What even serious individuals must note is that 40 or 50 years ago, the kind of jobs that illegal immigrants migrate towards today are the same positions that African Americans were relegated to. How else can we explain highly educated African Americans, even some with Ph.D's, being forced to work at the post office or as a hotel waiter. The barriers for African Americans were Jim Crow; for Hispanics or Latinos fleeing Mexico, El Salvador, Guatamala or other South American countries, it is the wretched poverty in those countries. For them, such jobs are a "step up" from what they had to accept in their country.
"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."
Tegucigalpa, Honduras: Proyecto Mejoramiento de la Calidad de la Educación Básica : Educación Intercultural Bilingüe : Consejo Nacional de Educación Garífuna de Honduras
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Prime minister Musa Said and his delegation highlighted the annual `Day in the Park' program sponsored by the Concerned Belizean Association at Hollywood Park in Inglewood on Sunday afternoon. "You should register to and vote in the United States," he said. "Your being active improves our capabilities in relations between the governments of the United States and the government of Belize. You can be an American, but you'll always be a Belizean!" In their comments, members spoke of progress toward their election goals of 15,000 thousand new jobs, 10,000 new homes and 1,000 new classrooms" to meet the needs of the Belizean people.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
422 p., A study of the politics of race, culture and identity among Garinagu in Honduras. Garinagu are a people of African and Amerindian descent deported by the British from St. Vincent to Central America in 1797. Within Honduras, they have been racially interpellated as “black” in contradistinction to the dominant mestizo, understood as the product of the racial-cultural fusion between the European and the Indian. Anthropological studies have failed to substantially investigate the relationship between Garinagu and the mestizo-dominated society and state. They have also neglected the construction of racial-cultural identity among Garinagu themselves.
The Peace Corps and the Mickey Leland Center on World Hunger and Peace at Texas Southern University partnered to send 10 students to live with current Peace Corps volunteers in Haiti, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Panama and Bolivia. The program, which was started last year, aims to increase minority student interest in global service centers. To honor this year's interns, a reception was held in July at the Houston Urban League.
Escaped slaves became Spanish Florida's first settlers. They joined refugees from the Creek Nation and called themselves Seminoles which means runaways. Intermixing became so common that they were soon called Black Seminoles. The black Seminoles struck frequently against slave plantations and runaway slaves swelled their ranks. The U.S. government launched three massive war campaigns against the Seminole nation over a period of 40 years. The second war alone cost the U.S. government over 40 million dollars and 1500 soldiers. The Seminoles eventually signed a peace treaty with President Polk which was violated in 1849 when the U.S. Attorney General ruled that black Seminoles were still slaves under U.S. law.
Austin: University of Texas Press, Austin, Institute of Latin American Studies
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
330 p, Based on a decade the author spent among the African-Caribbean "Creole" people on Nicaragua's southern Caribbean coast, Disparate Diasporas is a study of identity formation and politics in that community. Shows how a particular Black community can evolve distinct types of diasporic consciousness, and, depending on the historical moment, how different types of memories, consciousness, and politics come to predominate. Focusing on the period of the 1970s and 1980s, explains the inability of the Sandinistas to come to terms with the racial and cultural challenge to the Nicaraguan nation posed by the Creole community.
Chomsky,Aviva (Author) and Lauria-Santiago,Aldo (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
1998
Published:
Durham, NC: Duke University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
404 p, Research on the social history of Central America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean on rural workers, peasants, migrants, and women. Individual essays include discussions of plantation justice in Guatemala, highland Indians in Nicaragua, the effects of foreign corporations in Costa Rica, coffee production in El Salvador, banana workers in Honduras, sexuality and working-class feminism in Puerto Rico, the Cuban sugar industry, and agrarian reform in the Dominican Republic
Leland,Andrea E. (Director) and Berger,Kathy L. (Director)
Format:
Video/DVD
Publication Date:
1998
Published:
Hohokus, NJ: New Day Films
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
1 videocassette (46 min., 30 sec.) + 1 study guide (49 p.), Genocide, exile, Diaspora and persecution did not break the spirit of the Garifuna people. Descendants of African and Carib-Indian ancestors, the Garifuna fought to maintain their homeland on the island of St. Vincent in the Caribbean. The Garifuna resisted slavery. For this love of freedom, they were exiled from St. Vincent to Roatan in Honduras by the British in 1797. Despite exile and subsequent Diaspora, their traditional culture survives today. It is a little known story that deserves its place in the annals of the African Diaspora. In first person Garifuna voices, this documentary presents the history, the language, food, music, dance and spirituality of the Garifuna culture. It is a celebratory documentary, with engaging scenes of fishing, cooking, dancing, cassava preparation, thatching a temple, spiritual ritual, ritual music and dance all demonstrating the Garifuna link to the Carib-African past.
