Zee Edgell was a pioneering Belizean writer, journalist, and educator whose work helped define Belizean literature. Her debut novel, Beka Lamb, was the first Belizean book to gain international acclaim and explored themes of nationhood, gender, and identity. She went on to publish three more novels focused on Belizean history and women’s lives. Beyond her writing, she served as the first Director of the Women’s Bureau in Belize and later taught English at Kent State University. Honored with the Order of the British Empire in 2007, Edgell left a lasting legacy before her passing in 2020.
In this essay (NACLA Vol. 53, No. 3, 2021), Paul Joseph López Oro reflects on the vital role of Garifuna women in sustaining Afro-Indigenous cultural traditions and shaping collective memory. Focusing on the ways in which Garifuna women carry and transmit ancestral knowledge, López Oro highlights their work in preserving language, rituals, spirituality, and stories across generations and throughout the diaspora. The essay challenges the ways anti-Blackness and patriarchy often erase or silence Black Indigenous experiences, especially in academic and activist spaces. By centering the leadership and labor of Garifuna women, López Oro not only honors their contributions but also calls for a deeper understanding of Black Indigeneity as a lived reality, one rooted in care, resistance, and cultural survival.
In this essay, Nicole D. Ramsey examines how Belize’s cultural and historical distinctiveness disrupts dominant narratives of Central American identity. Drawing on her perspective as a Black Belizean American, she explores the erasure of Blackness in regional discourses and highlights Belize as a site that embodies multiculturalism, diaspora, and alternative frameworks for understanding belonging in Central America.
In this essay, Nicole D. Ramsey explores how Belizean independence brings into focus the lasting complexities of colonialism. She draws on personal and diasporic experiences to examine how British colonial influence continues to shape national identity, particularly for Black and Indigenous communities. Through reflections on language, culture, and memory, Ramsey considers how Belizeans navigate belonging both within the nation and across the diaspora.
In this essay, Paul Joseph López Oro examines how Garifuna communities, as both Black and Indigenous, challenge dominant understandings of race and identity in Latin America and the United States. Drawing on ethnographic research and lived experiences, he shows how Garifuna identities resist simple categorization, highlighting the ways Blackness and Indigeneity are deeply interconnected. By focusing on Garifuna cultural and political expression across national borders, López Oro calls for a more expansive view of Afro-Latinidad and underscores the importance of centering Afro-Indigenous perspectives in conversations about race, belonging, and diaspora in the Americas.
"The Black Movement in Panamá" (Souls Journal, 2008) examines the challenges and opportunities faced by the Black Movement in Panama between 1994 and 2004, a period marked by the aftermath of the 1989 U.S. invasion, growing racial discrimination, and the rise of neoliberalism. George Priestley and Alberto Barrow analyze how these shifting political and economic conditions, alongside the fragmentation of popular forces and setbacks within the movement itself, shaped Afro-Panamanian struggles for justice, visibility, and mobilization in a rapidly transforming national context.
In this essay, historian Victoria González-Rivera reflects on her father's experiences as an Afro-mestizo man in Nicaragua. She examines how systemic racism and a national narrative centered on mestizaje contributed to his lack of racial self-awareness. González-Rivera discusses the broader implications of racial silence in Latinx communities, highlighting the need for confronting anti-Blackness to foster a more inclusive understanding of identity.
