The Ends of Paradise: Race, Extraction, and the Struggle for Black Life in Honduras

In 1635, two Spanish ships carrying enslaved Africans from many different ethnic and linguistic communities wrecked in the Lesser Antilles. These newly freed people intermarried with the Indigenous Caribs, creating a new ethnic and cultural group that now refers to itself as the Garifuna. In 1797, the British, who had won the island of Saint Vincent from the French through the Treaty of Paris in 1763, deported approximately 5,000 Garifuna to the island of Roatán, off the coast of Honduras. In time, the Garifuna left the island and set up farming and fishing communities along the Caribbean coast from Belize to Nicaragua. In The Ends of Paradise: Race, Extraction, and the Struggle for Black Life in Honduras, Christopher A. Loperena sketches this history and goes on to examine how economic development initiatives systematically dispossess the Garifuna of their ancestral land, and how these communities struggle to defend that land and their way of being.Loperena is a cultural anthropologist who worked for over 15 years with the Garifuna communities of Honduras. That work has yielded at least two concrete contributions. The first was his expert witness testimony before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) in Garifuna Community of Triunfo de la Cruz and Its Members v. Honduras. The second is the monograph under review here, which he situates in relation to books by Nancie González and Mark Anderson and within the fields of Black and Indigenous studies.The Ends of Paradise is comprised of five chapters, plus an introduction and a conclusion. Its method is politically committed ethnography. The introduction, “Imagining Black Indigenous Futures,” establishes the Garifuna as both Black and Indigenous, and lays out the conceptual tools deployed throughout the book. Chapters 1 and 2 describe the history of extractivism in Honduras and how tourism has been recast as sustainable development, marketing the land of the Garifuna as available for developers and pleasure-seekers and the community's culture as available to the tourist's gaze. Chapter 3 examines the divisions that this model of tourism has created within the Garifuna community of Triunfo, pitting empresarios against defensores de la tierra, entrepreneurs against land defenders. Chapter 4 delves into the crucial role of women in the effort to rescue (recuperar) land that was once communally held by the Garifuna but has since been slated for incorporation into a beachside resort. Chapter 5 revolves around the 2014 legal case before the IACHR, where the Honduran state argued “that the Garifuna community Triunfo de la Cruz does not constitute an indigenous or original people” (quoted on p. 150). The conclusion recalls the murder of Berta Cáceres in 2016 to place the plight of the Garifuna within the larger frame of violence against environmental activists in Honduras and theorizes the struggles of Garifuna land defenders as premised on a notion of freedom that “ensures collective survival” (p. 174).Whereas earlier scholars, and the community itself, have shown how the Garifuna are both Black and Indigenous, Loperena tracks how various actors—from the Honduran state to local mayors, from the World Bank to entrepreneurs in Tela—have denied the Indigeneity of the Garifuna, casting them as solely “Afro-descendant,” and the way that this excision has become a precondition for destination tourism. He understands this discursive operation to be an offshoot of the nationalist whitening project of mestizaje, a process of racial mixing between Spanish colonists and Indigenous peoples that, in its early twentieth-century formulation, created a heartier new mestizo race. Loperena argues that the ideology of Honduras as a mestizo nation is being used to dispossess the Garifuna of their land, opening their territory to non-Black settlers and various extractive industries, from tourism to palm oil plantations.Over the course of the book, “the mestizo elite” comes to function as the Bad against which the Good are fighting (p. 155). But the situation is more complicated than that. At one point, Miriam Miranda, the president of a Black fraternal organization, pleads with non-Garifuna: “They question why we are fighting for our rights if we've only been here for two-hundred-plus years, when the ones who control this country haven't even been here for one hundred years, and no one calls them foreigners!” (quoted on p. 155). Miranda is, Loperena acknowledges, casting the descendants of Syrian, Palestinian, and Lebanese Christian immigrants as “the ones who control this country.” Loperena lumps this group in with “the mestizo elite” and then suggests that the term mestizo should be understood “as an aspirational racial category that is tethered to capital but always exclusive of Blackness” (p. 157). If it is true that Arab Christians are now accepted as indigenous to Honduras (and Miranda suggests that it's not), then that is a very recent phenomenon that must be explained.That aside, The Ends of Paradise is a powerful history of the present, one that captures and participates in the struggle of a Black Indigenous people to maintain a degree of economic and cultural autonomy in the face of development projects that are marketed as sustainable ecotourism.

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