What do you think of when you hear the name Honduras? A warm, tropical country? A culture filled country? The music, the food, the dances? “White” Hispanics on an area?... In my experience, the last thing that comes to mind when someone hears the name Honduras, is the association of dark-skinned, african- american descendants who speak spanish as well as have their own language, food, dances, and way of living, known as garifunas. Garifuna people are a mixed race whose descendants are from West Africa, Central Africa, the Caribbean, and the Arawak tribe who live along the coast of Central American countries such as Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, and Nicaragua. According to the article, “Garifuna,” “their phenotype reveals their African heritage, …show more content…
Being Garifuna means having African descendants that are a group of rarely heard of people with their own unique twists to aspects that make up an ethnicity or race. I knew that just the terms “Black Hispanic,” or “Garifuna” did not fully encompass who I am and so for a while people saw me as the dark skinned girl who spoke fluent spanish. I knew I was much more than that. Towards the end of high school, I was introduced to the term “Afro- Latino(a).” For the first time in my life, I found a word to fully categorize myself without feeling like I was leaving a part of my identity out. For the first time, I felt like I had a complete understanding of who I was and I wanted to share it with others and educate people that you can truly come from any ethnicity or race despite your skin color. Skin color is just a characteristic but the language, the dances, food, traditions, cultures etc. is truly what connects you to your ancestors. There is a way for you to identify all of these things in one if you really want to come to par with who you are. I no longer had to explain to people why I was dark but spoke Spanish. I no longer had to hear things like “ I didn’t think dark skins could speak Spanish,” or “Oh my God you speak Spanish, but wait... you’re dark, I thought you were Black,” or “ Your last name is Cacho? What are you? I thought you were Black.” If I had a …show more content…
Old, worn down houses, sandy roads, poverty, one common school, isolation, lack of food and clean water, no electricity, the village of San Jose de la Punta is poor but slowly advancing. Yet, through all of the disadvantages there is fulfillment in embracing where the blood that runs through your body passed down from generations and generations comes from. You learn to live in conditions that help you understand the value of digging deep into your roots and learning to find yourself and appreciate where you came from and where you are headed. This village, home to my dad, is a place where you learn to to live with many imperfections but still somehow manage to find perfection. With so little to offer, I managed to feel more like myself than I have ever felt before. Within the sun, the moon, the stars, there is just a sense of tranquility and more value in the true definition of home, life, finding oneself, and appreciation, for the blessing of being brought into this world along with the privilege of being born an American citizen. This village has shown me the many struggles that my ancestors faced to be able to give me the opportunity to live a life better than theirs without ever forgetting where I come from. Garifuna people are very likely to be unheard of. Hence, why a lot of people haven’t been exposed to people of darker skin complexions
Honduras was a part of the “Guatemala Kingdom” of provinces and was mainly settled by the Spanish for silver mining purposes. The northern part however was more resistant to Spanish conquest and was allied by Europeans and Jamaica. Honduras became independent from Spain in 1821 before becoming a member of the United Provinces of Central America. Comayagua was the capital at the time until 1880, it was then transferred to the city of Tegucigalpa. The social power in the book revolves around the government restricted many people ability to make a steady living and there is no way to move up in social classes.
In America today, there is a large and diverse African-American population. Within this population, there are several ethnic groups. The other ethnic group similar to Afro-Americans is Dominicans. Not only are they both minorities, but they also look similar as well. Both Dominicans and Afro-Americans are originally from Africa, but their slave masters separated them into two different cultures. African-Americans was African slaves of Americans, and Dominicans were African slaves of the Spanish. Hevesi of the New York Times says, "Dominican and Afro-Americans culture was formed from one ethnicity, Africans" (Hevesi 86). As a person of these two ethnic groups, I have two perceptions of my dual ethnicity. Among Afro-Americans’ and Dominicans’ culture, language, history and values, there are large differences, but there are also several similarities. I will compare and contrast these two ethnic groups which are within me.
In this book, the lives of two wealthy American citizens and two illegal immigrants collide. Delaney and Kyra were whites living in a pleasurable home, with the constant worry that Mexicans would disturb their peaceful, gated community. Candido and America, on the other hand, came to America to seek job opportunities and a home but ended up camping in a canyon, struggling even for the cheapest form of life. They were prevented from any kind of opportunities because they were Mexicans. The differences between the skin colors of these two couples created the huge gap between the two races.
The novel Brown Girl, Brownstones is a fiction story that is about an immigrant family from the Caribbean country of Barbados and their struggles in America. The story is set in New York during the time between The Great Depression and also World War II and is told in a third person point of view so that the reader, being us, understands different components of the story. The story’s main character is a girl named Selina Boyce and the story is told through the stages of her life from when she was around ten years old up to when she was around her early twenties. Immigration, specifically race, played a large factor in the story, with race hindering opportunity, and different characters coping with race in different ways. (Thesis statement)
These words immediately make the following paragraphs and pieces of insight feel more real to the reader. It is often easy for individuals to dissociate themselves from factual representations of history since they seem as if they are simply stories of a time long since passed. Yet, modern issues no matter how far their roots reach into the past enlist a different response. Hearing the stories of people who currently are or recently were victims of continuing racism is strikingly raw and provoking. Raquel Aristilde de Valdez, a half Dominican half Haitian woman, shows how racism is not simply a social issue. The people have made her feel as if she does not belong, and the government has wrongfully taken away her legal representation of belonging. The legal issue of her validity as a Dominican was resolved, yet it can be inferred that the issues that come with loosing that belonging cannot be fixed as easily. In a similar situation, Cherlina Castillo Pierre found her heritage to mean more than her personal worth. Despite Pierre’s athletic talents in soccer she’s restricted from her rightful chance to play for her birth-countries team simply because of a prejudice. An individual is more than a birth certificate yet, in a country that sees the word Haitian analogous to insignificance, thats all Cherlina Castillo Pierre became. Despite the discouraging stories of natural born
The Garifuna Language Day by day the world becomes more interconnected, we talk to people from other countries in languages that usually aren't our own, multi linguists now outnumber mono linguists and around 25% of the world's countries recognise two or more languages as official (see Pearson). English has become the Lingua Franca of the world, and native languages are starting to disappear. The fewer the number of speakers, the quicker. One language that seems to have reversed the trend is the Garifuna language, indigenous to the Caribbean coasts of Honduras, Guatemala and Belize. Unique in the sense that, until recently, unlike other native languages in the Caribbean Area, it did not form a creole.
As a social group of African descent, they have common historical experiences, with a collective ancestry, a shared culture, which is what gives them a sense of uniqueness. But then again, this is a culture that, according to its geography and history, continues to develop features and builds their future in a social framework that not only derivative from the past, but, beyond the differences, that clearly perceived them as the "other". The Garifuna acquired a significant reputation in the current context of recognition of cultural diversity. They have played an important role in the politics of visibility of people of African descent via the strengthening of ethno-racial categorizations. This role has involved, with peculiarities in each country, the official characterization as 'ethnic group', incorporating their cultural expressions as part of national identity, and recognition of their culture and intangible cultural universal heritage of humanity. Supported by a discourse on their Carib-Arawak roots and permanence of some of their cultural expressions, the Garifuna have been identified and have asserted themselves at certain times in its history the status of indigenous people. Currently, the process of political mobilization of the Garifuna articulates a discourse of inclusion in national societies, while proclaiming their transnational identity as Garifuna and members of the diaspora of African Descent in the Americas. This feature differentiates them from other processes of identity claiming their ethno-racial basis in the Americas, such as indigenous peoples and other African Descent. These dynamics including the Garifuna coexist and interact with other factors, are also based on a structural racial system that has in its roots in the colonial traces that maintain forms of social exclusion and discrimination against these
Martínez, Elizabeth Sutherland. 1998. De Colores Means all of us: Latina Views for a Multi-Colored Century. U.S.: South End Press.
A rich and diverse culture is what Guatemala is known for. It’s a mixture of the Spanish that conquered it and the indigenous people. Before it was conquered in the 16th century, it had a thriving people called the Mayans. The Mayan civilization is split into three different time periods called the Preclassic period, the Classic period, and the Postclassic period. The Preclassic period consisted mostly of small villages of farmers. The Classic period is when the Mayans were at the height of their civilization. Many sites in Guatemala show just how thriving these people were. It lasted until 900 AD when it all of the sudden collapsed. Many of the cities were abandoned and many were killed off by a drought. The Postclassic period brought on many new cities, but none had the greatness of those of the Classic period. This period lasted until the Spanish conquered them beginning in 1915.
My cultural identity, is Haitian American. My parents come from a country of beautiful landscape and valleys of the hidden treasures of knowledge, diverse people, and rustic towns. My parents walked up steep plateaus for water, laid in grassy plains for peace, and dive into the sea for cooling in Haiti’s humid heat. Although, I come from a culture of deep history, the first country to gain independence in the result of a successful slave rebellion, my parents knew the plague of suffering Haiti’s battle with will not recover through the poverty, unemployment, and illiteracy. As Haiti fought through its demons, my parents fought to provide plentiful opportunity for their family and immigrated to the United States of America.
In other words, the rich Puerto Ricans began to realize that because of their skin color, which was often darker than what was accepted as white, would force them to be fitted to the same stereotype as the non-whites in the mainland United States, and sought for a way to preserve their identity. In Puerto Rico, where the Spanish invasion caused a racial mixing of the island’s inhabitants, ...
people of different ethnicities. Such harm is observed in the history of North America when the Europeans were establishing settlements on the North American continent. Because of European expansion on the North American continent, the first nations already established on the continent were forced to leave their homes by the Europeans, violating the rights and freedoms of the first nations and targeting them with discrimination; furthermore, in the history of the United States of America, dark skinned individuals were used as slaves for manual labour and were stripped of their rights and freedoms by the Americans because of the racist attitudes that were present in America. Although racist and prejudice attitudes have weakened over the decades, they persist in modern societies. To examine a modern perspective of prejudice and racism, Wayson Choy’s “I’m a Banana and Proud of it” and Drew Hayden Taylor’s “Pretty Like a White Boy: The Adventures of a Blue-Eye Ojibway” both address the issues of prejudice and racism; however, the authors extend each others thoughts about the issues because of their different definitions, perspectives, experiences and realities.
It has been centuries since slavery ended across Latin America yet racial issues continue to plague these countries. Since manumission, the concept of race has evolved through the meaning societies have given it. Countries have used and continue to use the idea of race as a way to stratify their societies through racial hierarchies. Each country has taken on its own definition of race in terms of blackness, whiteness, and everything in between. These types of labels perpetuate racism and subject People of Color to discrimination, marginalization, and inequalities across society. It is crucial to identify the origins of race and racism, how the term has evolved, and the role race plays in societies across the Latin American countries, especially
I can personally resonate with Anzaldua is trying to convey to her audience. Although I identify as heterosexual Latino male Anzaldua sums it perfectly, in the following quote. "If you're a person of color, those expectations take on more pronounced nuances due to the traumas of racism and colonization"(65
Originally racial designators, the terms mestizo and Indian have lost almost all of their previous racial connotation and are now used entirely to designate cultural groups. Historically, the term mestizo described someone with mixed European and indigenous heritage. Mestizos occupied a middle social stratum between whites and pure-blooded indigenous people (see Socieconomic Structures, ch. 1). Whites themselves were divided into criollo (those born in the New World) and peninsular (those born in Spain) subgroups. In contemporary usage, however, the word mestizo refers to anyone who has adopted Mexican Hispanic culture. Seen in this cultural context, both those with a solely European background and those with a mixed European-indigenous background are automatically referred to as