Ep. 130 — *Throwback* How Exile From St. Vincent Shaped Garifuna Identity with Dr. Paul López Oro

Today, we reshare our reasoning with Dr. Paul López Oro to trace the Garifuna story across Caribbean history, from St Vincent and the Carib Wars to forced exile in 1797 and the building of communities along the Central America Caribbean coast in Honduras, Belize, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and beyond. Along the way, we wrestle with what it means to be Black and Indigenous at the same time, especially in societies that insist those identities must be separate. 

We dig into the “void in the archive” and why collective memory and oral tradition become more than storytelling. For Garifuna communities, memory shapes political life right now: claims to ancestral territories, fights for land rights, and daily resistance to anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity in nationalist narratives that erase contributions made long before the modern republics were born.  From there, we explore Garifuna Settlement Day as an embodied archive and a public demand for visibility, first in Belize and later in New York City. We connect diaspora routes to labor history in the United States, including pathways through New Orleans and the long work of building community “in the company of” other Black populations.

Dr. Paul Joseph López Oro is an Assistant Professor and Director of Africana Studies at Bryn Mawr College. He is a transdisciplinary Black Studies scholar whose teaching and research interests are on Black Latin American and U.S. Black Latinx social movements, Black diaspora theories and ethnographies, and Black Queer Feminisms. His research interests include Black politics in Latin America, the Caribbean and U.S. AfroLatinidades, Black Latinx LGBTQ movements and performances, and Black transnationalism. He is working on his first book manuscript, Indigenous Blackness: The Queer Politics of Self-Making Garifuna New York, is a transdisciplinary ethnographic study analyzing oral histories, performances, social media, film, literary texts and visual cultures to unearth the political, intellectual, cultural and spiritual genealogies of Garifuna women and subaltern geographies of Garifuna LGBTQ+ folks at the forefront of Garifuna transnational movements in New York City.

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