Abstract
López Oro analyzes two census campaigns—one in New York City and one in Honduras—geared toward Garifuna populations in order to interrogate larger questions about how Garifuna populations are included, or not, within dominant discourses of Honduran multiculturalism and US Latinidad. He argues that Garifuna are a quintessentially diasporic population who disrupt common assumptions about what it means to be Honduran, Latino, and/or Black in the Americas.
In loving memory of Professor Juan Flores whose friendship and mentorship have been immeasurably valuable to me. I’m grateful to the generous and critical feedback from Alexander G. Weheliye, Nitasha Tamar Sharma, Juliet Hooker, Jasmine E. Johnson, Tianna S. Paschel, Miriam Jimenez Roman, Petra Rivera-Rideau, Jennifer Jones, and Monica Alexandra Jimenez.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Matthew Orr and Vijai Singh, “Being Garífuna,” The New York Times (January 13, 2012) accessed March 10, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000001285066/being-Garífuna.html
- 2.
Arlene Dávila, Latino Spin: Public Image and the Whitewashing of Race (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 9.
- 3.
Garífuna refers to the language as well as to an individual. It could also be used as an adjective as in “Garífuna people.” Garínagu is the plural form of Garífuna.
- 4.
Nancie L. Gonzalez, Sojourners of the Caribbean: Ethnogenesis and Ethnohistory of the Garífuna (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 39.
- 5.
Richard Iton. In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics & Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 200.
- 6.
Sarah England, Afro-Central Americans in New York City: Garífuna Tales of Transnational Movements through Racialized Space (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006), 8.
- 7.
Juliet Hooker, “Afro-descendant Struggles for Collective Rights in Latin America: Between Race and Culture,” SOULS: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 10, no. 2 (2008), 281. Today, reinserting questions about race and ethnicity in Latin American national censuses, many of which were removed in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, is in fact a major demand by Black and Indigenous communities.
- 8.
Juliet Hooker, “Indigenous Inclusion/Black Exclusion: Race, Ethnicity, and Multicultural Citizenship in Latin America,” Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 37 (May 2005), 301.
- 9.
Within Central American mestizaje, a common trope ascribed to Blackness is foreignness, such as in the case of the Garínagu who speak a non-Hispanophone language and whose homeland is always invoked to be St. Vincent despite over 200 years of living in Central America, marking them as alien. As also Black communities colonized by the British and West Indian diasporic migrations due to their cultural and linguistic difference to the mestizo nation-states they reside in (Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama) are marked as alien to Central America’s mestizaje.
- 10.
Courtney Desiree Morris, “To Defend This Sunrise: Race, Place, and Creole Women’s Political Subjectivity on the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua,” PhD dissertation, The University of Texas at Austin (August 2012), 57.
- 11.
Tanya Golash-Boza and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “Introduction: Rethinking race, racism, identity and ideology in Latin America,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 36, no. 10 (October 2013), 1485.
- 12.
The definition of race that I use in this paper borrows from the work of Barnor Hesse who argues that race is irreducible to the body, and that it is merely one among several taxonomies such as language, culture, religion, geography, and climate, which came together in the colonial creations “Europeanness” and “non-Europeanness.” Hesse notes how “race,” even in late-nineteenth-century distinctions was deployed in excess of the corporeal, having multiple references of association (e.g. territory, climate, history, culture, religion), suggesting that the body was less the ubiquitous metaphor of “race than its privileged metonym.” Barnor Hesse, “Racialized modernity: An analytics of white mythologies,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 30, no. 4 (June 2007), 653.
- 13.
Tianna Paschel, “The Right to Difference: Explaining Colombia’s Shift from Color Blindness to the Law of Black Communities,” The American Journal of Sociology, vol. 116, no. 3 (November 2010), 732.
- 14.
Darío A. Euraque, “The Threat of Blackness to the Mestizo Nation: Race and Ethnicity in the Honduran Banana Economy, 1920s and 1930s,” in Steve Striffler and Mark Moberg’s, eds. Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 243.
- 15.
Jafari S. Allen, ¡Venceremos? The Erotics of Black Self-Making in Cuba (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 48.
- 16.
Marc Perry, “Garífuna Youth in New York City: Race, Ethnicity, and the Performance of Diasporic Identities.” Master’s Thesis (University of Texas at Austin, 1999), 15.
- 17.
Richard Iton. In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics & Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 200.
- 18.
Ibid., p. 201.
- 19.
Deborah Paredez. ““Queer for Uncle Sam”: Anita’s Latina diva citizenship in West Side Story” Latino Studies, vol. 12, no. 3 (2014), 349.
- 20.
Aida Lambert, “We Are Black Too: Experiences of a Honduras Garífuna,” in Miriam Jimenez-Román and Juan Flores, eds. The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 433.
- 21.
Sarah England, Afro Central Americans in New York City: Garífuna Tales of Transnational Movements in Racialized Space (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006), 51.
- 22.
Sarah England, Afro-Central Americans in New York City: Garífuna Tales of Transnational Movements through Racialized Space (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006), 188.
- 23.
Roxanne L. Scott, “Just Don’t Call Them Afro-Latino,” Voices of NY (June 26, 2014). Accessed on December 15, 2014 http://www.voicesofny.org/2014/06/just-dont-call-them-afro-latino/
- 24.
Miriam Jiménez-Román and Juan Flores, editors, The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 1.
- 25.
Vielka Cecilia Hoy, “Negotiating among Invisibilities: Tales of Afro-Latinidades in the United States,” in The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States, Miriam Jiménez Roman and Juan Flores, eds. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 430.
- 26.
Arturo Arias, “Central American-Americans: Invisibility, Power, and Representation in the US Latino World,” Latino Studies, vol. 1, no. 1 (2003), 171.
- 27.
John D. Márquez, Black-Brown Solidarity: Racial Politics in the New Gulf South (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 59.
- 28.
Haeyoun Park, “Children at the Border,” The New York Times, August 7, 2014. Accessed on August 15, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/07/15/us/questions-about-the-border-kids.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Ar%2C%7B%222%22%3A%22RI%3A14%22%7D.
- 29.
Jasmine Garsd, “Garífuna: The Young Black Latino Exodus You’ve Never heard About,” Fusion, June 5, 2014. Accessed on August 15, 2014. http://fusion.net/justice/story/garifuna-young-black-latino-exodus-youve-heard-743461.
- 30.
SEDINAFROH. “Yo soy Garífuna,” Advertisement clip for the National Honduran Census 2013 campaign for Self-Identification. Posted on (August 19, 2013) accessed on April 15, 2014 http://youtu.be/Nsd-OVfGxBs.
- 31.
Santos Israel Centeno. “Garífunas rechazan el término ‘afro,’ ” La Prensa (September 16, 2013) accessed on March 10, 2014 http://www.laprensa.hn/edicionimpresa/384341-96/gar%C3%ADfunas-rechazanel-término-afro.
- 32.
Rigoberto Chang Castillo. “Decreto Creacion SEDINAFROH,” in La Gaceta: Diario Oficial de la Republica de Honduras, no. 32, 364 (November 12, 2010), 1.
- 33.
Mark Anderson, “Garífuna Activism and the Corporatist Honduran State since the 2009 Coup,” in Jean Muteba Rahier’s, ed., Black Social Movements in Latin America: From Monocultural Mestizaje to Multiculturalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2012), 55.
- 34.
Juliet Hooker, Race and the Politics of Solidarity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 81.
- 35.
Helen I. Safa, “Challenging Mestizaje: A Gender Perspective on Indigenous and Afrodescendant Movements in Latin America,” Critique of Anthropology, vol. 25, no. 3 (2005), 312.
- 36.
Charles Hale. “Neoliberal Multiculturalism: The Remaking of Cultural Rights and Racial Dominance in Central America,” Political and Legal Anthropology Review, vol. 28, no. 1 (2005), 18.
- 37.
Tianna Paschel, “The Beautiful Faces of my Black People: Race, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Colombia’s 2005 Census,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 36, no. 10, Special Issue: Rethinking Race, Racism, Identity, and Ideology in Latin America (May 2013), 1544.
- 38.
Ana Aparicio, Dominican-Americans and the Politics of Empowerment (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006), 7.
Bibliography
J.S. Allen, ¡Venceremos? The Erotic’s of Black Self-Making in Cuba (Duke University Press, Durham, 2011)
M. Anderson, ¿Existe el racismo en Honduras?: Estereotipos Mestizos y Discursos Garífunas. Mesoamérica 42, 135–163 (2001)
M. Anderson, When Afro becomes (like) indigenous: Garífuna and Afro-indigenous politics in Honduras. Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 12(2), 384–413 (2007)
M. Anderson, Black and Indigenous: Garífuna Activism and Consumer Culture in Honduras (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2009)
M. Anderson, Garífuna activism and the corporatist Honduran state since the 2009 coup, in Black Social Movements in Latin America: From Monocultural Mestizaje to Multiculturalism, ed. by J.M. Rahier (Palgrave Macmillian, New York, 2012), pp. 53–74
A. Aparicio, Dominican-Americans and the Politics of Empowerment (University Press of Florida, Gainesville, 2006)
A. Arturo, Central American-Americans: Invisibility, power, and representation in the US Latino world. Latino Studies 1(1), 168–187 (2003)
K.V. Brondo, Land Grab: Green Neoliberalism, Gender, and Garífuna Resistance in Honduras (University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 2013)
S.I. Centeno, Garífunas rechazan el término ‘afro.’ La Prensa (16 Sept 2013), http://www.laprensa.hn/edicionimpresa/384341-96/gar%C3%ADfunas-rechazanel-término-afro. Accessed 10 Mar 2014
A. Dávila, Latino Spin: Public Image and the Whitewashing of Race (New York University Press, New York, 2008)
S. England, Negotiating race and place in the Garífuna Diaspora: Identity formation and transnational grassroots politics in New York City and Honduras. Identities 6(1), 5–53 (1999)
S. England, Afro-Central Americans in New York City: Garífuna Tales of Transnational Movements Through Racialized Space (University Press of Florida, Gainesville, 2006)
D.A. Euraque, The banana enclave, nationalism, and mestizaje in Honduras, 1910s–1930s, in Identity and Struggle at the Margins of the Nation-State: The Laboring Peoples of Central America and the Hispanic Caribbean, ed. by A. Chomsky, A. Lauria-Santiago (Duke University Press, Durham, 1998), pp. 151–168
D.A. Euraque, The threat of blackness to the nation: Race and ethnicity in the banana economy, 1920s and 1930s, in Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas, ed. by S. Striffler, M. Moberg (Duke University Press, Durham, 2003), pp. 229–252
T. Golash-Boza, E. Bonilla-Silva, Introduction: Rethinking race, racism, identity and ideology in Latin America. Ethnic and Racial Studies 36(10), 1485–1490 (2013)
N. Gonzalez, Sojourners of the Caribbean: Ethnogenesis and Ethnohistory of the Garífuna (University of Illinois Press, Champaign, 1988)
E.T. Gordon, M. Anderson, The African diaspora: Toward an ethnography of diasporic identification. Journal of American Folklore 112(445), 282–296 (1999)
C. Greer, Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration, and the Pursuit of the American Dream (Oxford University Press, New York, 2013)
C. Hale, Neoliberal multiculturalism: The remaking of cultural rights and racial dominance in Central America. Political and Legal Anthropology Review 28(1), 10–28 (2005)
B. Hesse, Racialized modernity: An analytics of white mythologies. Ethnic and Racial Studies 30(4), 643–663 (2007)
J. Hooker, Indigenous inclusion/black exclusion: Race, ethnicity, and multicultural citizenship in Latin America. Journal of Latin American Studies 37, 281–310 (2005)
J. Hooker, Afro-descendant struggles for collective rights in Latin America: Between race and culture. SOULS Crit. SOULS: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 10(2), 279–291 (2008)
J. Hooker, Race and the Politics of Solidarity (Oxford University Press, New York, 2009)
J. Hooker, Race and the space of citizenship: The Mosquito Coast and the place of blackness and indigeneity in Nicaragua, in Blacks & Blackness in Central America: Between Race and Place (Duke University Press, Durham, 2010)
V.C. Hoy, Negotiating among invisibilities: Tales of Afro-latinidades in the United States, in The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States, ed. by M. Jiménez Roman, J. Flores (Duke University Press, Durham, 2010), pp. 426–430
R. Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics & Popular Culture in the Post Civil Rights Era (Oxford University Press, New York, 2008)
A. Lambert, We are black too: Experiences of a Honduran Garífuna, in The Afro Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States, ed. by M. Jiménez Roman, J. Flores (Duke University Press, Durham, 2010), pp. 431–433
J.D. Márquez, Black-Brown Solidarity: Racial Politics in the New Gulf South (University of Texas Press, Austin, 2013)
C.D. Morris, To defend this sunrise: Race, place, and Creole women’s political subjectivity on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 2012
M. Navarro, For many Latinos, racial identity is more culture than color. The New York Times (13 Jan 2012), http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/14/us/for-many-latinos-race-is-more-culturethan-color.html?_r=0. Accessed 21 Mar 2014
S. Oboler, Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives: Identity and the Politics of (Re)Presentation in the United States (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1995)
M. Orr, V. Singh, Being Garífuna. The New York Times (13 Jan 2012), http://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000001285066/being-Garífuna.html. Accessed 10 Mar 2014
J.O. Palacio, The multifaceted Garífuna: Juggling cultural spaces in the 21st century, in The Garífuna: A Nation Across Borders, Essays in Social Anthropology (Cubola Productions, Belize, 2005)
D. Paredez, Queer for Uncle Sam: Anita’s Latina diva citizenship in West Side Story. Latino Studies 12, 332–352 (2014)
T. Paschel, The right to difference: Explaining Colombia’s shift from color blindness to the law of black communities. The American Journal of Sociology 116(3), 729–769 (2010)
T. Paschel, The beautiful faces of my black people: Race, ethnicity, and the politics of Colombia’s 2005 census. Ethnic and Racial Studies 36(10), 1544–1563 (2013). Special Issue: Rethinking Race, Racism, Identity, and Ideology in Latin America
T.R. Patterson, R.D.G. Kelley, Unfinished migrations: Reflections on the African diaspora and the making of the modern world. African Studies Review 43(1), 11–45 (2000)
M. Perry, Garífuna youth in New York City: Race, ethnicity, and the performance of diasporic identities. Master’s thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 1999
H.I. Safa, Challenging Mestizaje: A gender perspective on indigenous and afrodescendant movements in Latin America. Critique of Anthropology 25(3), 307–330 (2005)
R.L. Scott, Just don’t call them Afro-Latino. Voices of NY (26 June 2014), http://www.voicesofny.org/2014/06/just-dont-call-them-afro-latino/. Accessed 15 Dec 2014
E.T. Thorne, Land rights and Garífuna identity. NACLA: Report on the Americas 38(2), 21–25 (2005)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Oro, P.J.L. (2016). “Ni de aquí, ni de allá”: Garífuna Subjectivities and the Politics of Diasporic Belonging. In: Rivera-Rideau, P., Jones, J., Paschel, T. (eds) Afro-Latin@s in Movement. Afro-Latin@ Diasporas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59874-5_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59874-5_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-60320-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-59874-5
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)