The Limits of Indigeneity: Pueblo Garifuna v. Honduras

• In Event: Indigenous and Afrodescendant Peoples and the Inter-American Human Rights System

Abstract

In April 2014, after more than ten years of exhaustive investigation and preliminary hearings at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the case of the Garifuna Community Triunfo de la Cruz and its Members versus Honduras advanced to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. The public hearing took place in San Jose, Costa Rica on May 20, 2014. During the court proceedings, Honduran state lawyers argued that Garifuna, who are of mixed African, Carib and Arawak ancestry, should not be considered an “original people” (indigenous to Honduras); that despite the evidence, Garifuna do not suffer systematic discrimination; and that Garifuna claims to national territory undermine state sovereignty. This paper provides an ethnographic reading of the court proceedings. I examine how court testimony, as a form of storytelling about the collective self, bridges legal and affective constructions of Garifuna indigeneity, which are entangled with racial, temporal and scientific discourses. Garifuna testimonies before the court contest the racial logics undergirding the arguments presented by the state and suture the conceptual divide between blackness and indigeneity.

Author

• Christopher A Loperena, University of San Francisco