The Garinagu in New York
An Unnoticed Group Flourishes in the Shadows

By Angelica Medaglia

The doors of the buildings along East 149 Street were closed, but inside La Peña del Bronx music blasted one Saturday evening in early April. The setting could easily have been in Honduras, Guatemala or Belize. Black women, in long checkered dresses that matched their head wraps, chatted in Garifuna over chicken soup and beer. Younger black women danced like pairs of needles drilling the wooden board that serves as a dance floor in this small Mott Haven community center.

One dancer was dressed in black; her orange and silver Nikes flashed as she pounded the floor with her rapid skipping steps. She had not danced Punta, as the drum rhythm is called, in a traditional celebration of her Garifuna heritage since she went to France to study for a degree in sociology two years ago. But Punta is as innate to her as the Garifuna and Spanish she grew up speaking in Honduras. The loft-like space was crowded with black Garinagu -- the plural for Garifuna -- speaking in three languages: Spanish, English but mostly Garifuna, an Arawakan-based language with smatterings of West African tongues.

In the immigrant discourse of New York, the Garinagu are seldom mentioned. Yet for the last 50 years they have built close-knit communities in mostly poor neighborhoods. Sandwiched between African-Americans and Latinos of many shades, the Garinagu have burgeoned unnoticed in New York's mosaic of communities. Those from Honduras make up the largest percentage of their group in the Caribbean and also in New York, where many have settled in the South Bronx and East Brooklyn.

By some estimates, the Gariganu population has reached well beyond 50,000 in the area and 250,000 in the nation, yet the Garifuna identity -- as marked as other immigrant groups - has remained in the shadows. (Except for a brief period after dozens died in a fire at the Happy Land dance club in 1990.)

For Mirtha Colon, 49, a community activist, having a culture apart from the rest of society has been, at times, a trying way of life since Honduras. Jorge Cacho, 24, has seen how the isolation has made other young Garinagu ashamed of their identity. Felix "Linki" Zapata, 26, wrestled with his ethnicity while growing up and chose to resolve it by not telling his Latino friends he was a Garifuna. Music, however, became the bridge with which he kept connected to a heritage he is still learning about.

Like all Garinagu, Colon, Cacho and Zapata are the descendents of captives from several West African countries who were being taken to Brazil in a Portuguese slave ship that shipwrecked off the coast of St. Vincent Island in the Caribbean. Their ancestors intermarried with the Arawack Indians of St. Vincent. And for 150 years, while fiercely fighting British colonizers in the island -- the two groups blended blood and culture, developing their own language -- to become the Garinagu.

Failing to enslave the Garinagu, or to get them to give up their language and culture, Britain deported the group in 1797 to Honduras, where they settled along the Atlantic coast. Some Garinagu moved to British Honduras, now Belize, Nicaragua and Guatemala.

They ultimately came to New York in ships with dreams like those of many other immigrants. In the mid-1940's, they were merchant marines. Decades later, they were like Pablo Gomez, the vice president of a Garifuna coalition in the Bronx, who paid $500 to be smuggled into the country in a commercial ship in 1985. Many more have come on dance tours, displaying their singular brand of music called Punta and overstaying their visas. Others have been helped to immigrate by their relatives who are U.S. citizens.

***

"In order to survive with Latinos, blacks have to stop thinking that they are black," said Colon, president of Hondurans Against AIDS. "The black community in Central America exist and it doesn't exist."

Colon is sitting on a white plastic chair in her small apartment in Mott Haven. She has finished eating fried fish heads with casabe, a Garifuna flat bread made of yucca. She is getting used to eating on her own. Not too long ago her daughter, Gloria, left for Cuba to study medicine in one of the six-year scholarship opportunities offered to hundreds of low-income Latin Americans by the Castro government. At least 22 Garinagu in Honduras have traveled to Havana for that purpose this year.

Colon doesn't speak directly of her pride for her 22-year-old daughter, but her eyes moisten when she talks of her. Becoming a doctor was never an option for Colon.

A memory of her school days in Honduras still simmers in her mind. The teachers in her school had gathered all the Garifuna mothers and asked them to speak only in Spanish to their children. Colon's mother had said, "Well it is going to be harder for Mirtha because I am not going to stop speaking my tongue." So Colon learned Spanish as well, and she excelled in school.

But when she completed sixth grade, her teacher, who was a mix of white and indigenous, wrote on her graduation certificate, "This girl is fit for agricultural work."

"Even now with 50 years of age, and a master's, I ask myself what did my teacher mean to say," Colon said.

For economic reasons, she dropped out of school at 14 and came to the United States four years later. In America, Colon pushed herself through high school equivalency classes, then got associate's and bachelor's degrees and finally a master's in social work from Fordham University, while rearing her daughter. The photograph on her living room wall shows a 42-year-old Colon smiling under her mortarboard as she receives her master's degree.

When she came to the United States she integrated herself into the established Garifuna community of the Bronx. Many things were the same as in Honduras; the community here pulsated within its own nucleus independent of the larger Latino community. But she was fascinated to hear Garifuna being spoken without shame.

"Being told that meant that our language, Garifuna, was worthless and our customs were not going to get us get anywhere," Colon said. "It meant that we were worthless."

But in America "there is a revolution," she said, "as we look for our own identity; that we are black."

Colon kept her mother's tradition, speaking to her daughter in Garifuna. Her daughter in turned would respond in Spanish.

Her blackness and the central issue of the Garifuna identity have become explicit factors in Colon's life. Her community work has propelled her to join the black movement in Central America.

Eight years ago, she helped formed Hondurans Against AIDS, the only prevention group working directly with Garinagu residents in New York. In some years, the organization has helped raise money to send the bodies of as many as 20 Garinagu AIDS victims to Honduras, Colon said.

In Honduras the number of AIDS cases among the Garinagu has risen at an alarming rate. Over the years, Colon has spent her vacations talking about the disease and taking medicine to Garifuna communities.

During these visits she came to know the Garinagu who formed the Organization for Ethnic Community Development, the group who is fighting for the rights of Afro-Hondurans to own their lands. As a member of this organization, Colon has been able to travel throughout Latin America meeting with different Afro-descendent groups who share a similar history of racial discrimination as the Garinagu have in Honduras.

That Afro-descendent movement of Latin America has not caught on here. So the Garinagu live in a separate world, she said.

***

Garinet.com. Do you Gari?

The Internet put Jorge Cacho's dream into motion. He wanted to meet more Garinagu who were also writing computer programs, dismantling hard drives and designing Web sites.

And he wanted to introduce as many Garinagu as possible to the virtual reality of online communication; a Web site about them seemed the best venue, he thought.

"I think things have to be taken sequentially," he said, "so how do you motivate people to get a computer?"

You include them in the plan. Cacho, 24, started garinet.com three years ago, his first step was to ask people to chip in with ideas. So he put the word out in the Garifuna community and received enormous reaction.

What he didn't know is that out of this collective work, he would meet so much "talent," he said. "I met so many people like me, who had ideas but didn't know anyone else with whom to share them," he said. The Web site stands for much of what he gathered in those days: an online handbook on Garinagu culture, language and history and a virtual blackboard for community messages.

Yet its deeper messages were not generated from these conversations; it came from personal experiences. In the section, "Do you Gari?" Cacho shares his own frustration with Garinagu who hide their ethnic identity in order to fit in.

He came to the United States when he was 14 years old, after years of living with an aunt and a grandmother in Honduras. His parents, like those of many other Garinagu, had established themselves here first before bringing him over.

Cacho said he learned more English by listening to hip-hop than he did from his bilingual program in public school. He adopted the dress code of young black American teenagers because he didn't want to get picked on, he said.

Cacho was suspended from school and for a while he had little direction. But the computer his father bought for him yanked him back to reality: "I would spend night hours dismantling his computer and putting it back together until it became second nature to me," he said.

When Cacho came to America, he too spoke more Garifuna than he had in Honduras. This part was wonderful, he said. But at the same time, he met many young Garinagu who preferred to integrate with Latinos or pass as one - something that was viturally impossible in Honduras, where skin color indicates origins.

It particularly bothered him to see how a friend "didn't know where she belonged," he said. He met her at Polytechnic College in Brooklyn, where he was studying computer science.

She had wanted to join the college's Latino club, but had been rejected by its leaders because she was black, she told Cacho. She then went to the African-American club, where she was shunned because she was Hispanic, she told Cacho.

"If she had grown up conscious that she was Garifuna the incident of the Latino club wouldn't have hurt her as much as it did," he said.

Cacho posted his general feelings about this episode on his Web site under the title, "Can you come out of the box fellow Garifuna?"

In it he said, "For years, I watched some of my Garifuna people lose their identity to other cultures, most of it attributed to the lack or low self-esteem. … Some of my brothers and sisters return to the culture, some others stay where they are, taking the pain, for pity."

It still bothers him to know that his friend felt so displaced.

"What happened to her, was as the African-Americans say: 'When you don't stand for something, you fall for anything.' "

***

"I thought of a name for the CD," Zapata said about the compilation of Caribbean music he is recording. "It's going to be called, 'Mi gente; mi cultura. My people; my culture.' What do you think?"

From his room, perched on the fourth floor of the Riverside Towers in Brownsville, Brooklyn, Zapata records the CDs of Garifuna bands who blend the three-beat drum-tempo of Punta with other Caribbean sounds; it is known as Punta Rock.

The genre is a derivative of the traditional Punta, danced and sung at wakes and death anniversaries to honor Garifuna family ancestors.

Zapata didn't grow up listening to Punta. He didn't see men play the rhythm on drums at a Fedu, a wake, or the chorus sing, until he was a 12-year-old visiting Honduras for the first time. His parents always spoke to him in Spanish at home; of Garifuna, Zapata has learned only a handful of words.

But what he knows, Zapata understands well: "Garifuna music is in my blood," he said. The few times his parents had taken him to parties as a child, he would just sit by the stage watching the bands playing standard Latin music heard in Spanish-speaking radio stations.

In Honduras, at a party, he heard for the first time Punta Rock, a fusion of Caribbean rhythms and traditional Punta. A cousin taped the live bands for Zapata and he brought the recording back the United States. In his room, he taught himself to play Punta Rock on his keyboard by playing the cassette.

This was the beginning of what he calls his "double life." In school, Zapata was a basketball player, a Latino among the rest. But after school he would come home and play Punta in the company of two cousins. "I used to hide it from my friends that I was Garifuna" he said. "They just knew I was Spanish and they treated me like everyone else."

He had one Garifuna friend from school and together with Zapata's cousins. The group would come home to talk about the prospects of starting a band like the ones they would see at Garifuna parties. They had also briefly heard Punta Rock in La Mega, the largest Spanish-speaking radio station in New York. This enticed them to practice the music together.

Soon two adults asked him and his friends to become members of "Garifuna Kids," a group whose popularity took him to Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico and regions of the United States.

To this day, Zapata's high school and neighborhood friends do not know about his music.

But he has built a reputation among Garinagu. Zapata has one of the few at-home recording studios owned by young people in the community. His new band, Amistad Garifuna, sold out the thousand CD copies he produced last year. He recorded those two CDs in the built-in system of his keyboard.

Zapata is producing the third CD in his recording system, which he bought 10 months ago for $2,000.

Like dozens of Garifuna musicians playing Punta Rock, Zapata performs in one or two clubs run or rented by Garinagu. Playing for a couple of hundred dollars or selling a thousand CDs doesn't pay the bills and so most of the musicians have low-skilled jobs. Zapata, for example, is a maintenance worker in the Brooklyn hospital where his mother delivered him and where she has worked as a nurse for 30 years.

He has grown to believe less that Punta Rock will ever gain recognition like other Latin music genres, such as Salsa or Merengue.

Except for that brief stint when La Mega aired Punta Rock, Zapata only hears the music at Garinagu music stores, events or homes. Mostly, though, he hears it in his room.

"Why our music is not played on the radio," he said with bitterness and sadness, "to me has a lot to do with racism."

Zapata still hopes his CD can open doors.