AIDS Alibis: Sex, Drugs, and Crime in the Americas

3. Folk Surveillance

I f you don't know anyone who has died of it, believing that AIDS can kill you is like believing in ghosts. That's what it seemed like in I990 Belize. Occasionally spliced between 7 00 CLubChristian vaudeville-news shows and old HazeL reruns, televised images of gaunt-faced N orth Americans suffering with AIDS beamed into living rooms up and down the Caribbean coast. A few local people had experienced the confusing array of AIDs-related symptoms, but they did not fit the persistent and inaccurate stereotype linking HIV exclusively to gay white men. In this time and place, AIDS had yet to become a social fact. Perhaps, by some miracle, it never would. The Cultural Locale Belize is an ethnically and linguistically diverse nation that borders a long string of coral reef on the Central American coast of the Caribbean Sea (part ofthe same formation upon which the sailboat Meriah met her end) . British Honduras, once a superior refuge for pirates and a source of tropical hardwoods, gained its independence and became Belize in I981. Blacks are in the majority, dominating the upper echelons of business and government while also filling the poorest ranks. Most blacks are English-speaking Creoles, an ethnic identification that blurs black-white racial distinctions. A minority are Garifuna, descendants of Africans and Arawak Indians who speak 46 Copyrighted Material FOLK SURVEILLANCE . their own language as well as English. Living peacefully with the Creoles and Garifuna are the Kekchi, Mopan, and Yucatec Mayan Indians, each with their own language. There are also East Indians whose ancestors were brought from India by the British to work in the fields; a population of Chinese that had been growing rapidly when I was there, with the families of businessmen and women leaving Hong Kong. There are so many Spanish-speaking immigrants from the surrounding nations of Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras, and El Salvador, that some Belizeans had begun to worry about the weakening hold of English as the national language. There are still a lot of British of one sort or another who continue to profit from their investments , and plenty of folks from the United States, whose dollar has become the official national currency. There are almost as many religions as there are ethnic identities. People relate in many different ways to the Catholic Church, which is not only the dominant religious institution, but a moral and economic force influencing secular institutions such as education and health. Ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity combine to make Belizean identity rich and dynamic . As many folks pointed out to me, sexual culture operates in the mix. There is too much interethnic dating going on to use ethnicity as a marker for tracing HIV transmission risk. Tourism and agriculture are the two major engines of development , the former capitalizing on Belize's beautiful ocean and forest treasures, the latter on the sun, land, fresh water, and cheap labor. Both industries are susceptible to epidemiological analysis: tourism because it brings in sexually active persons from epidemic epicenters such as New York and Los Angeles and because it actively promotes sexual interaction as a central element in the tropical paradise vacation ; agriculture because it depends directly on male migrant laborers and indirectly on female prostitutes, most of whom, I suspect, do not receive health and education benefits conducive to HIV risk reduction. Belize City, located where the dirty mouth of the Belize River 47 Copyrighted Material ~ o ::a :II:: .. " GUATEMALA scale 1:800,000 Copyrighted Material .. ~" 1 I I • \ '- ~ :...., '..... r . :i .. FOLK SURVEILLANCE . empties into the sea, is the biggest city in this nation of about two hundred thousand people. 1990 was the year ofthe city's first elevator. But neither the modern conveniences offered by an optimistic tourist industry nor the well-kept white balustrades reminiscent of British empire hid the poverty from anyone who cared to look. Just about all the homes in the city had water and electricity, but walk a couple of miles in any direction away from a hotel and you would find a neighborhood that hauled away its sewage in plastic buckets. Many were dumped directly in the open waterways lining the streets. Scrubbing their houses spotless and covering their flower-printed furniture in plastic, homemakers were dismayed by ever-present flies. When I wasn't in Belize City, most of my time was spent in Punta Gorda, a small town of about two...