Why Indigenous Caribbean History Matters

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Strictly Facts, a Guide to Caribbean history and culture, hosted by me, Alexandra Miller. Strictly Facts teaches the history, politics, and activism of the Caribbean and connects these themes to contemporary music and popular culture. Great talking. Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Strictly Facts, the Guide to Caribbean History and Culture. In today's episode, we're following up on a very necessary history that we briefly touched upon in our conversation on Belize. Oftentimes, in discussions of race and ethnicity in the Caribbean in general, we tend to focus on black populations, oftentimes the descendants of enslaved Africans, and additionally Asian populations, you know, usually from India or China, descendants of indentured servants. But less often do we really consider indigenous communities like the Tayina or the Arawak, especially in the present moment in the fact that, contrary to popular belief, indigenous communities still exist in the Caribbean today. Joining us today to chat about indigenous Caribbean communities and the long overshadowed history of one particular community, the Garafuna, is Dr. Pablo José Lopez Oro. Dr. Oro, thank you so much for joining Strictly Facts today. Why don't you begin by telling us a bit about yourself and how you became passionate about studying Indigenous Caribbean communities like the Garafuna?

Meet A Garifuna Scholar

SPEAKER_02 1:29

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I'm incredibly honored and humbled to be in your amazing company. All the love for your podcast. I'm incredibly grateful to be part of this conversation. So, um, where did it all kind of start? So, Garifuna folks are Black Indigenous community from St. Vincent, whose history of marunage, see marunaje in St. Vincent and their eventual exile from British colonial powers in 1797, landom in Central America's Caribbean coast, particularly the Bay Islands of Honduras. And then there's mainland migration to Belize, Guatemala, mainland Honduras, and Nicaragua. I am a third-generation Brooklyn Knight of Garifana-Honduran descent. I'm really particular about the third generation Brooklyn Knight, particularly because my paternal line, which is from Dangriga, Belize, migrates to New York City, specifically Harlem, in 1962, which really details a larger hemispheric movement of Black Indigenous communities, specifically Garifana folks have been in the US, and particularly the US South, due to their labor with the United Fruit Company, have been in the US since the 1950s. And this is a community that remains slightly understudied, but also simultaneously really studied. So there's this interesting kind of scholarly conundrum around garifuna folks, particularly because garifuna folks, as Black indigenous peoples, um, kind of really create this scholarly puzzle for particularly for anthropologists, right? So there's a ton of ethnographic research on Garifuna folks in Central America. There isn't enough scholarship on Garifuna folks in the US. So this is where my work is making an intervention and contribution to the body of scholarship on Black diaspora studies and hopefully on Black indigenous studies, right? To kind of think about well, what does it mean to start considering peoples of African descent in the Americas, particularly uh survivors of the Middle Passage and their descendants as indigenous to the Americas? And Garifuna folks really model to us the possibilities of indigenous blackness in really genitive ways.

Black Indigeneity And Collective Memory

SPEAKER_00 3:43

It's so funny that you said that because you jump right in almost to my first question. One that we touched a bit upon in my discussion on the Maroons in Jamaica as well. The Garifuna, in our particular discussion today, are descendants of, as you mentioned, indigenous communities, um, whether that be the Arawak or the Kalingo, as well as enslaved Africans. Um could you walk us a bit through what is known about this early history and the connection between Black and Indigenous groups, you know, in that sort of 17th, 18th century period?

SPEAKER_02 4:17

Absolutely. Um, so in terms of the Garifuna context, right, a lot of the collective memory, right? So I turned to, you know, to kind of think about even Hartman's work around the archive, right? There is a void in the archive, right? Um, and Mark Anderson at the University of California, Santa Cruz really does this really phenomenal work of kind of teasing out um British archives to kind of get a sense of, well, you know, Garifuna folks were called black Caribs. There was a moments of Yellow Caribs, Red Caribs in St. Vincent. But the collective memory that Garifuna folks have throughout the diaspora is that we are descendants of shipwrecked slaves, right? Um, that a lot of our collective nostalgia around ancestry in St. Vincent is about a certain kind of uh fugitive freedom, right? It's about a simaronaje, uh a maronage that is really built on being shipwrecked slaves, but also Arawak Arab peoples, right? And this hybridity really informs um our political subjectivity. It really informs the way Garifuna folks negotiate 21st century politics in Central America around land rights, land titles, uh, particularly when um Garifuna activists refer to Central America's Caribbean coast as terrenos ancestrales, right? Ancestral territories, and what does it mean for Black Indigenous people to make land, to create land, and to construct land as ancestral, um, which is actually quite not unique to Garifuna folks, right? Um, black Colombians, I'm thinking particularly around the labor and political activism of Francia Marquez, where she talks about her community in Colombia from the 15th, 16th century as being built by enslaved Africans, right? That this is her ancestral land, right? That even though Africa is this homeland, that Colombia, right, La Toma Colombia is her ancestral land. And in fact, black folks throughout Latin America and the Caribbean have used land in really important ways to negotiate their not only their blackness, but their rights in that space, um, especially within nations that deny their existence and and particularly erase their existence to the building of the nation state. One thing about Garifona folks in particular, about this collective memory about being shipwrecked, is that there's this um turn to culture, right? So there's this, you know, choreographed problematic negotiation when it comes to shipwreck slaveness, right? Because there's also a distancing to the histories of plantation life. There's also a distancing to slavery that I'm not really particularly convinced yet that that distancing does much, if any, if that makes sense, right? Like I think that distancing is done to also say, well, this is why our culture has stayed intact. And I'm not really certain that that is actually the cause, right? And I think there's something particularly interesting about the collective history around marunage, self-governance, um, particularly on the island of St. Vincent, that allows for this political imaginary to become really expansive, right? Whether it's archivally fact-checked or not. Um, and in fact, my work is really much more interested in political imaginations, right? So thinking about this, even this idea of Garifuna's settlement day in Central America, right? So I'm not interested in whether the archive can prove what actually happened when Garifuna folks were exiled to Central America's Caribbean coast. What I'm actually really interested is how Garifuna folks right now use that collective memory, that social memory of the arrival to Central America as a position of freedom, right? As a position of fugitive geographies, of maroon geographies, right? And I think in particular, what's really interesting in the case of Garifuna folks is that in all of the nation states that Garifana folks reside and live and thrive in, their racialization and interpolation as Black people really questions their indigeneity because we are we're still in this 21st century moment where we compartmentalize indigenous people and black people as separate, right? As in mutually exclusive from each other. And we don't really reckon with the histories that are quite literally at the intersections of each other, right? Um Garifana folks really model to us what does it mean to actually think and engage on the political histories of living and breathing Black Indigenous folks, right? Who also are called to perform their indigeneity in really different ways, right? And who are called to really enact indigeneity because their blackness, right, and their black bodies are still described as non-indigenous.

Carib Wars Exile And Matrilineal Power

SPEAKER_00 8:58

I want us to take a step back because I think a lot of what you got to, I want to still get to. But for those who may not be familiar with Getarfuna's history, you know, we've jumped from St. Vincent to Central America to New York to, you know, the diaspora. But could you walk us a bit through concretely what happens particularly in in St. Vincent that forces this exile abroad to, you know, the Central American coast and maybe what lens to, you know, the first and second Caribbears in the 18th century, et cetera?

SPEAKER_02 9:35

Absolutely. So what's happening in St. Vincent is that here you have the emergence of Garifano peoples and they're self-governed, right? They're constantly in battle with uh British and French colonial powers in St. Vincent, and they're very successful, right? And they're actually um in the colonial records, they're seen as these really hostile, warrior-like Africans, right? They're literally understood as these constant militant enslavement resisting European colonial rule, and it actually creates this very um important history around military. Um, there is this uh Garifuna chief, um, which is adorned and loved and venerated, Joseph Satuye, um, who is understood to have fought against the British and won and was really successful. And there's actually there's a really fascinating story behind Satouye and his wife Baruda. Um, Baruda was uh one of Satouye's wives, and essentially one of the kind of political imaginaries around that story is that uh there's cross-dressing. One of the military strategies against uh the British and the French was to have the soldiers cross-dress. So the men were in women attire, and the military didn't expect. So it's this big moment where Baruda says, and I'm gonna say it in Spanish because the way it's kind of collectively said and memorialized is that um si vos no te pones los pantalones, yo me pongo los pantalones, right? So if you don't put your pants on, I'll put them on, right? And this is like kind of the oral history that has kind of transgenerationally passed on. And it's actually really telling about the gender politics, right? It's really telling, um, particularly because Garyfuna folks are a matrilineal society, right? So women are not simply just kind of these placeholders on the economic labor division. Like literally, women are the ancestral connection, the landowners, right? They're the ones that have um ancestral knowledge that is passed on to women. The matrilineal is beyond economics, right? It's beyond the labor division. It's quite literally in the very fabric of the entire culture. So, because of that matrilineal practice and custom and tradition, this narrative actually is really informative, right? It really tells us that Garifuna women were at the forefront of the military prowls, right? The forefront of military genius when it comes to how Garifuna folks were able to battle against the British and the French. Um, so this moment, this kind of scene around the Carib Wars, um, if we were to like Garifunize it, um, is to really actually understand that Garifuna women gave that military intelligence to Garifuna men. Um, and it's actually a really powerful oral history that remains, but still slightly on towed because matrilineal society and culture doesn't necessarily mean that massage noir doesn't exist, that patriarchy is very much still intact, even though there's a matrilineal um culture and society. So I think it's important for me to like pinpoint that a little bit. But also what's happening here in the exile in St. Vincent is that Garifana folks aren't exile because they just don't succumb to to European colonial forces. And and the the treaty, like the actual treaty between Garifana folks and the British was like, you gotta go, right? You gotta go. Uh the British had a lot of plans with St. Vincent. They had imagined St. Vincent to be another pearl of the West Indies, and they just had to literally take out the Black Caribs, right? And at that point, Garifuna folks are in the archive, are being called Black Caribs. Once again, Mark Anderson writes his gorgeous piece for the Journal of Transforming Anthropology, where he's like, there's these different racial categorizations that's happening in the archives. There's Red Caribs, there's yellow Caribs, there's Black Caribs, and the Garifuna folks, Garinagu, are the Black Caribs, and they're the most resisting ones, right? So there's this collective memory is really telling to the ideas of like survival and resistance and perseverance, right, in the face of European colonization, um, which really kind of marks the diaspora, the Garifuna diaspora, right? Because one of the big moments in the arrival, it's a rival of exile, right? It's a rival of British colonial forces, just taking Garifuna folks off of St. Vincent. And St. Vincent is quite literally the ancestral homeland of Garinagu. And Garinagu is the plural formation of Garifuna. So I'll go back and forth because it's like in my brain, it makes more sense to like it's all of us. So Garinagu, um, and Garifuna is kind of just like the descriptive adjective of the culture and music, but that exile is really important in Central America because in that exile, you know, Garifuna folks are arriving to a Central American Caribbean coast where there are already other black folks, where there are Creole, Mosquito, Linca, where there are other indigenous communities as well, who are also resisting European colonialism, right? So this long history of Black and Indigenous resistance on Central America's Caribbean coast, Garifuna folks are walking into it in 1797. Um and it becomes a really important marker because that's happening before the wars of independence of 1821. And that's an important date because that means Garifuna folks and Creole folks and Mosquito folks and Linca folks, they're fighting in these wars of independence. But they don't get to be narrated into that national historical project, right? They're certainly left out because of their blackness and indigeneity. So when we look at Central America's kind of nationalist ideologies and political imaginaries, black and indigenous people are left out, even though they have been present and contributing centuries before the birth of the republic. That's not uniquely like a Central America context, but I think Central America takes it to the next level. There's literally a, to borrow from Michelle Rolfe, right? There's a particular like intentional silencing of the past. And this is how anti-blackness and anti-indigeneity remained uh prevalent, right? Very pervasive in Central American nationalism is that they're literally written out. They don't exist, right? And the only time you kind of hear Garifana folks is like the United Fruit Company. Well, Garifana folks have been in Central America at least 200 years by the time United Fruit Company becomes a presence on Central America's Caribbean coast.

Central America Treaties And Land Rights

SPEAKER_00 15:58

You know, one of my reasons for starting strictly facts is the fact of like, why don't we know? And I mean, we as a collective, right? As Caribbean people, it shouldn't just be us in pockets knowing our own history. And so to sort of continue off this point that you're making of the shift to Central America or the, you know, the forced exile to Central America, because it wasn't by choice. And I want to reiterate that point. The Garafuna, you know, are forcibly exiled. A number of them go to Roatan, an island off Honduras, which in a very cruel history, like the island was uninhabitable for a large part, right? You know, with the support of Spain, that helps them transition to sort of mainland as well, right? But then it becomes, as you're saying, a challenge between the indigenous populations that were already in Central America. So could you help us problematize that a bit more? Um, what necessarily takes place as they are relocating and how that, you know, maybe those problems are persisting to the present.

SPEAKER_02 17:05

Yeah, no, thank you. Thank you. You are making me dig into my historian cat. There's so much work on this. I also want to like just like verbally cite, you know, um, the work of Edmund T. Gordon, Juliet Hooker, uh Charles Hale, Mark Anderson, Courtney Desiree Morris, and even like Garifuna scholars, right? Joseph Palacio, Media Miranda. Like there's this history and reckoning with deeply understanding that once Garifuna folks are exiled by the British in 1797 and they arrive to Roatang and they arrive to other the other Bay Islands of Honduras and they they kind of immerse themselves in these transgenerational migrations to Belize, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and mainland Honduras, it has everything to do with their negotiations with Spanish colonizers. And I think it's important to also reckon with the fact that Garinago folks had multiple colonizers, were colonized by the British, were colonized by the French. Um, and then their last colonizer were the Spanish, right? So this is why the majority of Garifana folks who have not been intermarried into Creole homes, right, have a Spanish last name. Um this is like Aurelio Martinez, right? Like the big kind of huge Garifana musicians, yeah, they're gonna have palacios, right? Um, even though they're in Belize, right? So there's this longer history about Spanish colonialism and the negotiations they did with Spanish colonizers. And one of the realities about that history is that the British were still there, that the British were also still in Central America's Caribbean coast. So this was a really strategic move by Garina Ruth to be able to negotiate with the Spanish because they had already been dealing with the British in St. Vincent. There was this allyship that really kind of um benefited obviously a lot more Spanish colonizers than they would Garifana folks. But in fact, that history is really telling in the present because one of the ways in which Garifana activists in Central America fight for ancestral land rights is reminding mestizos and reminding Spanish, the descendants of Spanish colonizers, we did this treaty. This is our land, right? We did this pact with you, there was this contract, there was this treaty for land in exchange for military power, for military engagement. And I think it's important to not like void that history because I think that history gets silenced incredibly um frequently in the context of Central American history, but it's a history that also really tells us about how Spanish colonialism's anti-Black impulse is strategic, because here you have this Black Indigenous community who got kicked out of St. Vincent because the British couldn't handle their military power. Literally, their resistance, their rebellion, right? Their maronage, right? And the Spanish use that marinage for their advantage, right? And in fact, it was Garif and the folks who really ended up, you know, fighting against the British on Central America's Caribbean coast, specifically in Honduras, right? And this is why there was this kind of physical removal of British colonizers to the more uh British Honduras, which is present-day Belize. Um, and that history is incredibly important because it really shapes the political imaginaries of the geography and also the Caribbean coast of Central America. It really highlights the history of black and indigenous folks in that space that doesn't get centered in the dominant narrative. One of the persistent political imaginaries around being Garifuna in the hemisphere is that resistance, right? Is the knowing that we are warrior-like people, right? That we will fight, that we will fight against European colonialism, that we will fight um for our lives and we will fight for our culture and our land. Because one thing that is really persistent is that Garifuna culture has not stayed intact because that's not how culture works, um, but there's parts of Garyfuna culture that are fragmented from St. Vincent, that are fragmented from Central America, that are fragmented from the United States, right? Um, and my work in particular looks at those fragmentations in New York City.

Settlement Day As Visibility And Belonging

SPEAKER_00 21:18

I do want to um talk about, as you're talking about lived and sort of felt imaginaries, I do want to talk about the meaning of settlement day, right? Have to name activists like Thomas Vincent Adonimos from Brazil, who was literally one of the pioneering activists saying, like, we really need to adhere and celebrate this history. I know you you did it a bit for us a little bit earlier, but could you talk about really what settlement day means for Geticuna populations?

SPEAKER_02 21:48

Yes, yes, yes, yes. And I'm so grateful that you brought that question up, particularly because it's the second chapter of my very much in progress book manuscript. Um, Gadita. Settlement day is incredibly important, and it's incredibly important for multiple reasons. And thank you for bringing Thomas Vincent Ramos into this space. Uh, a phenomenal garifuna man, born in Honduras, raised in Belize, and I think it's important to highlight that, right? That it's important to highlight that in many ways, um, Garifuna communities, peoples, and cultures and histories are borderless, right? When we think about Central America's Caribbean coast. And I love the fact that he was born in Honduras, particularly in Puerto Cortes, which is actually very close to Belize and Guatemala, and his constant migration between both spaces is just so telling of how black folks have always transcended borders, right? And I'm just like, this is a perfect example of how a Black Indigenous man and communities transcend borders, and these borders don't mean anything, right? Like in many ways. So the reason I spend time with Gharifana Settlement Day, because it becomes really fertile grounds to think about the public performances of our around Gharifuna. And particularly, I'm interested in this idea of arrival and this idea of arriving as exile, particularly because it's grounded in this idea of resistance. It's grounded in this idea of being marooned. And being marooned means that there's a particular negotiation with the land, right? And land and ancestors, right? So these enactments that have been happening since the 80s, and Belize is actually the first kind of location where Garifuna Settlement Day happens in the Americas. And the second one is in Brooklyn, New York, which is why it is incredibly important in the book manuscript because a lot of folks don't know that, right? That a lot of folks don't know that Garifana Settlement Day emerges out of the political activism of a Garifuna Honduran in Belize who really wanted to have the Belizean nation state recognize the cultural contributions of Garifuna folks. And in many ways, kind of in a really simplistic terminology around uh political activism, Garifuna Settlement Day is about quite literally the politics of visibility, right? It's literally saying we have arrived, we've been present, we have been present, and we're reenacting what our ancestors did in 1797. And that reenactment has a huge spiritual, intellectual, and political commitment to Garifunanis, to the Garifuna diaspora, but also to claiming um ancestral rights to land, claiming ancestral rights to nation states that were in non-existent, right? That there is a history of Garifuna folks prior to the nation state. And this Garifuna Settlement Day also allows for a conjuring of ancestral memory. You know, this is where I'm like Hartman really gave us what we needed to have in Venus and 2X because it's like, what does it mean to literally take embodied archives of ancestral memory and perform it publicly, right? And perform it, you know, one of the things about that performance is that it's also not just a Garifona performance, right? That in many ways the gaze is the nation state, right? That in the context of Central America, you know, Garifona Settlement Day has evolved into these huge multicultural um celebrations where the nation state, the mestizo nation state, right, can come and say, yes, we have black people and their culture is authentic and their culture is amazing. Come spend money here. These are the communities. And I think one of the obviously the origins of that was to honor and to remember the ancestors, right? And to make space, right? And I think Garifuna folks, um, like all Black and Indigenous folks throughout the diaspora, have been really strategic about making space and creating space. And Garifuna Settlement Day is doing that, right? It's literally carving and conjuring an ancestral space for Garifuna folks from yesterday, from today, and for tomorrow, because particularly Garifana folks' concerns around culture, right? This idea of losing culture, of losing the language, of losing the knowledge that the ancestors brought with them. So there's also this kind of contemporary push to bring um younger generations of Garinago into these performances so they can remember and honor their ancestors, right? And what I really love is like folks are not fact checking anything, right? Like there is no, there is no archival evidence of this and that, like even the size of the ship, even the idea of like what did the answers just physically bring with them. But what I love about Gharifana Settlement Day is that there's a conjuring of political imaginaries that come into that space. The historical fact-checking is so irrelevant, so entirely irrelevant because the performance of arriving, the performance of surviving that arrival, right? The brutality of that exile, you know, it wasn't just like a, you know, that exile was really incredibly violent. It wasn't this kind of, yep, just get on and go. It was violent getting on and then getting off, right? And I think it's important that um Garifuna Settlement Day continues to be the space where Garifuna folks, in the context of Central America, are able to negotiate with the nation state and also create a space for their visibility. Now, Garifuna Settlement Day in New York City, those are a different kind of politics, right? Particularly because there's just no physical ancestral land there to make, right? To kind of create. So a lot of the work that I do when I'm analyzing Garifuna Settlement Day in Grand Concourse in the Bronx, right? In Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn or in downtown, you know, Manhattan or Brooklyn is this idea of well, what is it about indigenous blackness in the company of African Americans, with Indians, other Afro-Latinx communities that is disrupting Garifana Settlement Day, right? There's something about Garifana Settlement Day as a disruption to what we normally understand to be indigenous, to be black, to be Central American, but it's also a borrowing a lot from other Black immigrant communities, right? So the West Indian Day Parade, that's entirely Black Caribbean immigrant labor that we have the Eastern Parkway every Labor Day because of Black Caribbean immigrants who wanted to make sure that their culture remained, right? That even though they're in the United States, even though they're in a different geography, that they wanted a space to really venerate and honor and celebrate their culture. So Garifana folks are really building off of the activism of West Indians, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans in the New York City context. I'm also constantly thinking about what is this multicultural melting pot moment in New York, um, particularly because Garifana Solomon Day emerges after David Denkins. Um and David Dinkins is really critical to the visibility that Garifuna folks get through like bilingual, bilingual education programs for Garifuna folks. I mean, remember, like Garifuna folks are migrating from Central America to the Caribbean coast and they're speaking Spanish, right? They're coming into Spanish-speaking communities in New York City and New Orleans and LA and Houston. So there was this moment in the 90s where there was this programming, right? There's a Garifuna Day in City Hall, right? There's this kind of um literal formation of creating Garifuna cultural visibility. And I'm always wondering what is both intellectually and politically at stake. And I have a couple of answers to that. Like I have a couple of wonderings and thinkings. We can save it for the book.

SPEAKER_01 29:38

You don't gotta get it.

Garifuna Migration To The US

SPEAKER_00 29:43

I think what you said about settlement day, I do want to just reinforce because I think there are a lot of ways our histories are told and just like depreciated in value. The fact that Settlement Day is like, we're gonna tell y'all what happened, right? Um, we're gonna show it. And, you know, even the fact that when we do quote unquote have these archives, right, they don't point us in the way oftentimes because they weren't written by us. So the fact that we have Settlement Day as this very present annual celebration, um, and are just basically like, you could say that the ship was this size, but you know, it is what it is, and we're going to, you know, relive what is most beautiful, um, what is most true for us, I think is really important. Yes. You're bringing up New York, so I've obviously got to do a discussion of diaspora, right? I mean, I am a product of the diaspora, so like I'm not trading diaspora or anything in the butt think, you know, there are often problems like brain drain, like um all of these issues that arise where movement is considered. And, you know, as a Caribbean people, I think movement, migration is inherent to who we are, right? There are pockets of us everywhere around the world. I remember studying abroad in college and like finding a Jamaican in Greece, right? Like because we move. How does that impact Yarrafuna populations today? Um, you did touch on it a bit, you know, in terms of like reinforcing histories, but what are sort of those problems um and the connections also, as you were talking about, you know, with New York? Um, but you know, even as Nicole Ramsey mentioned, um, there are big Belizean populations in California as well. And so how are these pockets coming together of people?

SPEAKER_02 31:37

That is a dissertation question right there. Um, you know, a couple of things come to mind. There are already two monographs in the world on garifno folks in New York. Um, Sarah England writes an ethnography, um, particularly on first generation Garifna New Yorkers from the 90s, 80s, and 90s. Um, so she really doesn't pay much attention to the communities from the 60s, 70s. Um, I'm quite literally interested in generations that have already been in the US for two to three to four, but she does a beautiful job on really articulating the transnational aspect of Garifuna New Yorkers' activism around um notions of land, of notions of indigenity. And then Paul Christopher Johnson writes this other manuscript on Garifuna religion. Um, and his kind of huge debate is like essentially trying to figure out how African is Garifuna religion. Um, and he obviously even covers that yes, Garifuna folks are very African and very indigenous. And I'm like, yes, sir. But I think one of the things that gets left out of both of those manuscripts and kind of the larger history of Garifana folks in the US is that Garifuna folks are entering the US as imperial subjects. They're not leaving Central America because of a civil war or a revolution, right? They're leaving Central America because of anti-blackness. And they're leaving Central America because the United Fruit Company gives them an economic opportunity to leave. And they're going to New Orleans, right? New Orleans is quite literally an extension of the banana republic in Central America. That's an important piece of history that gets left out a lot, particularly because um New Orleans, as one of the mechas of the Black Atlantic world. I mean, Garifana folks are entering the US South, right? So Glenn Chambers writes this amazing recent book on like essentially black Central Americans in New Orleans and how they're negotiating their Central American-ness, their lapinidad, right? In that time period, they're Hispanic and their blackness in New Orleans. That part of history becomes really important because New York is actually a later part in the migration, right? That New York actually isn't as um central to the story, right? It's not the beginning to the story of the reasonable folks in the US. And I really want to be able to center New Orleans in a way that's in conversation with New York, because in many ways, the financial offices and the financial structures of the United Fruit Company were in both places, right? They were in New Orleans and they were in New York. And the reason I start there is because it's important to think about, you know, to borrow from the work of Lada Putnam, what does it mean to think of Garifana folks in the company of other Black communities, right? So I'm interested in the ways in which, in the company of African Americans, in the company of the Schomburg Center, right? How does that really shift the diasporic contours of Black indigenity? Um, and in particular, I bring Schomburg into the conversation not only because of the naming of a Black Puerto Rican man, one of the most important archives of black culture in the hemisphere, but it's also a space that allows for this in the company of to really highlight, right? So one tendency that happens in the body of literature on black Latinx immigrants is that there's this tension with African Americans, right? That there's this kind of cultural tension, right? This language, linguistic tension. And I think those tensions are like incredibly real, they exist, but they're not the hallmark of the relationship. That at some point, the fact that Garifana folks, second and third generation, are going to HBCUs, that's not a tension. That's a falling into US blackness as a form of diasporic solidarity. That in many ways, the ways in which Latinab is so anti-black in the US, is that of course that Ifana folks are gonna go to Megar Everest College before they go to Bodigua College. Absolutely, right? There's a space for Garifuna folks as both Caribbeans, as Central Americans, as part of the Black diaspora. These tensions exist, but they at some point, blackness transcends those tensions, right? And that these spaces um become really important because one of the earlier activists um within the Garifina spaces in the Bronx and Brooklyn, they're West Indians, right? West Indians are modeling to read from the folks what does it mean to literally talk about your Black ethnicity um in a space, right? Um and they really model that. And it's incredibly important because one of the things that I discovered in the Chamburg Center, so you know, I'm like, you know, finished my qualifying exams, I'm, you know, did my dissertation perspectives, and I'm like, okay, I'm going back home to New York and I'm gonna do this work. And I go to the Chamber really happy and it's like, yeah, I'm gonna look for Garifuna stuff. And they're like, I found like maybe three things, three things. And I actually had to comb through West Indian archives in the chamber to actually find Garifuna stuff. And I was like, this is so interesting. It's interesting because I'm not surprised that Garifuna archives are in West Indian archives, right? Um, because of the communities that were already in New York, right? But also the communities that were already in New York and the ways in which that they would also allow garifuna folks to space, right? So of course I didn't find garifuna stuff in El Centro de El Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, right? Even though Garifuna folks are part of, right? Aida Lambert, who's a Garifana woman from Honduras, in the 60s, living in East Harlem, she's part of the founding committee on El Defile de la Hispanidad. But I don't find Garifuna stuff in Dominican archives or Puerto Rican archives, right? So it's so fascinating to me to always find it in West Indian archives because it makes complete sense. And even though there's a language barrier, it ends up not being an actual barrier. Um, and I think it's important to think about I always love the idea of in the company of because I want to really move away from this kind of pervasive idea of like there's these tensions, and yeah, there's God, we're human, right? So there are tensions, but they're tensions that are really um rooted in these kind of white supremacist ideologies around ethnicity and all of these things. And I'm just like, yeah, the tension is irrelevant. Like, let's get to the work. And the work is blackness, right? The work in the context of Guerrifuna folks, it's indigenous blackness, right? And they're really articulating a certain kind of indigeneity that is of African descent.

Music And Film That Hold History

SPEAKER_00 38:19

So you've heard it here, folks. Definitions or, you know, the distinctions between being black and indigenous, particularly in this Garafuna context, are null. Like, you know, there are Caribbean indigenous communities countered to the sort of you know overwhelming narrative. They didn't, they weren't all killed, you know, from Columbus and that whole, you know, 1492 story. Um, they are present, they are living, they are, you know, existing and breathing and changing the world still today. Like this was like probably one of my favorite episodes. So thank you so much. This was so great. I have to ask my favorite question though. Everybody knows this is my favorite question of all. Um, I love music, I love culture. Um, that's what I write, that's what I study. What are some of your favorite examples of Garrafuna history or Garrafuna culture through history? You know, where do we see some of the art just really highlighting Garrafuna history beautifully? And it could be settlement day. I that was probably me giving you one, but you know, if you want to, you can use that one. I will, I will take it from you. But um, yes, I I would love to be like, what is the the one song or the novel or the film that I definitely have to check out?

Documentaries And Final Takeaways

SPEAKER_02 39:38

So I love Aurelio Martinez. I deeply respect his activism through Garifuna music, through Garifuna dance. And there's this song called Africa that he writes um at a time period where there's these two very different garifna organizations in Honduras. One is called Ofrane, which is one of the oldest ones, Organización Fratelán Negra de Honduras, and then Odeco, Organización de Desarrollo Ético. Um and both of them just are they really both politically really different, particularly because one is much more interested in like Garifana land freedom, and then the other one is more interested in kind of being integrated into Honduran nation states, right? So one is always constantly more interested in government and one is more actually interested in community-based activism. Um, and there's not a hierarchy, I'm not putting the binaries of the dichotomy, but he writes this song, Afiga, right? It's a story, it's a song that really details the Gary Funa diaspora from Africa to St. Vincent, from St. Vincent to Roatang, from Rowatang to mainland Central America's Caribbean coast, and then from Central America's Caribbean coast to the United States. And it's a song that really captures the multiplicity, the resistance, the rebellion, the marinage. But it's also a reminder about how Africa is at the core of this, right? That in many ways Garifana folks can talk about their indigeneity, they can talk about their culture, but we can't forget Africa, right? That Africa gave us all of this culture. And this is where the kind of negotiations around indigeneity and blackness um become really complicated, right? And they get complicated because hybridity is kind of the core of the narrative, but this song really reminds us that the motherland is Africa, right? That in many ways, Garifuna folks wouldn't be Garifuna folks without Africa. And it's a gorgeous song, and he it's kind of like a little bit of a Garifuna ballad. Um the drumming is really low. Um, and it's really soothing to hear his words and reclaiming of Africa as the motherland of Garifuna folks.

SPEAKER_00 41:45

Boyago, stay tuned for Strictly Fact Sounds, where we connect our history to pop culture. For this Strictly Fact Sounds, what better way to pair the knowledge and resources Dr. Lopez Ora shared with us than with two documentaries? Filmmaker Andrea Leland has developed two great documentaries on the Garrafuna. The first entitled The Garrafuna Journey Historicizes the Culture and Beliefs through Food, Dance, Music, and Spirituality. And her more recent film, Yorame, which means Homeland, was released in 2013. Much like our episode today, the companion film recounts the lesser-known history of the Indigenous community in St. Vincent and their story of resistance, repair, and memory. Check out both online from our Strictly Facts Syllabus now. Thank you so much for joining me on Strictly Facts Today. This was such a generative conversation. It was so great talking with you, Dr. Lopez Oro. I hope the listeners enjoyed this. We'll have links to all of the readings and you know, activists, et cetera, that we mentioned in this episode on our Strictly Facts Syllabus online. And we hope you enjoyed this episode, everyone.

SPEAKER_02 43:03

Thank you. Appreciate y'all.

SPEAKER_00 43:06

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