Garifunas and Tourism Struggles for Human Rights by Blacks and Indians US Honduras

Garifunas and Tourism and the Struggles for Human Rights by Blacks and Indians

Because Garifuna music and dance are world famous, the official tourism sites of the Belizean, Guatemalan and Honduran governments all feature Garifunas and Garifuna villages as important tourist attractions. In Belize, there is even a Garifuna museum—Gulisi, named for the daughter of Chief Chatoyer, in Dangriga.  Almost all Honduran tourist brochures show Garifuna dancers.  At the same time Garifunas are losing their lands to tourist development and sales of land to foreigners who want to live where it is warm near Caribbean Sea beaches. Many Garifunas want “development” of their communities, as the title of one famous book shows “ethnodevelopment” often means “ethnogenocide”.  They do not want to dance like “payasos” (clowns) for tourists, said Ana Lucy Bengochea, the former coordinator of CEGAH when she was interviewed in Malaysia, or be dispossessed of their lands for cruise boat docks, hotels, condominiums, retirement homes and the other numerous development projects that have been proposed for the development of the Trujillo and Tela areas in Honduras and around the Garifuna communities in Belize.

When the Garifunas of Rio Negro, Trujillo resisted selling their homes and lands where their families had lived for 200 years to build the cruise ship dock, they were denounced by the Ladinos of Trujillo on the media, both written and especially over the radio, as "blocking development" (www.ofraneh.org and my personal eyewitness experience.)  I think when the World Summit of Afrodescent People asked for “development with identity”, they meant recognition of their cultures and traditional technologies, their needs for the use of certain types of eco-systems for the development of their culture, the preservation of their languages which is used for many cultural important elements including their religion, their medecine, their songs, and their oral literature, and the important part they can play in helping to develop the areas and the countries where they live.  In the end this cruise boat dock has brought little development to the area, and most of the few profits went to Canadians not the local Hondurans or Garifunas.  

The Garifuna area between Puerto Castilla and Trujillo and between that and Guadelupe and its agricultural area in Betulia has seen a lot of speculation of housing for foreigners, in spite of the fact that Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world due to 80% of the cocaine bound for the US going through NE Honduras on its way to Guatemala and the US. Currently the Garifunas of Trujillo are facing a multimillion lawsuit from a company that says it was going to build a windmill farm on the Garifuna lands near the Guaymoreto Lagoon. OFRANEH suspects that it was never a real deal, with a real company, that the company just made the deal without following the procedures for Free, Informed, Prior Consent as required by ILO Convention 169 and the UN Declaration on the Human rights of Indians.  See the OFRANEH blog for details www.ofraneh.wordpress.org.  

I don't know about windmill power elsewhere, but in Honduras it has been very problematic,usually affecting indigenous communities. Another windmill project is in Southern Honduras south of the capital Tegucigalpa in Santa Ana Cerro de Hula, a Lenca community which Dr. Lazaro Flores has been studying for over 26 years with his university anthropology students. He bought his retirement home there to spend his final years among his beloved Lencas. The windmills were set on a hill above an archaeological site in a cave, Las Cuevas de Ayestas. Lencas are known to use both caves and hill top sites in their religious and medicinal practices, such as noted by Honduran Lencan economist Dr, Julian Lopez. The windmill company has tried to argue there are no Indians in the area, even though the nearby town of Ojojona is famous for its guancasco, a Lenca ceremony of peace with another Lenca town Lepaterique (Flores,2003). Dr. Flores has documented the modern Lenca culture and practices throughout this Lenca area extending to Reitoca, which did have colonial pueblos de indios (Indian towns,subject to tribute labor). The windmills were so noisy and disturbing that Dr. Flores was forced to abandon his retirement home and return to Tegucigalpa one of the top 10 most dangerous cities in the world for more peace and quiet. 

Comparison American Civil Rights Movement and the Garifuna and Honduran Indian social movements

The outcomes of the US Civil rights movements were various.  There were movements around “black power” or “Indian power”, getting a voice in decision making, which partly including getting the vote and getting out the voters, but also being consulted on projects destined for their communities, one of the guarantees of ILO Convention 169.    There were also movements about aesthetics like “Black is Beautiful”, and the Honduran and Belizean Garifunas organize beauty contests of Garifuna women.   There was a lot of movement about the contributions of the ethnic group not being invisible in the society—things like Black History Month, the Black Inventors Museum, the Pequot Indian Museum, the Cherokee Museum, Black dance companies, African drumming and dance companies, art exhibits of Black Artists, journals devoted to Black Literature, movie about Blacks in the Army, etc.which the Garifunas also include in African Heritage Month, Settlement Day or Garifuna Day.   There has been movement about getting Indians and Blacks and Hispanics counted in the census, since in the US a lot of decisions from funding of special projects and education, to electoral districts are based on the census.  The 2001 was the first census in Honduran history to identify how many Garifunas lived in Honduras and the 1988 census identified how many spoke Garifuna and other indigenous languages (Davidson.2011). There was recognition of days or months in which we celebrate the culture and achievement of the ethnic group like Martin Luther King Day and Black History Month and Kwanzaa. Among US Indians Pow Wows often serve partially this purpose. There is has been significant movement towards revisionist history—the contributions and sufferings of Indians, Black, Chinese, Japanese, and Hispanics in the US history. The history books by Garifunas like Salvador Suazo, Virgilio Lopez, and Tomas Alberto Avila help fill the void left by the lack of attention by professional historians.

American Indians have been active in trying to get control of their schools and what is taught in their schools and many  US tribes now control pre-school, elementary and high schools. Previously schools were intentionally used to try to change Indians so that they lost their native cultures and languages, and a video on Indian Boarding Schools blames that educational system as the principal cause of dysfunction on Indian reservations today.  There are at least 12 Indian run colleges, some with multiple campuses.  Most offer teacher’s education to train Indian teachers for their schools, among other topics.  At least one offers a master degree in Management.  Lakota College of the Lakota-Souix of South Dakota calls their Master’s program “Warriors as Managers”. A  number of non.Indian colleges offer Indian studies programs and many US universities offer some kind of African-American or Africana studies programs. Honduran and Nicaraguan Indians, especially the Miskitos have been active in this area with Urracan University in eastern Nicaragua focussing on the ethnic groups of the region, and the UPN in Honduras offering Distance Education in Intercultural Education at two sites in the Honduran Mosquitia.  Miskito and Garifunas are now the majority of the teachers and principals  in their communities.

After the US Civil Rights movement,  there have been statues made of important African-American leaders like Martin Luther King and centers and roads named after him.  There are statues of chief Chatoyer in front of some Garifuna schools, including Kindergaten "America"  in Trujillo and the building of ODECO is named after him.  Garifuna schools are often named after important Garifuna teachers, like Jose Laboriel High School in Santa Fe, after Garifuna musician and music teacher at the Departmental High School "Espiritu del Siglo"  in Trujillo.  The Garifuna have sought most of these changes in Honduras, in Belize and some of them in the US, and often they have been successful. 

When Black Bay Islanders like Dorn Ebanks started the first English speaking cable TV station in Roatan, Bay Islands, Honduras which showed shows developed by Black Bay Islanders, they said part of their motivation was so that young people on Roatan could see Black people like themselves on TV, that this might inspire them and think they could do something big in life, like the other Bay Islanders they saw on TV.  Dorn Ebanks went on to become Governor of the Bay Islands and pastor of the Roatan Baptist Church, so sometimes if you think big, great things can happen.  I think the movie "Garifuna in Peril" will likewise inspire not only Garifuna, but also other Blacks, and Indians that speak minority languages, that they and their languages could also do something big.   I applaud the creators of the Garifuna in Peril movie for thinking big and I think it is a great production.  

About the Author

Wendy Griffin is the co-author of the book Los Garifunas de Honduras, a 10 year study of the Garifunas of Trujillo and the North Coast of Honduras, as well as 5 other published and several unpublished books on Honduran ethnic groups.  She was reporter for Honduras This Week from 1992-2004 writing over 300 articles, mostly on the ethnic groups on Honduras.  She has been an English and French professor at the UPN and UNAH univerisities in Tegucigalpa and Anthropology Professor at the UPN in La Ceiba, Honduras.  She has been a volunteer with bilingual-intercultural education in Honduras since it started in 1987.  Since 1996 she has divided her time between the US and living in Trujillo, Honduras in or near the Garifuna communities there. .

Bibliography for all the Garifuna articles published in this blog March 30, 2017. These articles were formerly in the article "Garifuna Immigrants Invisible" on the Garifuna in Peril movie website. They were updated March 30, 2017. 

Amaya Banegas, Jorge Amaya (2005) "Los Negros Ingleses o Creoles de Honduras: Etnohistoria, Racismo, Nacionalismo, y Construcción de Imaginarios Nacionales Excluyentes en Honduras", Boletin No. 13, AFEHC. http://www.afehc-historia-centroamericana.org.

Amaya Banegas, Jorge Amaya (2012)  "Reimaginando la nación en Honduras:  de la nación homogénea a la Nacion Plurietnica: Los Negros Garifunas de Cristales, Trujillo, Colon, Honduras" http://www.

ird.fr/afrodesc/IMG/pdf/TESIS_Amaya_web-3.pdf

Arrivillega Cortés, Alfonso (2007) "Asentamientos Caribes (Garifunas) en Centroamérica:  De Héroes Fundadores a Espiritu Protectors" Boletín de Antropología, Universidad de Antioquia, Colombia Año/Vol. 21, número 38, pp. 227-252.  http://redalyc.uaemex.mx

Avila, Tomás Alberto (2009) Black Caribs-GArifuna Saint Vincent' Exiled People and the Origin of the Garifuna A Historical Compilation.Providence, RI: Milenio Associates

Chambers. Glenn (2010) Race, nation, and West Indian Immigration to Honduras, 1890-1940.  Baton Rouge: Louisana State University.

Davidson, William (2011) Censo Étnico de Honduras: Cuadros y mapas basados en el Censo nacional.  Tegucigalpa: Academia Hondureña de Geografía e Historia. 

Euraque, Dario (2004a) Conversaciones Historicas con el Mestizaje. San Pedro Sula: Centro Editorial.

Euraque, Dario (2004b)"Jamaican Migrants and Settlements in Honduras, 1870's - 1954" Paper presented at the Conference "Between Race and Place: Blacks and Blackness in Central America and the mainland Caribbean," Tulane University, New Orleans, Nov. 11-13, 2004.

Flores, David (2003) La Evolución Historica de la Danza Folklórica Hondureña.  Tegucigalpa: IHER.  (The Garifuna, Miskito, Bay Islander, Pech, and Chorti  sections are partly based on my research)

Franzone, Dorothy (1994) A critical and Cultural Analysis of An African people in the Americas:  Africanisms in the Garifuna Culture in Belize.  Ph.D. Disertation. Temple University.  (Available online at www.ProQuest.com).

Gonzales, Nancie (1988) Sojourners of the Caribbean: Ethnogenisis and Ethnohistory of Garifuna. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Griffin, Wendy and CEGAH(2005) Los Garifunas de Honduras: Cultura, Lucha y Derechos bajo el Convenio 169 de la OIT, San Pedro Sula:  Central Impresora.

Griffin, Wendy and Tomasa Clara Garcia (2013) Yaya: La Vida de una curandera Garifuna.  Negritud. (Photocopies of the article with Yaya's medicinal plant recipes are in the libraries at Tulane Univeristy and the Univeristy of Pittsburgh)

Griffin, Wendy, Hernán Martinez Escobar and Juana Carolina Hernández Torres (2009) Los Pech de Honduras: Una Etnia Que Vive.  Tegucigalpa: IHAH.

Gudmundson, Lowell and Justin Wolfe (2012) La Negritud en Centroamerica:  Entre Raza  y Raices.  San José:  Editorial Universidad Estatal a Distancia.  (There is an English version of this book Blackness in Central America: Between Race and Place. It is for sale on Amazon.com).

House, Paul et al.(1995) Plantas Medicinales Comunes de Honduras. Tegucigalpa: Litografia Lopez. 

Johnson, Paul (2007) Diaspora Conversions: Black Carib Religion and the Recovery of Africa.  University of California Press.

Lopez Garcia, Victor Virgilio (1994) La Bahia del Puerto de Sol y la Masacre de los Garifunas de San Juan.  Guaymuras, Honduras.

Tilley, Virginia (2005) Seeing Indians: A study of Race, Nation, and Power in El Salvador.  Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Mentioned books

Amaya Banegas, Jorge Alberto (2007) Las imagenes de los negros Garifunas en la literatura hondureña y extranjera. Tegucigalpa:  Secretaria de Cultura, Artes y Deportes.  prize winning book. Premio Latinoamericano de Investigación Luis Beltrán Prieto Figueroa, Maestro de America.

England, Sarah (2006) Afro-Central Americans in New York City: Garifuna Tales of Transnational Movements in Racialized Spaces. Gainesville, Fl:  University Press of Florida.

Palacio, Joseph (2005) The Garifuna: a Nation Across Border. Essays in Social Anthropology, Cubola, Belize.

The last two are available at Amazon.com

Background Information on Garifuna music.

Punta and Paranda—The Most Famous Garifuna Dances and Songs

One type of secular song is called paranda in Spanish which means to carouse.  In Garifuna it is called berusu and in Belizean English guitar song (Avila, 2009). Opinions vary as to when Garifunas began to sing paranda, but some time between the Garifuna arrival in Central America in 1797 and the 1920’s the Garifuna men began to accompany themselves on a guitar and sing, with a background of drums and maracas, and later the turtle drum.  Parandas were often traditionally sung as a “seranata”, going to someone’s house and singing, accompanied by a guitar.  Paul Nabor, an over 80 year old Belizean Garifuna parandero, said in an interview for Spanish TV, when he had a problem with someone, he would not fight with him, he would sing about the problem (http://www.rtve.es/alacarte/videos/todo-el-mundo-es-musica/todo-el-mundo-es-musica-honduras-y-belice-la-aventura-garifuna/1070122.) Now in Belize, they are principally sung at wakes (Avila, 2009). Although in both Avila’s book and in conversations with Garifuna blogger Teofilo Colon, they identified paranda as “beresu” in Garifuna, the old men who play paranda in Belize like Paul Nabor, were not familiar with the word “beresu”.(Avila, 2009)

There are female and male versions of paranda.  In Honduras, Garifuna women organized in dance clubs go singing traditional Garifuna songs from house to house at night sometime in the week before Christmas.  Unlike the more famous Belizean men’s parandas, in Honduras the women’s paranda is not accompanied by guitar, but it is accompanied by drums (two segunda and one primero) and maracas.  Since the women go into the house and get people up out of bed and crowd around as best they can, they are variously in rows or in a circle. The step is balancing back and forth from one foot to the other with the arms free to move as the person feels the music, like hunguhungu.  One dancer might go up and dance in front of the drums and the first drum player has to follow her movements, like punta. Another dance Culiau which has its own song, according to Honduran Garifuna dancer Herman Alvarez, this is more sexy (mas cadente) than punta and was traditionally done from house to house before Christmas. Garifuna women’s dance clubs also go out to “parrandear”, to sing Garifuna songs from house to house and dance with drums the first of January after dancing all night in their club’s dance house (Griffin and CEGAH,2005).

 Paul Nabor was a buyei, a Garifuna shaman in charge of Garifuna ceremonies like the dugu and chugu, as well as a musician, so he was well aware of the problem that young people were not learning the language and some of the old music styles like paranda and the ceremonial songs. Paul Nabor has done concerts around Belize and, after being recorded for the Paranda Project of Belizean record label Stonetree Records, also in the US (www.stonetreerecords.com/albums/meet_the_paranderos.php;  www.belizeanartist.com). He has been interviewed by PBS in January 2004 (www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/Belize/nabor.html) , as well the interview for Spanish TV where he sings his most famous song, Naguyu Nei, written when his sister was on her deathbed and she wanted a band to play at her funeral.  This song and other tracks by Paul Nabor, like Niri and Sandi Balandria are available from Amazon mp3 as well as the Stonetree records site. On Youtube there are over 25 videos of Paul Nabor playing Garifuna music. .  Other paranderos on the CD include Jursino Cayetano (Livingston, Guatemala), Juni Aranda (Dangriga, Belize), Lugua and Dale Guzman, Honduran Garifuna Aurelio Martinez as well as Paul Nabor. Most of these men were over 60, except Aurelio Martinez, and few young people were learning their songs.

Another Garifuna type of song is punta (banquity in Garifuna).  Traditionally women sing and compose punta songs, while the men drum, and play maracas, the turtle shell drum, and the conch horn. Punta is sung at wakes, held the night after someone dies before they are buried the next day.  Both punta and paranda are sung at End of Mourning ceremonies (fin de novenario), held one year after the death of a friend or relative. Women go into the center of the ring one by one and on the tips of their feet they dance forward, backwards, and to each side, swaying her hips. Sometimes a man dances around her, but he can not touch her. Traditionally Garifuna women wear full skirts below the knee and short sleeved blouses and headscarves to dance this dance, which when danced traditionally is sensual but not vulgar. In the past, young people did not dance this dance at wakes, but rather another dance for young people Saguai, which no longer exists(Griffin and CEGAH, 2005).