Urban Arts Education as Nonviolent Resistance in Honduras

• In Event: Education for Societal Transformation: Alternatives for a Just Future (Panel 2)

Proposal

Since the early 2000s, Honduras has ranked as one of the most violent countries in the world (Landa-Blanco, et al., 2020). In a context negatively impacted by decades of foreign intervention and recent political turmoil, factors including extreme poverty, structural inequality, and the international drug trade feed a range of forms of direct violence carried out primarily but not exclusively by gangs and other criminal groups (Gutiérrez Rivera, 2013; Menjívar & Walsh, 2017; Sanchez & Cruz, 2023). While a small number of urban neighborhoods experience exceptionally high rates of violence (Berg & Carranza, 2018), Hondurans in rural and urban areas alike (UNAH-IUDPAS, 2020) and across social classes have become accustomed to frequent homicides and other violent acts in their everyday environments. Scholarship shows that chronic violence has pervasive effects, including widespread anxiety, deterioration of trust, and collective trauma (Rinker & Lawler, 2018; Somasundaram, 2014). Living amidst such fear and distrust, many Hondurans feel helpless.
Furthermore, in Honduras’ most marginalized urban communities, young people are starved for opportunities to study, work, or connect with one another in spaces that are not controlled by criminal groups. This very lack of opportunities is one of the primary forces driving youth into gangs and ensnaring them in cycles of violence (Pine, 2008). Rather than accept these injustices, however, some activists in vulnerable communities forge emancipating paths for themselves and their peers — not only avoiding violence but creating nonviolent alternatives to it. In this presentation, I describe one such alternative: an urban arts collective, grown from the grassroots, that provides youth in marginalized communities options that the broader society does not. By providing an alternative to the dehumanizing options that their surrounding environment offers, I find that youth in this collective experience healing through self-expression, positive identity development through creative and intellectual production, and security through the cultivation of community. Most importantly, this group demonstrates that those who can best create alternatives to seemingly endless cycles of violence are the people most deeply affected by them.

Author

• Amanda Renee Blewitt, University of North Carolina Greensboro