"As the largest umbrella organization for Black communities throughout Central America and the Caribbean, ONECA has brought people together," said Arthur Samuels, the Costa Rican-based ONECA secretary of education. "We're organized so that we can have more force in each of our countries." The Guatemalan-born Mario Gerardo Ellington, ONECA's legal representative, said that the one thing Black Central Americans have come to realize is that identifying themselves by the nations they reside in can be pointless. "We didn't seek out these different nations to live in," he pointed out. "We only live in these places because this is where, eventually, our cultures were able to settle."
