A Modern Paradise

Blackness and Mestizaje

Racialization, the production of social hierarchies and power inequities that assign both privilege and punishment along racial and cultural lines, is relevant to the examination of international development processes and narratives of modernization and progress (Appelbaum, Macpherson, and Rosemblatt, 2003; Bonnett and Nayak, 2003; Escobar, 1995; Fanon, 1967; Kothari, 2006; Spurr, 1993). Development narratives discursively reproduce the global South as “different,” “inferior,” and “backward” (Chakrabarty, 2000; Escobar, 1995; Ferguson, 1994; Power, 2003; Radcliffe, 2007), and in Latin America racialized hierarchies affect development practices (e.g., agrarian reform, biodiversity conservation, land titling programs, water and sanitation) with jarring consequences for the region’s indigenous and Afro-descendant populations.

Garifuna displacement in Tornabé occurs in spite of multicultural constitutional reforms. Over the past 15 years, the collective positioning of indigenous and Afro-descendant communities vis-à-vis Latin American states has improved with state-led democratization. In addition, pressure on the state from indigenous and Afro-descendant social movements has empowered communities in their struggles against increasing poverty, land-tenure insecurity, encroachments by outsiders, and exclusion from employment, health care, and education (Dixon and Burdick, 2012; Hooker, 2008; Rahier, 2012; Sánchez, 2008). For Honduras, multicultural reforms brought recognition of the multiethnic and multicultural composition of the country, collective rights to bilingual education for indigenous and Afro-descendant Hondurans, and ratification of the ILO’s Convention 169 and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Among the development improvements is the Intersectoral Commission for the Titling, Extension, Recovery, and Protection of the Lands of the Garifuna and Miskito Communities of Honduras, which aims to guarantee Miskito and Garifuna collective property rights. Its protections extend to “those that constitute their functional habitat and are regarded as ancestral [lands] under the ILO Convention No. 169” (ILO, 1989; República de Honduras, 2001).

In Latin America state distribution of collective property titles has tended to benefit the collective land tenure regimes of indigenous peoples more than those of Afro-descendants (Hooker, 2005; Walsh, 2012). As Catherine Walsh (2012: 17) puts it, “It has been indigenous peoples, not African descendants, who have set the frame and the claim—both in the past and the present—for cultural-ancestral difference, collective identity, and social, cultural, and territorial rights.” In state and elite imaginings, indigenous people have “culture” and blacks do not (Hooker, 2008; Ngweno, 2007). When Afro-descendant populations have succeeded in making land claims, their success has often been explained in terms of their employment of “indigenous-like” narratives and strategies (Anderson, 2007; Hooker, 2005; Ngweno, 2007). The treatment of the Garifuna as “indigenous-like” in the constitution does not, however, affect the racialized imaginaries that represent the Garifuna (despite the fact that they were present before the consolidation of the nation-state) as “upstarts” and “foreigners” whose presence on the North Coast is made acceptable only by their capacity for labor in the cause of national development.

Garifuna subjectivity is in part shaped by regional racial hierarchies. In Latin America, race is a prominent aspect of the distribution of rights and resources (Andolina, Radcliffe, and Laurie, 2005; Appelbaum, Macpherson, and Rosemblatt, 2003; Hooker, 2008; Mollett, 2006; 2011; Sundberg, 2008; Warren, 2001). Contemporary racial hierarchies are the result of the persistence of the notion of mestizaje, blood and cultural mixing, as the path to a homogeneous nationalism and elevated global status. Inherent in mestizaje is the idealization of whiteness and its achievement through a process of whitening (Bonnett, 2000; Radcliffe and Westwood, 1996; Wade, 2001; Whitten and Torres, 1998). The ideology underpinning mestizaje attempts to obscure its racist exclusion by proclaiming “racial democracy” (Gould, 1998; Rahier, 2003; Wade, 2001). While brown-skinned Indians have always been visible and part of the nation-state in Latin America (Hooker, 2005; Ngweno, 2007; Wade, 1997; 2001), Afro-descendants have been invisible and “othered” (Dixon and Burdick, 2012; Rahier, 2003; Wade, 1997; 2001; Whitten and Torres, 1998). They are rarely imagined as part of the “ideological biologies of national identity” (Rahier, 2012: 1). These naturalized hierarchies reflect a “coloniality of power” grounded in the notion of race (Quijano, 2000). The discourses and practices of whitening place Indians above blacks and view blackness as degenerate (Mollett, 2006; Thompson, 2004; Walsh, 2012). The persistence of mestizaje is visible in the “narratives of white supremacy” (Quijano, 2000; Rahier, 2003: 42) that assume that nonwhites seek whiteness as a path to modernity (Bonnett, 2000; Rahier, 2003).

My analysis tempers the popular notion that neoliberal multiculturalism has replaced mestizaje as a system of governance (Anderson, 2009; Hale, 2005). While certain events fit nicely into this framework (see Brondo and Woods, 2007), whitening remains a key operating logic in the shaping of racial hierarchies in Honduras and sets the stage for neoliberal multiculturalism’s “menacing” impacts on the majority of indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples (Hale, 2002; Radcliffe, 2007). Whiteness is woven into the development of capitalism and modernity. Notwithstanding the recent creation of the Secretariat for the Development of Indigenous and Afro-Honduran Peoples and the Promotion of Policies of Racial Equality, Honduras is known for its racial prejudice. As the UN’s special rapporteur points out (Diere, 2004), “Such prejudice is a legacy of the colonial conquest and the slave holding system, which, by subjugating these peoples and belittling their identities and cultures on the basis of an openly racist ideology, have effectively marginalized them in a lasting way at the political, social, economic, and cultural levels.”

The Garifuna and Displacement-in-Place

The Garifuna village of Tornabé is located on the North Coast in the municipality of Tela in the Department of Atlántida. Tela is almost equally distant from Honduras’s second- and third-largest cities, San Pedro Sula and La Ceiba. It is the municipal center for roughly 100,000 people in both rural and urban areas. (Procorredor 2011). Previously the home of the United Fruit and Tela Railroad Companies, for the past 80 years it has been a sleepy fishing town in which the beach, the climate, and the hospitality of the locals fuel the dream of its becoming a bustling tourist destination.

Tela contains six Garifuna communities: Río Tinto, Miami, Tornabé, San Juan, Triunfo de la Cruz, and La Ensenada. Tornabé (population 4,000), founded in 1885, is 5 kilometers from Tela and is predominantly Garifuna, with ladinos making up fewer than 10 percent of the population. Most villagers speak both Garifuna and Spanish. Subsistence farming and fishing are the main livelihood strategies, but roughly half of the villagers receive remittances from family in the United States or Europe (ODECO staff member, interview, La Ceiba, 2003). Women cultivate crops and sell products in the market in Tela. They also sell to tourists who come to Tornabé for “authentic” ereba (cassava bread), machuca (mashed green plantains served with whitefish or shellfish and coconut broth), or pan de coco (coconut bread). Yuca is a staple among the Garifuna and is central to Garifuna identity on the North Coast. Lily, who owns a small restaurant on the beach, says, “The Garifuna people belong on the coast because that is where we harvest our food. Yuca [laughing], like us, is durable. It grows in sandy soil” (interview, February 1999). Garifuna connections to coastal lands are grounded not only in livelihoods but in practices such as the dugu, an intricate two-week-long ritual that honors the ancestors of a community member who is gravely ill or suffers an affliction untreatable by Western medicine. Under the guidance of a buyai (shaman), worshipers contribute locally produced foods ranging from game to medicinal rum. The freedom and frequency of travel along coastal beaches to and from Tela’s commercial center are key to the control of place, allowing cash-poor villagers to move about between communities without paying the cost of bus transport. Access to the beach also provides cooler travel to Tela than the gravel and dirt roads and is important for the economic activities of Tornabé villagers.

State and municipal development practice threatens the integrity of Garifuna communal land titles. The Honduran constitution guarantees the communal land rights of “ethnic” groups, “particularly in the land and forest in which they are settled” (República de Honduras, 1982: Art. 346). Under the Law of Modernization, indigenous peoples have the right to have lands titled communally (República de Honduras, 1992). With communal title, improvements to land can be bought and sold by individuals within the community, but all land is held by the government and cannot be sold to non-Garifuna. Land use rights depend upon inheritance, residence, and ethnic identity (Mollett, 2000).

Tornabé has a communal title awarded by the National Agrarian Institute in 1992, but in the past 10 years the title has been rendered almost meaningless. First, it was awarded in exchange for 500 hectares of communal agricultural land. The former president of the village government, Tulio Lano, explained: “INA [the institute] told us that these lands [the 500 hectares] would be public land used for infrastructure development [potable water and sanitation services] for the Tela Bay Project and that we, the communities of Tornabé and Miami [a small Garifuna hamlet to the west], would have rights to these services” (interview, 2003). However, in 1994 the community learned that the lands had been sold to Maltwood Development, a Canadian company and a key investor in the Tela Bay Project. According to the former executive director of the environmentalist nongovernmental organization Fundación PROLANSATE (Foundation for the Protection of Lancetilla, Punta Sal, and Texiguat), the Honduran Tourism Institute had an agreement with Maltwood that the state would provide the road, electricity, water, and sewers prior to the development of tourist infrastructure (Mollett, 2000). Between 1994 and 2000, the state was unable to do more than build the road, leaving villagers in Tornabé feeling duped (Garifuna guide at Fundación PROLANSATE, interview, Tela, 2003). Making matters worse, in 1998 Hurricane Mitch flooded villages and caused millions of dollars in damage. With the government declaring a state of emergency and appeals for international assistance, investment in the Tela Bay Project froze (former director of Fundación PROLANSATE, interview, 2003). Because the process of communal land titling in Honduras involves three steps—titling, the removal of nonindigenous people, and the recovery of agricultural lands (Gregoria Flores, interview, 2003)—along with most Garifuna communities Tornabé is awaiting this final step.

Garifuna displacement also occurs through protected-area enclosure. Blanca Jeannette Kawas National Park (or Punta Sal), created in 1994, is on the Ramsar List of Wetlands of International Importance, and it has changed natural-resource access for the Garifuna population at Tela Bay. Tornabé lies within the buffer zone for the park, and this means that land use is limited to subsistence farming and that what were once prime fishing areas are now off-limits. Agricultural and forested lands have also been greatly reduced. Because protected areas in Honduras are state property, park land cannot be used to restore Tornabé’s agricultural lands.

The park is managed by the Fundación PROLANSATE, which is also responsible for the management of the Texiguat wildlife refuge (established in 1987) and Punto Izopo National Park (established in 2000). Private security guards patrol the boundaries of the national park and deny access to villagers despite ancestral rights (World Bank, 2007). Villagers insist that they have not been told the rules and therefore do not know what the state considers a violation, which makes them vulnerable to fines and mistreatment (Mollett, 2000). In the context of protected-area expansion in Tela Bay, the former president of the Organización Fraternal Negra Hondureña (OFRANEH), Gregoria Flores, denounced the state’s expansion of Punta Sal, rejecting “the desires of the powerful elite that have tried to expel us from our territories in Tela Bay . . . directly affecting our capacity to survive as a distinct culture” (El Tiempo, 2004). Roughly 60 percent of Garifuna communities are enclosed within protected areas (Miranda, 2009).

For many years the Fundación PROLANSATE had argued that the Los Micos Beach and Golf Resort project failed to satisfy environmental impact assessment parameters because it would be located too close to the nucleus of the park. In 2006, however, the executive director said (Trucchi, 2010: 7):

Tela has been waiting for this project for more than 30 years. . . . It is necessary to foresee a scenario in which the communities have the best quality of life. What do we gain to have a protected area when we have people living in horrible conditions without food security? It’s here that we have to recognize that people do not live from conservation.

This about-face regarding conservation did not, however, lead to the Garifuna’s being granted access to the nucleus zones of Tela Bay’s protected areas and having their agricultural lands returned. Rather, the foundation gave the green light to the development and expansion of the resort within the buffer zone of Punta Sal.

Unsuitable Land Uses and Suitable Laborers

Contemporary threats to their land tenure security are part of a long-standing postcolonial development narrative that problematizes blackness and truncates economic development among the Garifuna. Antiblack sentiment was already commonplace when the Garifuna arrived in Honduras in 1797 (Anderson, 2009; Mollett, 2006). Along with the Zambo-Miskito, also located on the North Coast, they were considered degenerate (Thompson, 2004; see also Mollett, 2006; 2011). In fact, “mulattoes, zambos, and free Negros all suffered from the combination of illegitimacy and the stigma of slavery. . . . The most ‘vile’ birth of zambos and mulattoes was considered a fact beyond discussion” (Mörner, 1967: 44–45). In 1804, the intendant governor of Honduras, Ramón de Anguiano, commenting on the growing Black Carib presence on the North Coast, argued that this “herd” brought little good to the nation and suggested that “all this coast be left clean of blacks . . . before they multiply further . . . in order to remove them from this Kingdom a people only good for itself [and] useless for our works” (Anguiano, 1946 [1804]:122–124).

However, only 10 years later Spanish officials sought to incorporate the Garifuna, despite their blackness, into the country (Thompson, 2004). According to José de Aycinena (quoted in Thompson, 2004: 23], converting the Black Caribs to Catholicism would improve

the temporal happiness of the whole province of Guatemala, since the Caribs are diligent in agriculture, incessant in the work of cutting exquisite woods, like “fish in the water” for fishing, skillful sailors, and brave soldiers. By virtue of their physical constitution they are strong and robust; for them, these climes are healthy, and they multiply in great numbers—wherefore they are very suitable for populating the immense wastelands of this coast with benefit to the state, and for forming settlements along the roads, which are so sorely lacking.

The harnessing of suitable black labor as a way to redeem blackness was further encouraged by competition over land with the expansion of the global banana trade in the last decades of the nineteenth century (Chambers, 2010; Euraque, 1996; 1998). In Tela, Garifuna farmers lost significant amounts of land to the fruit companies, often through violent confrontations (López García, 1994: 29–33). These displacements were often justified in terms of the alleged inappropriateness of Garifuna crop choices and their small plots. In 1896 Francisco Altschul, a ladino farmer, sought state support to exploit a significant coconut grove in Tela, arguing that the Garifuna, “having planted a very small number of coconut trees, take those of the Nation for their own” (Soluri, 1998: 82). Ladino farmers also maintained that “what the Moreno [Garifuna] calls a crop is only miniscule plantings of yucca, made in the yards of their houses, that barely serve to maintain them” (Soluri, 1998: 81). ² But while they were considered inadequate as farmers, the Garifuna remained an important source of labor for the banana plantations and in the Tela Railway Company (Anderson, 2009; Euraque, 2003).

Complicating matters further, the Honduran government passed immigration laws in 1929 and 1934 that prohibited “the entry of Negroes, coolies, gypsies, and Chinese into the territory of the Republic”(República de Honduras, 1934: Art. 14), While much of the nationalist rhetoric targeted West Indians, blackness was represented as a “threat” to the nation (Mollett, 2006). Despite being targeted by the antiblack rhetoric that treated them as foreign, the Garifuna’s role as “suitable” labor persists and continues to shape Garifuna subjectivity.

Contemporary State Development Logics on the North Coast

The historical trope of the Garifuna as suitable laborers looms large in the context of two development initiatives on the twenty-first-century North Coast: The Honduran Land Administration Program and the Indura project. Debates over North Coast tourism development have sparked Garifuna protest and mobilizations in Honduras since the mid-1990s (Anderson, 2009; El Tiempo, December 20, 1998; Mollett, 2000). The battle over tourism is a battle over land (Paley, 2010)). Garifuna leaders insist that tourism represents, “as always, an invasion of our habitat by the gringo; this time, maybe they aren’t coming armed with rifles, but they are with their devaluation of our ancestral heritage, our culture and our national being” (ODECO, 1999, my translation). Despite these concerns, the state has legalized foreign ownership of coastal lands through a special provision in Article 107. It can declare coastal land a “tourism priority” and then use Law 90/90, which permits foreign ownership of urban land, to open a land market to foreigners (República de Honduras, 1982; 1990; World Bank, 2007). All six Garifuna communities in Tela are classified as “urban.”

In 2004 the Honduran government, seeking debt relief under the International Monetary Fund/World Bank program for heavily indebted poor countries, launched the Honduran Land Administration Program. The central objective of this US$139 million and 12-year World Bank–funded program is to formalize the country’s property rights systems, improve access to land for the poor, reduce the transaction costs of property transfers, and develop a market in land (World Bank, 2008). It considers land titling a way out of poverty (World Bank, 2004). In the development narratives of this program, rural poverty and extralegal land systems chain Honduras to the past (República de Honduras, 2004). In a two-page spread in El Heraldo (January 28, 2003), the former president Ricardo Maduro argues that Honduras has almost 800,000 undemarcated properties and that “such extralegal property arrangements are a sign of an outdated property system.”

He goes on to say that most rural communities live on “extralegal land” and only 30 percent of the country’s estimated 2.6 million parcels are legally registered. Complicating matters for the government is that the property arrangements of roughly 500,000 indigenous and Afro-Honduran people do not conform to the individualized property regimes central to a mainstream model of land tenure modernization (Jansen, 1998; Mollett, 2006). Maduro holds that “land regularization will ensure that ordinary Hondurans may invest in agricultural inputs and sell their surplus as ‘modern’ contributors to the Honduran economy and the wealth of the nation-state” (Secretaría de Gobernación, 2004: 4). This assumes that individual title holders will use their titles as collateral for credit. Thus modernity is linked with individual tenure arrangements and cultural practices.

The Property Law (República de Honduras, 2004) that is a key component of the program is deemed the “most innovative property law in Latin America” (Coma-Cunill and Delion, n.d.). One of its aims is to regularize indigenous and Afro-descendant land claims. However, according to the OFRANEH, it does the opposite, and in 2006 this nongovernmental organization requested an inquiry into the World Bank’s responsibility to consult indigenous communities in the management of the program (Anderson, 2009; World Bank, 2007). OFRANEH acknowledges that the property law provides for indigenous rights over ancestral lands and respects their communal land tenure regimes (República de Honduras, 2004: Arts. 93 and 94). However, at the same time outsiders living in the ancestral territories of indigenous peoples are afforded generous concessions. In fact, the Property Law makes legal the dissolution of communal tenure systems and “[authorizes] the rental of lands to third parties” (World Bank, 2007: 57). With foreign ownership made legal under Law 90/90, OFRANEH fears that “the land titling and procedures under the project will ultimately cause the loss of their rights over parts of their ethnic lands and the demise of collective property held by Garifuna communities in favor of individual property” (World Bank, 2007: x). Thus the development of a market in land encourages encroachment by nonindigenous people, which will only complicate ownership and create conflict. Because the Property Law is a central component of the program, since 2007 the Garifuna have rejected any participation in it (World Bank, 2007).

The dismantling of Garifuna communal territories by tourism and neoliberal land policies are the newest version of a common tale of indigenous dispossession. Communal titles have long been menaced by state and elite geographic imaginaries about what is suitable for North Coast development. According to the former minister of tourism Norman García, Honduras loses millions of dollars each year because of a lack of tourism infrastructure compared with Costa Rica and Guatemala. “The North Coast is a tourist developer’s dream. . . . There are 600 kilometers of uninhabited beach” (La Prensa, October 9, 1998). The claim that the North Coast is uninhabited is of course a familiar fiction of conquest, using a word or phrase such as “empty,” “no-man’s,” or “useless” to justify encroachment by denying the presence of people and their cultural practices on the land. In the face of Garifuna resistance to these claims, Antonio, an official at the Honduran Institute of Tourism says, “It seems that the Garifuna want to live in reservations like red-skinned Indians in the United States. . . . They need to integrate themselves into Honduran society” (La Prensa, December 4, 1998). State officials assume that living communally precludes integration into the wider society. In contrast, the Garifuna in Tela have worked for global banana conglomerates and for centuries have been tied to global networks of trade and migratory labor (England, 2006; Gonzalez, 1988). At the same time they overlook the fact that displacement of Native Americans and Garifuna peoples is central to mainstream development in the Americas.

According to a former executive director of the Fundación PROLANSATE, Raúl Aviva (interview, Tela, 1999), “communal titles are an obstacle to state development plans for North Coast beaches.” As a result, the state “comes and gives money to the community and offers poor people in the community a way out of their misery. . . . They will keep offering poor people a cheap price for their lands until they have sufficient amounts of land in the middle of the community and then chase the rest of us out.” These observations are echoed by Mulonari, a Garifuna fisherman from neighboring Triunfo de la Cruz, who laments that “the government seeks to offer us communal land titles on one hand and on the other to blame us for our misfortune [the fracturing of communal lands] when people are pressured to sell their lands because of coercion and poverty” (interview, 2003). As Escobar (2003: 158) explains in the case of the Afro-Colombian displacement, modernity and development as “spatial cultural projects” require the subjugation of people and territories and demand ecological and cultural change shaped by “rational logocentric order.” Projects of modernity are imbued with hegemonic notions of continual progress, individuation, and homogenization and linkages to capitalism filtered through the nation-state and the governance of daily life (Escobar, 1995; 2003).

The governing practices of Tela take Garifuna displacement for granted. When I asked Carlos, a ladino official and a surveyor in the Tela cadastral office, about Tornabé’s eligibility for the restoration of its agricultural lands, he said, “Those little blacks ² don’t pay taxes” and “live on free land” (interview, Tela, February 1999). When I followed up with an inquiry about whether ladino encroachments would complicate the village’s access to recovering lost lands, his secretary, Angela (also in the room), remarked, “It is just hard to see such hardworking people [ladinos] struggling for land while the blacks run around on their poor women and leave their children without fathers. Hardworking families should have land. They deserve it.” While at first it seemed to me that she had ignored my question, I later understood that she was indeed addressing it. In her opinion ladinos were more deserving of land than the Garifuna. It was clear, furthermore, that the cadastral office ignored international policies that grant the Garifuna people rights to the coast. As Víctor Virgilio, a Garifuna agronomist in Tela, put it,

Our [Garifuna] relationship with the municipality is the same as it has been for many years. We stand in the way of their money. They see us as the enemy because we declare our rights to our ancestral lands. They forget that when we say these lands are “ancestral” we don’t just mean that our ancestors lived and worked here. They died here, are buried here, are still here.

Suitable Labor

While Garifuna land claims engender exclusionary state explanations, narratives of inclusion highlight Garifuna’s labor as a key feature of Honduran “living culture.” The former president Carlos Roberto Reina (quoted in El Heraldo, April 12, 1997), at a state-sponsored bicentennial celebration of the Garifuna’s arrival, said,

Being a people of multiethnic origin, we are prepared to develop, from the natural and geographic advantages of our country, an ecotourism industry in which you, above all, can be effective protagonists, taking advantage of the force of your dances, the originality of your foods, the happiness of your character, and the natural beauty of these islands and all of the Atlantic littoral of Honduras.

The Garifuna and their coastal lands help provide a tourist landscape in the state’s image. While there are certainly villagers who welcome tourism in Tornabé, most Garifuna aspire to jobs beyond being “janitors and waiters in the production of the state’s tourism dream” (Malden nature guide, interview, Tela, 2003). These experiences are not dissimilar to tourism projects elsewhere in the region (Babb, 2010; Castellanos, 2010). While it is too soon to tell what the impact of the promised 5,000 direct and 10,000 indirect jobs in Tela Bay will be, initial reports indicate unequal hiring practices, poor working conditions (low wages and outright lack of payment), and limited jobs for local people (Loperena, 2010; personal communication, 2011).

While the municipality and the state ignore, obscure, and erase Garifuna ancestral rights in the name of national development, ladino and gringo residents on the coast employ local Garifuna ancestral connections to the land as a basis for their own claims to Afro-indigenous space. Garifuna rights are central to the property claim strategies of nonindigenous people in Tornabé. For example, in the early 1990s Rodrigo, a former military official turned jewelry maker from Tegucigalpa, registered four manzanas of land with the municipality. “No one asked me how I acquired the land,” he said. “They just told me how much tax I owed, I paid it, and they gave me a receipt. The land was mine.” He maintains that while he was an army pilot he met a Garifuna fisherman, Tony, who needed transport to Tegucigalpa to get paperwork for a job abroad, and took him to Tegucigalpa and back the next day. As payment Tony gave Rodrigo some land on the edge of Tornabé on the condition that his cousins be allowed to remain living on the property. “It was only right to let them stay,” he said. “Their family had lived there for almost 200 years.” Over the next five years, Rodrigo established a 10-cabaña resort and hired local Garifuna women to cook typical Garifuna cuisine for backpackers and eco-tourists. He boasted of being “almost” Garifuna and, despite having a wife in the city, was proud of his Garifuna girlfriend and his “acceptance” into the community.

In the late 1990s, an American man named Jim arrived in Tela to claim a beachfront plot that he said he had inherited from his father. According to Jim, his father had purchased a plot of land on the edge of Tornabé from the municipality in 1970s and then paid the Boden family (Tony’s cousins) to “watch” it. On learning that his inheritance had been claimed and registered by Rodrigo, Jim submitted a request that the municipality investigate the plot’s history. In the meantime, he built a one-room house on the beachfront side of the property. He then told the Bodens that they had to leave because they had been hired by his father to protect his land and, given Rodrigo’s presence, had failed to do so. The family moved, but only 20 meters, to Rodrigo’s side of the property. Not satisfied, Jim threatened to hire the Tela police to “persuade” the family to leave immediately. In response, Rodrigo contacted his acquaintances in the national military police stationed in Tela. The next day Jim’s home was burnt to the ground. Infuriated, Jim went to confront Rodrigo, and “before he could even open his mouth” Rodrigo shot him. The bullet grazed Jim’s neck, and in the end he fenced the property and moved into Tela, traveling for months with a bodyguard.

In the aftermath of the shooting, Rodrigo maintained that he was the legal holder of the property. In 2003, in the context of renewed enthusiasm for the Indura project, he said, “I am Honduran, and I have papers to this land. But, more important, I am sensitive to the local people’s rights. The Garifuna live on this beach. I am not throwing them out, like my American friend; I accept them, and they accept me. Our friendship is key to my tourism business; we have a partnership and an understanding.” In contrast, Jim is holding out for the tourism boom: “As soon as I can sell this land, I’m out of here. My father paid the Bodens to mind his property. They grew food here and were able to live off this land because of my father. They worked the land in my father’s name.”

Both Rodrigo and Jim claimed this space, and they used their relationships to the Garifuna—as employer, protector, friend, “family,” neighbor—to legitimate their presence on Garifuna land. The conflict between them not only illustrates the devaluation of Garifuna claims to coastal land in the face of capitalist/elite outsiders but shows that Garifuna displacement is a naturalized outcome of elite demands justified by offers of employment and protection. Jim’s and Rodrigo’s claims converge with the creation of a Central American Cancún whereby the Honduran Tourism Institute seeks to mitigate Garifuna dispossession with promises of employment (República de Honduras, 2011).

Conclusion

In Honduras, race and its cultural meanings are embedded in environment-development practice. The state’s commitment to improving the country’s development profile centers upon opening up coastal lands to foreigners. These concessions weaken international and national regulations that ought to protect indigenous and Afro-indigenous people’s lands from encroachment by outsiders. Without completely removing the Garifuna, they undermine their rights to their ancestral lands and play a central role in reproducing racial hierarchies that exalt whiteness and devalue blackness.

Garifuna displacement-in-place reflects the fact that their presence in Tela Bay is part of the landscape sold on the Internet as “attractions” (see http://www.Letsgohonduras.com). In this sense, with dwindling access to land and few economic opportunities, their presence is a form of unpaid labor. Tornabé residents are aware of this paradox. Molana, a Garifuna woman from Tornabé (interview, Tornabé, 1999), said,

We have been asking for territorial protections against invasions for many years. . . . The fact is, we are black people. The only time they are interested in our heritage is when they come for Garifuna cooking or ladino men and gringos want to see Garifuna women dance punta. They want to make us dependent, to serve ladinos from here and white people from rich countries. Garifuna were never slaves, you know? We won’t be slaves now.