments like saxophone and trumpet, and there are traditional Garifuna dances like Tiras also called Moors and Christians which require this type of music.  Also to be buried, Garifunas accompany the coffin to the graveyard with a band of a trumpet or saxophone, bass drum and snare drum(Griffin and CEGAH,2005).  The people who play these instruments now for funerals or dances are over 70 years old.  In spite of the fact that Garifunas pay for this kind of music, young Garifuna men show no interest in learning this music and these instruments, a source of considerable concern in some Garifuna communites like Trujillo. These musicians like Don Nufo of Trujillo  also organize Garifuna groups to play “musica de recuerdo” (old style Latin music) like cha-cha-cha for special occasions like the fair, the Saturday before Easter, and Mother’s Day.

According to Garifuna painter Herman Alvarez, the first Garifuna group in Honduras to record a record was “Los Aladinos” where he was the singer.  They recorded an album of Salsa music in New York, because there were no record companies in Honduras. He went on to sing and play drums and dance with many Honduran groups including Los Profesionales, and Los Silver Stars of La Lima, who travelled all around Honduras playing at fairs. He has also danced for a number of years for the Ballet Nacional Folklorico Garifuna in Tegucigalpa, traveling around the world. In Trujillo and San Juan near Tela he has worked as a painter of excellent paintings showing Garifuna life, especially Garifuna dancers.  He says, “Since I dance, I know all the dances and moves and so I can paint them.”  Tourists from around the world arrive in Tela and take his paintings back home to Canada, the US and Europe.  Honduras This Week Online published articles on his work both as a painter and  as director, and choreographer of a Garifuna dance group for young Garifunas in San Juan. His photo and short biography are included in the section of Distinguished Garifunas in Los Garifunas de Honduras (Griffin and CEGAH,2005).

According to BeingGarifuna.com Garifunas in the US sing and play a variety of music including reggae, dancehall, bachata, meringue, R and B, Rap, etc.  For example, a popular song by a Garifuna artist is “Fue una noche” (It happened one night) which is a Spanish reggae song by Shabakan.  The video of Shabakan featuring Panchan, another Garifuna  “Mire como Meanea” (Look at how she moves) had received over 34,000 views on YouTube, so it was extremely popular..  Reggae in English is very popular in Honduran Garifuna communities, it makes sense Spanish reggae would be even more popular.  Some Garifuna songs like “Gudemei” by Young Gari, a song about overcoming poverty and not giving into poverty’s depressing grip, got over 10,000 hits on YouTube.  Teofilo Colon, the blogger at BeingGarifuna.com, said I loved this song! (http://www.beinggarifuna.com/winter-2010-2011-garifuna-hit-song-list.html).

In Honduras there are two principal areas where Garifuna paintings are produced—Tela and the Bay Island of Roatan, both tourist destinations.  Garifuna painter Cruz Bermudez has a gallery/studio “El Aura” just a short distance from the biggest resort in Tela and on the same street, Villas TelaMar.   Villas TelaMar used to be where the white executives of the Tela Railroad Company (United Fruit) lived, and across the street lived the highly qualified, usually Black, employees in company housing.  Cruz’s father worked as a mechanic and timekeeper for United Fruit, so Cruz and his brothers grew up in company housing in Tela.  When the Tela Railroad moved its headquarters to La Lima, near San Pedro, Cruz’s family bought the original company house where they grew up.  Cruz’s gallery is one of the last standing examples of banana company employee housing in Honduras. He comes from a very talented family.  Two of his other brothers also paint, and one is a professor of music at CURLA, the national university in La Ceiba.  He has been honored by the city of Tela for his painting career and Honduran TV did a special on him and his talented family. A Danish TV crew came to do a documentary of his life and the life of an American painter who lives in Honduras Guillermo Yuscarán. Cruz at first mostly painted animals, and the painting of the bird that appears in Los Garifunas de Honduras now hangs in Rome, Italy. He wanted to document Honduran birds and animals before they all became extinct, so we could at least remember them, he said in an interview in 2012. But now he does some striking paintings of Garifunas and other people like Haitian boat people fleeing to liberty. Every year for the art exposition in La Ceiba for Garifuna Day organized by ODECO since 1997, Cruz has exhibited paintings. He also exhibits at the fair in Tela and was featured in an exposition on Self-Taught Artists in Tegucigalpa and Honduran Spanish language and Honduras This Week Online newspapers did articles on him and his art. 

Although tourism is down in Honduras, first due to Hurricane Mitch and now due to the high crime rate and the highest per capita  murder rate in the world, Cruz says Canadian tourists still come and buy his paintings, although other Tela painters like Ladino Napoleon Villalta are suffering economic hardship with the change. Cruz’s brother Gil Bermudez whose paintings are in Los Garifunas de Honduras and was featured in Honduras this Week Online, gave up painting and opened a medicinal plant clinic. Tela Garifuna painter and previous owner of the Tela Garifuna Museum, Máxima Tomas married a Canadian and immigrated to Canada. Herman Alvarez is planning to move to the Bay Islands, where thousands of tourists arrive each year on cruise ships and to go scuba diving on the world's second largest coral reef.

Cruz Bermudez was excited a few years ago when the US government sent a Black Ambassador to Honduras Larry Palmer, and he painted a special painting of him.   The Garifunas in general were excited about this and invited to Larry Palmer to visit them in the Garifuna community of Limon, east of Trujillo.  He went, but when he was getting near Trujillo on the road from Limon to Corocito, he was stopped by the Honduran police asking to see his papers and the papers of the car.  He showed the documents and asked what was wrong.  The police said,  It was so unusual to see a Black man driving such a nice car, that it must have been stolen, that is why they stopped him.  

Cruz thinks famous Garifuna composer Victor Bermudez is an uncle of his.  According to Professor Batiz, the golden age of Garifuna music started when Victor Bermudez’s mother died and he composed a punta song for her.  Since he was a breakman on the Truxillo Railroad (a United Fruit subsidiary in Colon), every time they stopped in the many Garifuna villages of Colon, he would teach people his songs. Some Garifuna composers have composed over 200 songs in Garifuna, kept alive by Garifuna dance clubs and other singers.

A Garifuna painter on Roatan is Marco Tulio Guillen, a native of Guadelupe, Colon west of Trujillo. He paints beautiful Garifuna themed paintings like a fisherman with an oar by his canoe. His brother Celso Guillen also paints.  He paints cotton  cloth bags, skirts, and shirts with Garifuna scenes and also produces silkscreened decorated clothes. He employs several Garifuna women in Guadelupe who make the clothes and bags for him.  He is also on the city council of the “municipio” (like a US county) of Santa Fe, for the UD party, Honduras’ newest and most left wing party, made up of Honduran union members, Agrarian Reform agricultural cooperative members, among others.

About one quarter of Honduras's Garifunas now live in on the three main urban centers--Tegucigalpa, San Pedro, Sula and La Ceiba.  Santos Arzu is a Tegucigalpa Garifuna painter who paints modern art and has received awards at the painting salons held in Tegucigalpa. Garifuna Peter Centeno was helped by a teacher to study art professionally in Mexico. He worked  for 20 years as a commercial artist for San Pedro Sula newspapers like La Prensa.  His painting of "Yan Canu" or "Mascaro", a Garifuna dance shown in Garifuna in Peril, was put on Honduran postage stamp to celebrate the 200th anneversary of the arrival of the Garifunas in 1997, and now hangs in a Tegucigalpa hotel. He has had his own Gallery in San Pedro, and has exhibited at Garifuna bicentential art exhibitions in La Ceiba.   In addition to a Honduras This Week Online article on him, he was the only Honduran artist included in Encyclopeida Caribe (www.encaribe.com)

Some Garifuna painters have immigrated to the US.  Sabas Whittaker, whose mother was a Black Bay Islander of Gran Caymanian descent, and his father was a Garifuna from Punta Gorda, Roatan Honduras, now lives outside of Hartford, Connecticut. He began his career as a merchant marine at age 15 and later worked in law enforcement and then in Mental Health.  He paints, makes artistic furniture, and he composes music, including producing two CD’s of Latin jazz music which he composed and played. He has published 4 books—two books of poetry, a book about faith and the mental health field called Faith in the Field, and a history book “Africans in the Americas”.  He has written, produced, composed music, and directed plays, such as “Don’t look down on Your brother if you’re not going to pick him up” about the homeless.  This was performed as a benefit for FISH homeless shelters in 1991 at the famed historical Warner Theater is Torrington, CT. Two of his children’s plays that he wrote were later put on to benefit the Connecticut AIDS Buddy Network in 1994.   Honduras This Week Online did an article on him when his book “Africans in the Americas” was published.

Sabas’s brother Overton Whittaker was famous a journalist.  In addition to working for Honduran radio stations and Tegucigalpa newspapers like La Prensa and La Tribuna, he worked overseas for many years including as one of the few Black reporters covering the Vietnam War and also in Germany. Rosie, Sabas Whittaker's cousin, is a graduate of Columbia university in New york and is an editor for People En Español in New York City.  Another famous Garifuna reporter was Julio Ariola, whose report on the news of Trujillo for Radio America was heard all over Honduras for decades.  Now over 90 he still does reporting for local radio stations in Trujillo.

In Belize like in Honduras and the US, the best known Garifuna painter is also a musician. Pen Cayetano, the inventor of punta rock, and the originator of the Original Turtle Shell Band was also a painter. .There are other Belizean Garifuna painters whose names I do not know, but their beautiful and well done paintings showing tradtional Garifuna life including the dugu and Mascaro, hang prominently in Banco Atlantida's La Ceiba  branch.  One such Belizean Garifuna painter was the late Benjamin Nicholas (http://www.ngcbelize.org/content/view/12/138      http://edition.channel5belize.com/archives/69013).  His son  Isiah Nicholas is also a painter in the same style (www.rogallery.com/Nicholas_Isiah/Nicholas_bio.htm).  Belizean Garifuna painter Greg Palacio (son of Clifford J. Palacio who worked on the dictionary) studied painting under Pen Cayetano and Benjamin Nicolas. Garifuna in Peril co-producer Ali Allie has started work on a film portrait of him and his work, but that project is on hold for right now.

One of the most famous Garifuna playwrights in the US arrived in New York in the early 1800’s.  In 1823 a play about the Garifuna hero Joseph Chatoyer was written by playwright William Henry Brown who is believed to be a Garifuna from St. Vincent.  His play, the Drama of King Shotoway, was the first Black drama of the American theater.  The subject is the 1795 Black Carib Insurecction on the Island of St. Vincent. (www.garifunacoalition.org).

The most famous Honduran Garifuna writer is Salvador Suazo, the author of at least 10 books.  He has written dictionaries and grammar books and Conversation books to learn Garifuna, books on the history of the Garifuna, a Garifuna cookbook, a book on the Esotheric Beliefs of the Garifuna religion, a collection of Garifuna stories in Garifuna and Spanish, a Garifuna songbook with cassette Lanigui Garifuna. Some of his books are for sale at www.garinet.com.  Under the Manuel Zelaya government, he was Vice Minister of Culture. He was one of only 5 Hondurans included in Encyclopedia Caribe (www.encaribe.org) an online free Encyclopedia of Caribbean history and Culture organized by universities in Cuba and the Dominican Republic.  The director of the National Garifuna Folklore Ballet Armando Crisanto Melendez has also written a few books on Garifuna culture, not all of which have been published. Much of Garifuna literature is oral and in Garifuna.  There are traditional Garifuna stories called "Uraga",usually told by men at wakes, several collections of which have been published. There are other Garifuna stories which people just tell, mostly as experiences of what has happened to people, like a "duende" (a nature spirit) possessing someone. The people who tell "uragas" are often quite old, and reportedly the best "uragistas" have already died.  In Honduras there were at least 2 projects to collect "uraga" in which people of the Ministry of Cutlure and the Ballet Folklorico Garifuna participated and then the results were not published, showing the difference in the level of support Honduran Garifunas as compared to Belizean Garifunas have had.

In a newspaper interview of Cristanto Melendez’s daughter Ashanty, who also dances for the Ballet, she said Garifunas are well known for music, sports, and food, but not for science.  In fact, one of the best known biologists in Honduras, Dr. Cirilio Nelson of the UNAH is Garifuna.  He has an herbarium with examples of over 10,000 Honduran plants and has produced at least two books with the common and scientific names of all Honduran plants.  Anyone doing research on the Honduran rainforest or medicinal plants in Honduras, has to consult his work.  Dr. Tulio Mariano Gonzales, the Minister of Culture, has his doctorate in tree science, and has been president of the profesional organization of Hondurans who work in Forestry.

There are also Honduran Garifuna agronomists, like Noel Ruiz.  While working with CEGAH, he not only taught modern ideas  of agronomy like organic fertilizers and "seed banks" for Garifuna root crops that are becoming scarce, but he also listened to the old women farmers who explained about how to plant according to the phases of the moon and other traditional techniques. Studies of attempts of non-Indian agronomists to try to change how Arawak and Carib Indians farmers farm yuca or cassava, have shown most of their advice does not work.  If you add fertilizer, the yuca gets smaller and the leaves grow more. If you plow, the yuca  does not grow as well, reported ethnobiologist Paul House. .If you plant in a swampy area, like one Honduran agronomist suggested, the yuca rots.After 3,000 years of planting yuca, the Garifuna women know good techniques how to plant yuca.  Noel Ruiz was so popular as an agronomist, partly because he incoporated Garifuna ideas into his farming seminars, that he was recently elected Mayor of the Garifuna "muncipio" (like a US county) of Santa Fe, Colon, west of Trujillo.