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  • Black and Indigenous: Garifuna Activism and Consumer Culture in Honduras
  • Sarah England
Black and Indigenous: Garifuna Activism and Consumer Culture in Honduras. By Mark Anderson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Pp. viii, 290. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. $25.00 paper.

In scholarship on race in the Americas it has often been argued that, while there are several ethnic groups that could be classified as Afro-Indigenous, they have largely remained invisible or have been forced to emphasize one aspect of their hyphenated identity over the other as a result of the common perception that black and indigenous are mutually exclusive ethno-racial categories. Indigeneity in the Americas has long had the connotation of tradition, racial purity, cultural stasis, rootedness, and authenticity, whereas blackness has had the connotation of acculturation, diaspora, and inauthenticity. In this book, Mark Anderson demonstrates how this perception of mutual exclusivity has often been used by scholars to make sense of Garifuna culture and identity and by state and transnational political actors to create policy related to Garifuna rights. He also shows that in spite of this attempt to categorize Garifuna as either indigenous or black, Garifuna themselves have not completely given over to this binary model of ethno-racial identity but have instead articulated and practiced both an activist and everyday identity politics that he calls “black indigeneity.” This form of identity emphasizes African descent, a history of being discriminated against as blacks in Honduras, and identification and membership in the African diaspora, while also recognizing structural similarities with indigenous peoples who have suffered a long history of land encroachment, discrimination as a people with a non-Hispanic language and culture, and economic exploitation as a folkloric tourist attraction. While this hybrid identity has given Garifuna activists the ability to join other members of the African diaspora in anti-racist struggles in one moment, and claim rights to land, bilingual education, and so forth as an autochthonous peoples in another moment, it has also come with certain tensions because these identities have different political and cultural connotations that both open spaces and place limitations on demands that Garifuna activists can make within current multicultural politics.

Anderson bases his ethnographic study in the Garifuna village of Sambo Creek, and supplements his analysis with intensive participation with the two main Garifuna national level organizations, OFRANEH and ODECO, in order to show how the politics of black indigenity works in everyday social interaction and among activists. He deftly shows how black indigeneity does not arise out of the simple fact that Garifuna are Afro-Indigenous, but rather as a response to a complex history of the way that Garifuna have been racialized and folklorized by the Honduran state, their experience with U. S. notions of blackness through their transnational migration to New York City, and through their negotiation of the local and the international politics of multiculturalism and ethnic rights. Like most Central American nations, Honduras has a racial politics of indo-hispanic mestizaje. Within this blacks have been seen as outside of the Spanish-indigenous racial continuum, at best placing them outside of the national identity, at worst constructing them as racially contaminating. By tracing the history of Garifuna activism from the 1920s to the present, Anderson shows how Garifuna have fought against this construction of blackness [End Page 297] through anti-racism campaigns, but have also distanced themselves from other blacks, positioning themselves as blacks who were never slaves, and who have a more authentic African culture. This notion of being autochthonous blacks places them squarely within the current moment of multiculturalism in Honduras in which ethnic groups have increasingly gained space to demand rights as a “people.” Anderson shows that while both OFRANEH and ODECO have taken advantage of this space to push for Garifuna rights, and both use the notion of black indigeneity, OFRANEH takes a more critical stance on neoliberal politics and how it promotes structural racism, while ODECO has placed more emphasis on fighting against ideological racism. He shows that while this is a somewhat different emphasis, their goals for economic and cultural empowerment are the same. He also demonstrates that in everyday articulations of identity, Garifuna negotiate between black...

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