US Racist Development theories Immigration of Honduran Blacks US Effects Mestizaje

American Racist Development theories, the Immigration of Honduran Blacks to the US, and the Policy of Mestizaje--why Honduran Blacks and Indians have been Invisible

The website of the Honduran Minister of Culture Garifuna Dr. Tulio Mariano Gonzales stated that it was the position of this government (of President Pepe Lobo) that culture can be an “eje” (axis) of development(www.scad-gob.hn).  These politics represent significant changes from the period 1929-1950 when in Honduras it became illegal for Blacks to come to Honduras, either to immigrate or to even come as tourists as researchers. Harvard professor Herscovits tried to send a Black researcher to study the Garifunas, but he was denied entry (Euraque, 2004). Many non-Honduran Blacks who were residing in Honduras, mostly English speaking Blacks from the Caribbean Islands working for the banana companies were repatriated, sometimes with only a few days notice and house to house searches for them (Chambers, 2010, and reports by older Garifunas like Sebastian Marin).

This was partly caused by an extremely racist theory of development that Indian and Black cultures, as taught by the United States and Cuban Eugenics experts in a Conference “First Pan-American Conference on Eugenics and Homogenous Culture”  in 1927, impeded the Latin American and US countries from developing and that countries could improve their chances of developing by limiting immigration of “undesirable races” including at various times Blacks, Chinese, Indians from India, Palestinian Arabs, Jews and others and encouraging immigration of white Europeans. This was in line with the Scientific Racism of the period. In the US and all of Central America laws were set up restricting immigration by race and thousands of Afro-Caribbean workers  in Central American had to return home to countries like Jamaica.  Many of these Afro-Caribbean families displaced from Central America eventually migrated to the US(Gudmundson and Wolfe,2012).  For example the Jamaican father of Veronica Airey, former Deputy Mayor of Hartford, Connecticut, was born in Honduras, but had to flee there as a child  with his parents due to anti-Black immigration laws, according to her own reports. 

There has been a lot of international interest and research on the history of Afro-Hondurans and Afro-Central Americans recently including several books since 2000 by Trinity College professor Dr. Dario Euraque, Tulane Professor Justin Wolfe,  Texas A and M Professor Glenn Chambers, Honduran UPN and UNAH Professor Dr. Jorge Amaya Banegas, and University of Costa Rica professor Rina Caceres. The academic journal Negritud, edited by Dr. Luis Miletti and based in Atlanta, Georgia which specializes in studies of Afro-Latin Americans, is preparing a special bilingual (English/Spanish) edition on Central American Blacks and the on-line Journal AFEHC  published in January 2013 a special edition in Spanish on Central America Blacks (www.afehc-historia-cantroamericana.org). International conferences on Afro-Central Americans have been organized in the US and in Honduras since 2000. Dr. Sarah England of Soka University in California whose book is available on Amazon.com was the first to study the role of Afro-Central Americans in New York, specifically Garifunas, in the struggles of lands rights and other rights in Central America. Other multi-site international studies have looked at the role of remittances sent back by the Garifunas in New York to the development of Honduras and how immigration has affected the Garifuna communities in Honduras.  Other researchers like Dr. Mark Anderson of UC-Santa Cruz have looked at the question of identity in the Garifuna communities in the US and Honduras. The book Diaspora Conversions looks at how being in New York among other Afro-Caribbean peoples has changed the Garifuna or as he calls it Black Carib religion from how it was practiced in Honduras and in Belize.

Wikipedia now has a lot of pages on Afro-Central Americans, including Garifunas, dugu, Garifuna Americans, individual pages for many Garifuna musical artists like Andy Palacio, Paul Nabor, and Aurelio Martinez , and other Afro-Hondurans like Miskitos, Afro-Mestizos,  and Black English speakers.  For more than 250 years, the Miskitos had their own kingdom and their own king.  Previously little was known about them, but now not only is there a list of all the Miskito kings on the History of the Miskito Coast and when they reigned, but each Miskito king has his own Wikipedia webpage.  The Garifuna villages of Colon east of Trujillo originally were ruled by the Miskito Indian king rather than the Honduran government before 1860, which gave them freedom to maintain their traditional culture and language(Griffin and CEGAH,2005).

Honduran History professor Dr. Dario Euraque (2004b) believes that the strong anti-Black sentiment in Honduras in the 1920’s and 1930’s was partly caused by a mistake. Hondurans who arrived to North Coast towns like Tela, La Ceiba, and Trujillo saw thousands of Blacks and assumed that they were all Blacks from other countries like Jamaica, and Belize come to take jobs away from native born Hondurans. Both studies by Euraque (Euraque, 2004b) and Dr. Glenn Chambers (Chambers, 2010) show that only a small portion of these Blacks were Afro-Antillan immigrants, and that the majority were native Honduran born Garifunas and Black Bay Islanders.

Miskito Indians, Honduran Afro-Mestizos, and some US born Blacks also worked for the banana companies in Honduras.  In addition to expelling the foreign born English speaking Blacks from Honduras, the Honduran government undertook “españolización” campaigns (trying to make Afro-Hondurans adopt Spanish language and culture) through the Honduran schools, affecting the cultures and languages of the Garifuna, North Coast Black English speaker, and Bay Islanders. . The categories of Black, mulatto and Indian were dropped from birth certificates and census records, partly in an attempt to present a public appeareance of a mestizo (mixture of Indian and European) country, perhaps to attract foreign investors. 

This combination of policies which makes invisible modern Indians and Blacks, as well as other minorities like Palestinian Arabs, Jews, and Chinese, is known as “mestizaje”, and has been researched in a number of countries including Mexico, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua, and existed as far south as Chile.  So if the Garifunas have been invisible, it is partly due to an official policy adopted by many Latin American countries. According to Dr. Justin Wolfe, in Nicaragua the adoption of this policy was heavily influenced by the racist attitudes of Americans and Europeans towards the local Nicaraguans, including the President and other government officials.  They thought, “How can the English recognize the Miskito King and the Miskito Kingdom which was made up of Indians and Blacks, and not recognize us, the Criollos (children of the Spanish born in Latin America), Mestizos and Ladinos of the Pacific Coast of Nicaragua, because of our racially mixed background?”  (Gudmunson and Wolfe, 2012).

 These American racist attitudes continued or worsened in the 1920’s and 1930’s, and in official American diplomatic correspondence about the then president of the Honduran congress and second in command of the Honduran Army and later Honduran President Tiburcio Carias, they considered him “racially inferior”.  According to Carias’s nephew, President Carias had strongly Indian features and was known as the “ el Indio de Bronce” (the Indian of Bronze). He was from a Lenca Indian part of Honduras.  To counter the anti-Indian sentiment against the Hondurans who were of mixed Indian-European heritage, under Carias the Honduran money came to be called “Lempira” for a legendary Lenca Indian chief who rose up against the Spanish in the 1500’s, Honduran schools celebrate “Lempira Day”, the Mayan ruins of Copan were opened as an archaeological park, and Parque La Conconcordia, a Tegucigalpa park with models of Mayan Ruins, was built and  opened (Euraque,2004a). Before Carias, the Central Plaza of the Mayan Ruins at Copan, now world famous, had been rented out to local owners to plant corn, even though archaeological work started there in the 1890’s by US universities like Harvard, according to local residents.

 But at that time, the leading ideologues of Carias’s Nationalist Party were very anti-Black (and anti-Chinese), and the discriminatory immigration policies and the other policies of “mestizaje” were introduced, strongly affecting the Garifuna language and culture. While many of the Honduran politicians and their friends and families from the Tegucigalpa merchant class had never been to the North Coast and actually seen the Garifuna or Bay Islanders, they were distressed by the competition of Chinese and Palestinian  merchants, and limited immigration of “undesirable races” in general, suggests the Honduran writer for http://www.angelfire.com/ca5/mas/etnias/chino/chino.html in his book review of Jorge Amaya Banegas’s book “Los Chinos de Ultramar en Honduras” (The Overseas Chinese in Honduras).

Honduran President Carias is also remembered among the Garifunas for the Massacre of San Juan, a Garifuna village near Tela.  Carias believed that the Garifunas of San Juan were responsible for bringing in by canoe contraband or smuggled rifles into Honduras for General Umaña and possibly General Umaña himself.  General Umaña was at that time in rebellion against General Carias. Honduran soldiers from El Progreso went to San Juan and told the Garifuna men that they were organizing a clean up campaign and they should get shovels and come back and dig trenches in the beach.  Some men, including the uncle of Garifuna painter and dancer Herman. Alvarez, ran away at that point, but others came back and dug the trenches. The soldiers told them they were going to take a photo to line up by the trenches.  So the Garifuna men lined up and the soldiers shot them all and buried them in the trenches they had dug, reported San Juan resident Herman Alvarez and Profesor Batiz.. Much of what was left of the population of San Juan immigrated to Stann Creek (now Dangriga) and Hopkins, Belize, including Herman’s uncle who never returned (Arrivillaga Cortés, 2007). These massacred Garifunas are still remembered such as in a recent article on OFRANEH’s blog www.ofraneh.wordpress.com. A Garifuna friend of mine in Trujillo wrote a page to commemorate these killed Garifunas on May 1, Worker’s Day in Honduras, as a way to remember these men who had just been trying to make a little money hauling who knows what in boxes.

After that many Honduran Garifunas were members of the opposition Liberal Party, which was persecuted under the Carias government.  Both Garifunas and Black Islanders, like former Bay Islands Congressman Thomas Green, reported having to leave in the night in a canoe for Belize suddenly because they were sought by soldiers for their activities in the Liberal Party. Both the Comandante de Plaza of Trujillo General Zanabria and his Lieutenant for Iriona, Colon  where many large Garifuna communities are located, were reported to have had private cementaries, according to US historian Louise Donnell, so the threat was serious if the soldiers were looking for them.  Even former Honduran President Roberto Reina was for a time a prisoner of Carias for his work in the Liberal Party of Honduras.   From Belize the Hondurans political exiles immigrated to the US in the 1930’s.  That was the beginning of Garifuna immigration to the US, according to Garifuna teacher Claudio Mejia. The story of the Massacre of San Juan is told in a book by Garifuna teacher from the Tela area Virgilio Lopez (Lopez Garcia,1994).My version of the Massacre was told by Garifunas Hernan Alvaez and Profesor Santos Angel Batiz.