Garifunas
and Their Culture Brighten Up Pacific NW Cultural Scene
By Wendy
Griffin
If people
have heard of the Garifunas, an Afro-Indigenous people who live along the
Central American Caribbean Coast in Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua,
they usually think of warm weather, sunny beaches, palm trees, and coconut
based foods. For example, the Univision
program “Magia Garifuna” on Garifuna medicinal practices on the
Guatemalan Coast which is part of the Medicina Desconocida show which started
in February 2014, is fairly typical of a Garifuna settlement in Central
America. So I was surprised that while visiting my brother in Seattle, Washington,
he googled Garifunas in Seattle, and found a Youtube video of Garifunas dancing
the traditional dance “punta” in the South Park area of Seattle to the live
music of a pair of large Garifuna drums.
When my
brother and I went to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Visitor’s Center in
Seattle, they invited the visitors to leave small notes on kiosks near the
exit. The first note that caught my eye there was written in Garifuna just having the word “seremein” (thank you in
Garifuna), so I was more and more intrigued to know who were these Garifunas in
the Seattle area.
The
Garifunas are a mixture of Africans, who intermarried with Arawak and Carib
Indians on the island of St. Vincent north of Venezuela, and were exiled to
Honduras in 1797 after losing a second war with the British. Taino Indians who
form part of the family trees of many people from the Dominican Republic,
Puerto Rico, Cuba and elsewhere in the Caribbean spoke an Arawak language, as
do the Garifunas, and so the current culture of the Garifunas has relations to
the cultures now in Caribbean like Puerto Rico and Cuba, and also the North
coast of Venezuela and Guayana.
Most areas
where the Carib Indians lived were not conquered by Spain, but rather later
arriving Europeans like the Dutch or the French or the English, because in his
letter to the King of Spain when Christopher Columbus visited St. Vincent on
his last voyage he said, “the Caribs were very fierce and warlike and the
Arawak speaking Tainos docile and friendly, and so it was better if Spain
avoided the Caribs’ lands,” which they
did ,in general, for the whole colonial period, which is why Dominica, St.
Lucia, Guyana, Surinam, St. Vincent , Trinidad and Tobago, etc. became English or French or Dutch and
not Spanish. Indians and Blacks from
islands near St. Vincent ran away there on rafts up until 1796, when the
Garifunas were defeated in battle.
According
to Wilbor Guerrero, a Honduran Garifuna from the San Juan Tela area, who lives
near the SeaTac airport south of Seattle, there have been Garfunas in the
Seattle area for at least the last 30 years when his uncle moved to the area. The
Seattle area Garifunas include Garifunas
from Honduras, Guatemala and Belize.
These Garifunas often come to Seattle after first having lived in other
US cities, particularly New York City where an estimated 100,000 Garifunas
live. The US is now the country which has the highest population of Garifunas, not
a Central American country, which presents challenges to US institutions like
schools, hospitals, the Catholic Church, as well as to the Garifunas
themselves.
The
Garifunas are attracted to Seattle for opportunities such as opportunities for
advanced studies, like a Garifuna woman who is getting a Ph. D. while studying
the African Diaspora in Seattle, or because there are good jobs here in their
field. For example, Wilbor Guerrero works with computers and technology,
currently for Sprint, so the Seattle/Bellevue area which is where Microsoft and
Adobe are headquartered, is a happening place to be. Sometimes groups of immigrants generate the
demand for specific types of services, and so the Seattle area now also has a
Garifuna DJ, who is featured on the blog www.beinggarifuna.com
in their study of what Garifuna music is popular around the country.
The
Garifunas have an incredibly rich culture with their own language which is used
in most of the music that they sing or play. There are at least 34 different
genres of Garifuna music, most of which also have a type of dance that is
associated with them. Some of the dances also have elaborate costumes
associated with them. The most famous Garifuna composers have written over 200
songs.
Garifuna
music is readily available for sale on the Internet for example from Stonetree
Records of Belize, Amazon.com, Folkways
Records of the Smithsonian, garistore.com, or on
Youtube. Some of the Youtube performances of Garifunas show them singing other
Latin American music genres like Spanish reggae or reggaeton. Some of these
video clips have gotten over 20,000 hits, reports Teofilo Colon, the owner of
BeingGarifuna.com. Garitv.com has videos to watch and to buy.
There are
Garifunas who record professionally both in the US, especially New York and Los
Angeles, and in Central America. In addition to recording their own music, many
Honduran Garifunas play as back up musicians on Garifuna percussion
instruments for most of the
internationally famous Honduran groups like Guillermo Anderson, Rascaniguas,
Angela Bendeck, Silver Stars, etc. The most famous popular song to come out of
Honduras “Sopa de Caracol” (Conch Soup), was originally a Garifuna song with
Garifuna lyrics, composed by a Belicean Garifuna who had copyrighted it, before
the Banda Blanca adopted it for merengue band instruments and partially
translated it into Spanish, selling over 3 million copies. The copyright issues
were eventually settled out of court.
Some Garifunas have won international prizes
for their music such as Andy Palacio whose Garifuna Collective played without him at the Vancouver Folk
Festival in Vancouver, Canada this year, and Aurelio Martinez, who played this
year at the Bumbershoot Festival in Seattle. The Garifunas of Seattle have
formed their own Garifuna dance group which performs around the area, said Mr.
Guerrero.
Garifuna
films are another way to see Garifuna dances and hear the music. In the film
Garifuna in Peril which was shown at the Langston Hughes Film Festival in
Seattle this year, there are several examples of powerful Garifuna dances, and
19 different cuts of Garifuna music accompany the movie which is set in both
Los Angeles and near Tela on the North Coast of Honduras. That movie is now for sale at www.garifunainperil.com as is Ali Allie's first Garífuna movie El Espiritu de Mi mama, and some Belizean Garífuna movies like one by Aziatic, a popular Garífuna singer.
The movie
tells the story of a Garifuna teacher worried about the loss of the Garifuna
language both in Honduras and in the US who tries to build a Garifuna school in
his hometown near Tela, Honduras, but runs into problems with the expansion of
a nearby tourist resort. There are 159 Garifuna videos on Vimeo.com, dozens on
Youtube including Discover Rio Platano Biosphere In Search of Ciudad blanca
which featuresGarifuna Roberto Marin from Plaplaya talking about medicinal
plants and the lack of protection in the Biosphere in spite of international
funding. The Garifuna films of the Garifuna Emergency Committee of Honduras which
are about Santa Rosa de Aguan after Hurricane Mitch and about an illegal
highway being built though the Honduran
Garifuna’s protected water catchment area and fields to reach the endangered
UNESCO World Heritage site Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve are available through
Witness.org. Mauricio Productions is another good source on the Internet for Garifuna videos.
The
Garifunas make over 40 different kinds of crafts, including musical
instruments, tools to prepare traditional foods, canoes, jewelry, etc. Examples
of these Honduran Garifuna crafts were on exhibit at a talk sponsored by the
Anthropology Club at Western Washington University (WWU) in November 2013, and
then were donated to the Burke Museum at the University of Washington (UW),
together with other Honduran rainforest Indian crafts by WWU graduate Wendy
Griffin. Garifuna crafts and the Garifuna movie Revolutionary Medicine were
also shown recently on the Society for Applied Anthropology conference in March 2014, which
also had three talks related to Honduran Garifunas and a whole panal on Belize,
which included issues of the Garifunas in that country.
Griffin’s book “Los Garifunas de Honduras: Cultura,
Lucha y los Derechos Bajos el Convenio 169 de la OIT” (The Garifunas of
Honduras: Culture, Struggle and Rights under ILO Convention 169) which is the
result of a 10 year study among the Garifunas, is in libraries at WWU, CWU, and
at the UW Burke Museum. While currently out of print, negotiations are underway
to make it available as an e-book, through e-libros. The Burke Museum also has
a preliminary version of the English version of this book.
CWU and WWU
also has her study of the dances, music, and musical instruments and ceremonies
with dances of all 4 Afro-Honduran
groups (Garifunas, Miskitos, Black
English speakers, and Ladinos) in David Flores’s book “La Evolución Historica
de la Danza Folklorica honduereña” (The Historical Evolution of Honduran Folk
Dances). Her book on Bay Islanders and Black English speakers is available for
free on the Internet, as is her study “Garifuna Immigrants Invisible” which is
on the Garifuna in Peril website under About Garifunas.
Other good resources on the Garifunas are
Nancie Gonzales’s Sojourners of the Sea and
Tomas Avila’s Black Carib-Garifuna which is available from Amazon.com.
Tomas Avila is a Garifuna living in Providence, Rhode Island, and his book
includes articles by leading Belizean Garifuna intellectuals. The updated
Spanish version of Gonzales’s book “ Los Peregrinos del mar”, published in
Honduras, includes a section on Garifuna immigration and its effects which the
English version does not have.
The main
general book I have seen on Garifunas in New York is Dr. Sarah England’s book
on Afro-Central Americans in New York. Note that the book on Garifuna religious
ceremonies in New York “Diaspora conversions” calls them Black Caribs instead
of Garifunas. Both of these titles which may confuse people who do not know
that the people now called Garifunas used to be called Black Caribs or in
Spanish “morenos”, and some librarians have gotten confused because the
Garifunas speak their own language, and so classified them as Garifuna Indians,
instead of Afro-Hondurans or Afro-Central Americans. As noted above, the
Garifunas are not the only Afro-descent people in Central America or Honduras.
Nice article. My friend recently moved to Belize which is the 1st time I had heard of the Garifunas. Great info as I plan my trip there.
ResponderBorrar