Paul Joseph López Oro's "Black Caribs/Garifuna" uses Kamau Brathwaite’s conceptualizations of the “inner plantation” and “neglected Maroons” in his field-making 1975 essay “Caribbean Man in Space and Time” to meditate on the multiple meanings of home within Garifuna political subjectivity. St. Vincent holds epistemological status as the Garifuna homeland associated with ancestral marronage. The author looks at how public performances of Garifuna Settlement Day in Central America and the United States (New York City is home to the largest Garifuna communities outside Central America’s Caribbean coasts) open an alternative—ancestral—terrain within the interior geographies of Indigenous Blackness. By framing ethnographic vignettes of Garifuna ancestral memory throughout the diaspora as an embodied archive of knowledge production, this essay demonstrates how Brathwaite’s mapping of an intellectual genealogy creates space for reimagining the geographies of marronage, resistance, and survival within the interior landscapes of Caribbean expressive culture and life.
Based in Colón, FEN is dedicated to promoting Afro-descendant culture, educating Afro-Panamanians about their rights, and equipping youth with skills to overcome racial discrimination. The organization has collaborated with international partners to strengthen its advocacy and amplify the voices of Afro-Panamanians across the country.
Jennifer Carolina Gómez Menjívar's Black in Print (State University of New York Press, 2023) examines the role of narrative, from traditional writing to new media, in conversations about race and belonging in the isthmus. It argues that the production, circulation, and consumption of stories has led to a trans-isthmian imaginary that splits the region along racial and geographic lines into a white-mestizo Pacific coast, an Indigenous core, and a Black Caribbean. Across five chapters, Jennifer Carolina Gómez Menjívar identifies a series of key moments in the history of the development of this imaginary: Independence, Intervention, Cold-War, Post-Revolutionary, and Digital Age. Gómez Menjívar's analysis ranges from literary beacons such as Rubén Darío and Miguel Ángel Asturias to less studied intellectuals such as Wingston González and Carl Rigby. The result is a fresh approach to race, the region, and its literature. Black in Print understands Central American Blackness as a set of shifting coordinates plotted on the axes of language, geography, and time as it moves through print media.
David McField’s “Black is Black” affirms Black identity across geographies, blending Spanish, English, and Creole to highlight the everyday realities, labor, and struggles of Black people worldwide while insisting on dignity and recognition.
This short documentary aims to capture the factors influencing Nicaraguan Creoles to identify themselves as Black and as members of the Black diaspora.
The essays in Blacks and Blackness in Central America (Duke University Press, 2010) begin to recover the forgotten and downplayed histories of blacks in Central America, demonstrating the centrality of African Americans to the region’s history from the earliest colonial times to the present. They reveal how modern nationalist attempts to define mixed-race majorities as “Indo-Hispanic,” or as anything but African American, clash with the historical record of the first region of the Americas in which African Americans not only gained the right to vote but repeatedly held high office, including the presidency, following independence from Spain in 1821.
Breena Nuñez is a queer Afro-Central American cartoonist and educator from the Bay Area whose work explores themes of race, identity, queerness, and the complexities of growing up Central American in the United States. Through self-published zines and comics, she uses humor and personal storytelling to unpack the awkwardness of racism, cultural belonging, and diasporic memory. Breena co-founded the small press Laneha House and teaches Race & Comics at California College of the Arts.
The Endangered Archives Programme captures forgotten and still not written histories, often suppressed or marginalised. It gives voice to the voiceless: it opens a dialogue with global humanity’s multiple pasts. It is a library of history still waiting to be written.
The British Newspaper Archive is a partnership between the British Library and Findmypast to digitise the British Library's vast collection of newspapers.
The Caribbean Central American Research Council (CCARC) is a nonprofit organization of scholars and activists committed to advancing racial, cultural, and economic justice across the Caribbean Coast of Central America, the broader Caribbean, and the United States. Through participatory research, education, and policy work, CCARC centers local knowledge and community engagement at every stage of its projects. With an interdisciplinary and activist-oriented approach, the organization works to challenge inequality and support grassroots visions for equity across the Americas.
