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Facing the Music by Josh Jackson
A young Garífuna woman dances to traditional punta music. AIDS is a growing threat to these members of Honduras' largest minority. (Photo ©Nestor Salavarría & ODECO) |
The Garífuna fishing villages that dot Honduras' northern seacoast have long been known for their unique and rich Afro-Caribbean culture. Now these same communities face a new, less welcome distinction: having the highest incidence of HIV/AIDS in the country. The struggle to cope with the AIDS epidemic-and to prevent it from getting worse-is beginning to move these proud African-Amerindian descendants from collective denial to acceptance and action.
Some four dozen people have gathered for an AIDS awareness meeting in the Garífuna community of Limón, on the northern coast of Honduras. Dr. Delfi Valentín, a local physician, begins her class by asking the assembly--teenage girls, tough-looking young men, and concerned mothers--who has family living in New York.
More than half raise their hands.
Valentín follows with another question. Who in the class has family members with AIDS or has lost family to the disease?
Almost the same number of hands go up. Valentín confides later to a visitor that the show of hands would probably have been even greater if not for the stigma associated with AIDS.
Among a people who initially reacted to the presence of HIV/AIDS in their communities with almost universal denial, Valentín's community AIDS meetings are something of a triumph. They suggest that slowly but surely, the Garífuna are facing a truth that is both sad and alarming: the cumulative rate of AIDS cases among these descendants of Africans and Amerindians is nearly 15 times the national rate. More than 8 percent of adult Garífuna test positive for HIV, four times higher than the national average. "This epidemic is decimating their population," says Dr. Nestor Salavarría, codirector of a local AIDS prevention project.
Dr. Nestor Salavarría talks with members of the local AIDS awareness soccer team. While some Garífuna are still trying to come to terms with the AIDS crisis, others are joining efforts to try to stem the epidemic's tide. (Photo ©Josh Jackson) |
The good news is that more and more Garífuna and their allies are today trying to do something about the problem.
Some 100,000 Garífuna populate the northern coastal departments of Honduras, making them the country's largest minority. Their African ancestors came to the Caribbean on two Spanish slave vessels that shipwrecked on St. Vincent in 1635. There the Africans intermingled with Amerindians, and when the British won control of the island in 1797, their descendants, the karaphuna, were deported to Roatán, off the coast of Honduras. From there they emigrated to mainland Honduras via Trujillo, then spread up along the coast into neighboring Guatemala and Belize.
The union between Africans and the Amerindians living on St. Vincent left the Garífuna with a unique culture and ethnicity. Their still widely spoken language is based on the Amerindian languages Arawak and Carib, but also incorporates words from French, Spanish, and English. Their traditional punta, a frenetic courtship dance accompanied by wooden drums, conch shells, and maracas, has been electrified into "punta rock" and is today admired by music lovers around the world.
For two centuries, the Garífuna subsisted primarily through fishing and farming, later growing bananas as a cash crop and selling mahogany. During the 20th century, they were a key source of labor for Honduras' banana exporters.
But in recent decades, the Garífuna's search for work has increasingly taken them to the Honduran cities of La Ceiba or San Pedro Sula and beyond, to New York, Los Angeles, and New Orleans. Even London now has a Garífuna community. This diaspora has intensified in the past ten years as foreign and domestic investors have voraciously bought up Garífuna property for tourism development.
When Garífuna migrants return home, as many do, they often bring more than just their hard-earned money; they also bring HIV/AIDS. "Labor migration is a root cause of the high incidence," says Dr. James Stansbury, a professor of anthropology at the University of Florida who has done field work among the Garífuna. "Young men with few opportunities for making a living in their home villages leave, both out of need and by custom. They find themselves living and working in areas where there is a high risk of contracting a sexually transmitted disease." He notes that one out of five commercial sex workers in San Pedro Sula are HIV-positive, according to a recent study. New York City, where the greatest number of Garífuna emigrants end up, has more AIDS cases than any other U.S. city, according to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Ga.
Stansbury, who studied attitudes towards HIV/AIDS among Honduras' north coast Garífuna, found that most residents were able to identify the causes and symptoms of AIDS. The problem, he says, lies more with their perception that only people of low moral standing are at risk of infection. "Many of them link knowing about who you're getting involved with--saber con quien meterse--with the concept of prevention. People seem to be denying the link in infection, that people who they know, who are close to them, could be infected."
This culture of denial produces an unlikely statistical artifact: hardly anyone in communities like Trujillo or Limón "dies from AIDS," at least officially. They die from diabetes or cancer, psoriasis or even witchcraft--invented ailments or the opportunistic infections that accompany AIDS. A check of medical records at Limón's local clinic reveals only one death from AIDS. Dr. Valentín, who often works there, acknowledges that doctors and nurses often yield to pressure to mask the true cause of an AIDS death, protecting the reputation of the deceased and his or her relatives, but skewing the data on the disease.
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