Abstract
This essay analyzes the multilayered causes for the recent migration from Honduras of Garífuna mothers and their children in search of political asylum in the United States, including tourist development, dispossession, and drug related violence. Their migration patterns challenge the presumptions and boundaries of three booming research areas in ethnic studies: prison studies, settler colonial studies, and migration studies. Garífuna mothers and children are members of an internationally recognized group of Afro-indigenous peoples, and their detention in the US prison system challenges the identitarian boundaries of each of these research fields in productive ways that help us, as scholars and activists, analyze and confront the multilayered and devastating violence in Central America and expand the basis for the claims for asylum by these most recent immigrants arriving in the United States. Rather than offer yet another new area of study, this essay seeks to integrate ethnic studies in necessary ways.
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I thank Maylei Blackwell, Paloma Diaz, and Luis Urrieta for organizing the Critical Latinx Indigeneities Symposium held at University of Texas, Austin, in March 2015, as well as the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies and the Center for Mexican–American Studies at University of Texas.
In their introduction, editors Blackwell, Boj Lopez, and Urrieta define Critical Latinx Indigeneities (CLI) as “an interdisciplinary analytic that reflects how indigeneity is defined and constructed across multiple countries and, at times, across overlapping colonialities” (this issue), suggesting the traversing of disciplinary and area studies boundaries that I invoke with the idea of drifting across artificial borders. CLI is less a prescription than a vigilant comparitivism, a transnational commitment to understanding modes of Indigenous identification as shifting depending on the colonial particularities of their birth, and to the specific, contemporary conditions of the coloniality of power across the hemisphere.
See Cotera and Saldaña-Portillo (2014) for a historical review of the genealogy of mestizaje and the political consequence of Mexican Americans claims to indigeneity.
The Mashpee Tribe sued to recover their original territory on Cape Cod, claiming the sale of their lands to the Town of Mashpee in 1834 and 1870 had transpired illegally, without the federal consent required under the Non-Intercourse Act. The town countered that the Mashpee were not a tribe at the time of the sale (or in the present) and hence not protected by the act. The Mashpee had to prove their status as an Indigenous nation before the court could adjudicate their recovery claim. Frustrated by the lack of consensus presented in expert testimony as to what constituted a tribe, the judge instructed the jury to follow the strict precedent set in 1901 by Montoya v. United States: "By a 'tribe' we understand a body of Indians of the same or similar race, united in community under one leadership or government, and inhabiting a particular though sometimes ill-defined territory" (Montoya v. United States, 180 US 261, p. 266 [cited in Torres and Milun 1990, p. 633]). In 2007, the Department of the Interior granted the Mashpee federal recognition and a reached a settlement, demonstrating some drift in O'Brien's colonial calculus.
To clarify, according to the settler logic that defines the United States as an immigrant nation, to be a true American one must be an (European) immigrant, rather than Indigenous.
See Seed (1995).
For an extended discussion of racial geographies, the centrality of Indigenous peoples in the Americas to their formations, and the place of agricultural practices therein, see Saldaña-Portillo (2016).
I am not contesting the decimation of Indigenous populations upon contact with Europeans, rather I am addressing the discursive uses of the figural weak, lazy Indigenous body for the formation of racial capital.
A new generation of Latinx scholars are devising a vocabulary, as well as theoretical concepts, for addressing the relationship between mestizo and Indigenous identity formations, without falling into the romanticism of the high nationalist period. I thank three of these new scholars—Ricardo Gamboa, Oscar Marquez, and Susana Morales—for their critical insights on the impasses among settler colonial studies, prison studies, and migration studies.
Previously, there were family detention centers in Artesia, New Mexico and in Hutto, Texas, both of which were closed by the Obama administration because of the deplorable conditions in the centers and because the prolonged detention of children violated the Flores Settlement Agreement, which prohibits long-term detention of minors. For more information on the Flores Settlement Agreement, see https://lirs.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Flores-Family-Detention-Backgrounder-LIRS-WRC-KIND-FINAL1.pdf.
Figures on deportations of Central Americans from this report as well, same page.
Nicaragua is the notable exception to the increase in gang violence, having had both fewer returned immigrants and a demonstrably better capacity for keeping out drug violence, due in part to its uncorrupted police force.
While OFRANEH began as a broader organization representing autochthonous Afro-Hondurans, its membership quickly shifted to an advocacy group for identifying the Garífuna as an Afro-indigenous community. Brondo (2013) describes the organization and the transformation of its mission into one of Indigenous advocacy thus, “OFRANEH is a grassroots support organization [that] achieved official recognition in 1980. While it was formed to represent ‘Afro-Hondurans,’ a category that includes English-speaking blacks and the Garífuna, it has since transformed into an organization that focuses exclusively on Garífuna representation, with an emphasis on self-determination, autonomy, and protection of Garífuna territory and culture.” For a full discussion, see Brondo (2013).
See Cortés (2015).
For an archived video stream of García's presentation at the NYU Hemispheric Institute's Crossing Mexico Conference, where she presented the analysis I summarize here, see: http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/video.
For a full analysis of this cycle of development and dispossession, see Brondo (2013) and Loperena (2012). Also see OFRANEH's website for an account of their activities in regard to territorial recuperation and cultural preservation: https://intercontinentalcry.org/the-struggle-for-indigenous-land-and-autonomy-in-honduras-26652/. Accessed February 6, 2016.
OFANEH and COPINH played a crucial role in halting reforms of Article 107 of the Honduran Constitution in the late 1990s, which prohibits foreign ownership within forty kilometers of the Honduran coastline or inland borders, by coordinating a successful national movement of Indigenous, ethnic, peasant, labor and environmental activists (Anderson 2007, pp. 399–400).
OFRANEH explicitly links neoliberalism with US imperialism and out-migration in this 2005 statement: “The ratification of the Free Trade Agreement with the United States will speed up the process of economic globalization and lead to increased poverty, given the enormous gap that exists between our country and the North American Empire. The traditional agricultural economies of our country will be undermined and there will be a huge increase in the number of campesinos who are forced to migrate to the North. The Empire’s attempt at economic globalization is a total failure and the situation will only get worse with the implementation of projects such as the Free Trade Agreement with the United States, the Plan Puebla Panamá, the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor and the PATH (Proyecto de Administración de Tierras de Honduras), all of which directly impact the future of our people’s land. Financial institutions such as the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank are attempting to implement these projects. At the same time, wherever possible, they try to sow the seeds of division in popular movements and buy their leaders” [OFRANEH 2005 (cited in Anderson 2007, p. 403)].
Comunidad Garífuna Triunfo de la Cruz y Sus Miembros v. Honduras, Sentencia de 8 de Octubre (Fondo Reparaciones y Costas), Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos.
While scholars agree that Garífuna are descendants of free Africans, Caribs, and Arawaks, the precise location of Garífuna ethnogenesis varies. Brondo suggests communities of freed slaves and Carib and Arawak Indians formed in the Greater Antilles and parts of the South American mainland, eventually relocating as "Black Caribs" to the Isle of St. Vincent (2013, p. 21). Mollett also traces their origins as "Black Caribs" to St. Vincent. García placed the origin of the Garífuna to the shores of current-day Venezuela. While the location of Garífuna ethnogensis is undetermined, it is agreed that the Garífuna migrated to Honduras in the late seventeenth century, once the British deported them from St. Vincent.
The Indigenous status of the Garífuna has been challenged by some Indigenous organizations in Honduras, though by no means all, but it is difficult to disentangle the reasons for their objections. Anderson (2007) explains these protestations, especially from Lenca and the Miskito organizations, are influenced by competition over territory, fundamental disagreements over tourism development, and profound differences in organizational strategies. The Garífuna have been recognized as meritorious of autochthonous land rights by the Honduran government, however.
URNG stands for the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (Guatemalan National Revolutionary Union), an umbrella organization that joined guerrilla groups operating in urban centers and among the rural Indigenous areas.
FSLN stands for the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (the Sandinista National Liberation Front), more commonly known as the Sandinistas.
For NAFTA’s effects on Indigenous land-holding in Mexico, see Cornelius (1998).
For an early analysis of the prison-to-plantation system, as well as the threat incarceration poses to democracy, see Davis (1998).
Afro-Guyanese immigrant organizations are also providing aid to the Garífunas who arrive in New York City. For a discussion of Guyanese national identity and its relationship to both indigeneity and maroonage, see Shona Jackson (2012).
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Saldaña-Portillo, M.J. Critical Latinx Indigeneities: A paradigm drift. Lat Stud 15, 138–155 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-017-0059-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-017-0059-x