Black Indigenous History Beyond Black Panther: Pablo José López Oro on Garifuna New Yorkers

It’s February 2016 at a music center in the Bronx, and Pablo José López Oro, who is currently a Smith professor of Africana Studies, attentively gazes at a group of Garifuna folks rhythmically swaying across the stage. The beat of militant drums echoes across the room as the dancers, dressed in a traditional attire that predates their existence, swing their hips and fervently chant in their native Garifuna language rooted in Carib-Arawak syntax — Carib-Arawak Indians, they claim, are their ancestral origins. 

These dancers are inviting the immaterial presence of ancestors who are usually not recognized in popular understandings of Black communities. Adamantly communicating ancestral descendance from both the Carib-Arawak and enslaved West Africans of St. Vincent in the Caribbean, the dancers momentarily pause their tireless movement to specifically speak directly to their Carib-Arawak ancestors in their indigenous tongue. 

An audience member suddenly interrupts the performance to ask a curious question:

“How do we know this is really true?”

Tania Molina, host of the dance workshop and Garifuna activist in the city, mulls over the inquiry for a moment and calmly responds:

“It doesn’t matter if it’s true.”

López Oro takes in the scene. He’s not just an observer: he’s a professor studying the audience member’s common doubt that people like the Garifuna, who are typically racialized as Black in the U.S., have ancestry that is truly indigenous to the Américas. 

López Oro, a third-generation Brooklynite Garifuna of Honduran descent, is working on a book manuscript about Garifuna New Yorkers. It was at this moment where he said he had a moment of realization regarding his project: Garifuna folks in the city aren’t concerned about the actual authenticity of their native ancestry — that’s not the point of their public claims to Carib-Arawak lineage. They’re more interested in the political project behind declaring their simultaneous Blackness and Indigeneity in an environment that struggles to recognize that Black people can also be Indigenous.

“The very idea that Blackness is a galaxy shouldn’t be foreign,” López Oro notes. “We want to be able to put everything into a box, but Blackness can’t be put into a box. Indigeneity can’t be put into a box.”

The Garifuna make their claim to indigeneity in a country where requirements for native citizenship are hotly debated. Contrary to what Tania Molina said to that audience member, many Native tribes would think it does matter if the Garifuna’s indigenous ancestry is true. Having the evidence to back up claims to an individual’s indigeneity has been and still is important to some tribes, who have varying membership requirements. 

Today, some tribes in the U.S. still use blood quantum, a system initially imposed by the federal government that determines native citizenship by the percentage of “native blood” one has, writes Kat Chow on NPR. Others determine citizenship through lineal descent, granting admission to those whose ancestors were enrolled in the tribe. López Oro finds that the Garifuna aren’t interested in proving their indigeneity in either of these fashions.

His upcoming manuscript currently entitled “Indigenous Blackness in the Américas: The Queer Politics of Self-Making, Garifuna NY” seeks to bring attention to these Garifuna New Yorkers’ assertions of both their Indigeneity and Blackness, calling readers to question normative ideas of race. 

“We continue to be in a place where we’re bound to colonial logics around Blackness and Indigeneity,” he said. “Colonial logics tell us that African and Indigenous peoples are compartmentalized, even though we know there’s a history of Black and Indigenous peoples always coming together to fight for each other’s freedom.”

We get a fantastical version of this history in Ryan Coogler’s newly released Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, which introduces a new community: the underwater kingdom of Talokan, an indigenous MesoAmerican peoples who, after Spanish colonizers brought disease to them, ingested a healing plant that morphed them into mermaid-like beings — consequently, they fled to the waters. The film follows Talokan’s conflict with Wakanda over the highly valued vibranium, as well as their journey towards co-kingdom solidarity. 

As kingdoms who share traumatic experiences with colonial powers, their relationship mirrors the many real-life Black and Indigenous bonds that López Oro and others online say many aren’t aware of. The Garifuna claim to be a product of such bonds, though many tell them otherwise.

In a country that is persistent in reminding Black folks that they can only be Black, López Oro finds the exploration of Black Indigeneity to be of dire importance — especially in New York City, where 200,000 Garifuna Americans reside, making it the largest Garifuna population in the U.S.

New York and other U.S. cities are the most recent destinations for Garifuna immigrants, who have historically migrated to the Bay Islands of Honduras and the Caribbean coastal regions of mainland Central America. The Garifuna say their story begins in St.Vincent, where enslaved ship-wrecked West Africans first made contact with varying native tribes that came to be known as “Caribs” and “Arawaks.” 

Krystal D’Costa, an anthropologist and writer, writes in “Scientific American” that after Europeans initially interacted with the natives, many of the Indigenous peoples were gradually “eradicated by disease, starvation, and the hardships of the work they were forced to do.” Looking for a solution, Europeans of the mid-16th century turned to the import of enslaved Africans for an alternative source of labor.

According to cultural theorist Pablo José Ramirez in “Garifuna Communities: Exiled and Anti-Colonial Resilience,” some enslaved West Africans of a sunken slave ship on the coast of St.Vincent escaped captivity and were received by Indigenous Arawaks. The Arawaks at first subjugated the Africans, Ramirez says, before some finally formed alliances with them. Products of this Indigenous-African mixture were called “Black Caribs,” forming a distinct ethnic identity.

After a 40-year war of resistance, in 1797 the Black Caribs in St. Vincent were exiled by British colonial powers to Honduras, where they would eventually come to understand themselves as Garifuna, explains Minority Rights Group International. It’s safe to say that Garifuna New Yorkers are upholding this tradition of fighting for public awareness of their unique community, though this time in the distinct racial environment of the U.S. — and López Oro is on the academic frontlines of this struggle.

There’s something “queer,” López Oro said, about the way Garifuna folks unsettle conventional divisions between identities. Queer: not in the strict sense of sexuality or gender, but instead building on scholar Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s idea of queerness as a practice of resisting invented boundaries between identities.

“I’m thinking of queerness as not simply same-sex loving and same-sex desiring, but also thinking about how queerness, as a praxis of resistance to structures of normative violence, helps us understand a Black, Indigenous community that negotiates its Blackness, Indigeneity, and Latinidad in the space of New York,” he explained. 

Just as a non-binary person is queer in the sense that they don’t fit into categorized boxes of cis-genderedness, López Oro, who identifies as queer, thinks a Garifuna New Yorker “queers” restrictive ideas of race in the U.S. They refuse to accept standard distinctions between Blackness, Indigeneity, and Latinx identity. 

Queerness isn’t only present in López Oro’s work as a way of describing resistance — Queer, LGBTQ folks are also literally at the forefront of Garifuna political movements. López Oro has found that they usually lead the protests, organizations, and events that fight for the public recognition of Garifuna’s coexisting Blackness and Indigeneity. With this in mind, he’s spent a lot of time with LGBTQ Garifuna New Yorkers, both in public spaces and in private, intimate spaces, such as peoples’ homes.

It’s important to remember that conceptions of indigeneity in Latin America are very different from those in North America, said Sarah England, professor and author of the 2006 “Afro-Central Americans in New York City: Garifuna Tales of Transnational Movements in Racialized Space.” She finds that the Garifuna in Latin America define their indigeneity in ways contrary to values of blood quantum and lineal descent, unlike the many tribes in the U.S.

“In Latin America indigenous peoples have not been called upon to prove their indigeneity on an individual level, which is what blood quantum and lineal descent suggests, but rather more as a collective,” England said. “Garifuna are demanding rights as an indigenous peoples as a collective and their identity as indigenous is not about blood but more about culture and history.”

López Oro suggested that Garifuna New Yorkers proclaim their indigeneity in a very similar way, seeming to have maintained generational understandings of their identity even throughout different locations. 

On the contrary, while conducting research in the 1990s, England found that the Garifuna in New York “were not talking about themselves as indigenous at all” as the Garifuna in Latin America do. She said that they instead primarily consider themselves Afro-Latinx, Honduran, or Black. England does however acknowledge that Garifuna New Yorkers’ self-perceptions could have changed since the 90s.

López Oro remains committed to the idea that Garifuna New Yorkers strongly claim their indigeneity, understanding it in terms of a collective understanding of a shared past and culture. 

Considering how Garifuna New Yorkers unsettle these popular ideas of indigeneity in the U.S., López Oro ultimately hopes his upcoming manuscript brings readers to consider larger questions: What even is Indigeneity? What exactly is Blackness? He wants us to bring more complexity to these categories, making room for unique groups like Garifuna New Yorkers.