The Queerness of Indigenous Blackness
By Pablo Joseph López Oro
[Derick Martinez (to the left) and Jose Sambola (to the right) during rehearsal of their duo dance performance in preparation for Miss Garifuna 2016]
Garifuna dance for me is not only about my ancestors, my culture, or my traditions—it’s about my freedom, my gay freedom. When I get on stage, all of the racism, homophobia, and machismo that I live every single day of life goes away. My body makes people connect to themselves. In all of my performances, I know that I make my ancestors proud because I let them take over me. They are the ones moving me, guiding me. My gayness becomes their vessel, so others can see them be honored and be present. [1]
Indios [mestizos] (read: non-Black folks) steal our culture. They dance punta, they sell pan de coco, they want to make babies with us, but they don’t know our ancestral culture. They only like to make videos, put us on a postcard and call it Honduran. Garifuna culture is not Honduran culture. Garifuna culture is from St. Vincent and Africa. Punta is popular not because indios know what it truly is about, it’s popular because Black people and sex sells. To the untrained eye, you would look at punta and think that it is a dance all about sex, fertility, sexuality, it is not at all. Punta is a sacred dance that our ancestors do for our ceremonies for when our people pass. Punta is a dance to commemorate the living and the dead. The drums open the door for the ancestors to pass into their new life. But indios see it and think it’s all about fucking. That is all we worth to these people, such a good dance and fucking. Garifuna dance is deeper than that. Garifuna dance is our library, our library to the ancestors. Garifuna dance keeps us connected to each other and to them on the other side of el rio. [2]
The club is the central institution of Black queer communion. Here we assert bodies, putatively dangerously riddled with disease and threat of violence, not only as instruments of pleasure but also as conduits to profound joy, and perhaps spiritual bliss and transcendent connection. Interstices or conduits that connect, perhaps to utopias. [3]
Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough. [4]
Garifuna dance collectives/companies have a long and nuanced hemispheric history of creating subaltern spaces for Garifuna youth that transcend a politics of cultural preservation. Garifuna dance collectives emerged throughout Central America’s Caribbean Coasts at the tail end of the first-wave of multicultural constitutional reforms, which were spearheaded by Nicaragua in 1987. [5] Nicaragua’s Creole, Garifuna, and Indigenous communities modeled to the rest of Latin America what collective rights for Afro-descendant and Indigenous peoples could look like, both legislatively and culturally, in spaces where Black folks continue to be marginalized and imagined outside of mestizo nationalism. This “win” by Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast communities directly re-shaped the ways in which Black Central Americans mobilized politically within the cultural sphere.[6]
In other words, it was immediately after 1987 that the first-ever Garifuna dance company—the Ballet Nacional Folklórico Garífuna—was formally established in Honduras in one of the most unexpected locations: the very mestizo capital of Tegucigalpa. In Central America, the shift in racial discourse from mestizaje to multiculturalism brands Black and Indigenous cultural expressions of embodied ancestral knowledge as commodified objects for a kind of consumption that falsely portends inclusion into projects we were never meant to be a part of. Yet, these dance collectives/companies nurture a space for transgenerational exchanges, enact performances of cultural preservation, and engage in a hemispheric project of Black Indigeneity. [7] Moreover, Black dancing bodies serve as embodied archives where queerness and queer subjectivities find a home within a home, where queer freedoms are manifested on the stage and into the bodies of those witnessing and enacting the performance.
Dance is a useful frame with which to consider Black bodies as embodied archives of the flesh, bodies that carry within them Black people’s enmeshment with colonialism, racism, sexism, and imperialism. [8] Garifuna dance is filled with complexities, distinct historical and ancestral symbolisms, movements, and a wide range of gestures, postures, and attire that merit much deeper analysis. Within this delimited space, I aim to analyze Garifuna dance companies/collectives as subaltern queer spaces of kinship-making and community activism, which disrupt heteronormative structures of gender and sexuality politics.
My interests in Garifuna dance companies/collectives in New York City is guided by both my own subject-position as a LGBTQ-identified, third-generation-Brooklynite of Garifuna Honduran descent, and by the fact that when I entered “the field” as a researcher Queer Garifuna folks guided me into these hidden-in-plain-sight subaltern queer geographies. [9] These shared epistemologies led me to witness how LGBTQ Garinagu folks were producing, directing, contributing, and founding many of the citywide projects of Garifuna cultural preservation. Yet, their political, cultural, intellectual, and spiritual labor were not being documented nor acknowledged by the broader New York Garifuna community. Writing about dance collectives/companies has been an unexpected turn, particularly because I am not formally trained in dance. I know how to boogie because of my paternal grandmother (her dancing would light up an entire parranda!), but my analytical lens on Garifuna dance is not focused on the choreographies or movements, my interests lies in the discursive and political labor of dance as a space/place/geography for embodied queer freedoms.
In the case of Garifuna communities, LGBTQ-identified Garifuna folks founded the very first Garifuna dance company in East New York, Brooklyn and continue to be on the frontlines of the hemispheric Garifuna project of cultural preservation. Yet, LGBTQ Garinagu peoples are left outside of most ethnographies, oral histories, and studies, not even footnotes in multiple scholarly documentations of Garifuna life. If one would take a quick gloss over the extensive bibliography on Garifuna people, one would walk away with the impression that LGBTQ Garinagu folks just simply do not exist or have not contributed much to Garifuna life. Yet, Garifuna dance, its expressions, its gestures, its movements, and its bodies tell us a story of queer subaltern identities and spaces, while unearthing a different kind of Black Indigenous life in New York City and throughout the Américas.
Situating Garinagu in Black Queer Studies: Locating Queered Genders and Sexualities within Hemispheric Black Indigeneity
The intellectual project of Black queer diaspora invites us all to think about Blackness, queerness, gender, sexism, homophobia, and racism across borders, bodies of waters, and texts. While I remain suspicious of diaspora because of its impulse to make Blackness mappable along colonial and imperial terrains and its tendency to reinscribe Blackness into the confines of nationalism and nationalistic discourses (i.e.: Afro-Colombians, Afro-Mexicans, Afro-Germans, etc.), I do find it useful to decenter U.S. exceptionalism in ways that invite non-U.S. centered expressions, lived experiences, and self-makings of Blackness. Black, queer, diaspora when taken together then offers a different and more supple possibility. As Jafari S. Allen notes in “Black/Queer/Diaspora at the Current Conjuncture”:
Black/queer/diaspora announces itself ready and willing to embrace and be embraced: to listen and to negotiate. The notion of ethics or even “good politics” is not strong enough to hold this. Perhaps love is. Still unfinished, our work consciously looks for and finds nonheteronormative peoples of Africa(n descent), within and outside the United States, as we also lay claim to our position in black studies, queer studies, and feminist studies, as backbone rather than anomaly (230).
Allen’s call for the inherent unsettledness of Black/Queer/Diaspora methodologies is generative and provokes inquiries into Black queer diasporic life in unexpected spaces. LGBTQ Garinagu are hidden in plain sight, and their activist labor shapes the hemispheric political mobilization of Garifuna cultural preservation in non-normative, hidden, and unrecognizable ways. This is particularly true for the anomaly of “home.”
Home is typically a fraught concept in the lives of LGBTQ Black folks, as home is filled with familial constellations whose very construction of heteronormative respectability and sociality marginalize, disenfranchise, and silence non-heteronormative identities. Yet, Black and Brown queer folks also make home differently from heteronormative sociality. Kinship is built through gendered norms of expression and identification, i.e., sis/dyke, bitch/butch, mutha, etc. Non-heteronormative sexualities and genderings are open secrets, loud whispers, and double-meaning jokes that fester under the tongues of family members, neighbors, friends, and communities. Within Garifuna communities, queer sexualities are kept silent by a pseudo “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, but the reality is that there is a lot of asking and a lot of telling when it comes to LGBTQ Garifuna sexuality. The gendered norms of motherhood and fatherhood are a constant in daily interactions, and while the bedroom is located in the private space of home, sex is also public.
The notion of “el secreto abierto” is thus useful to think about how LGBTQ Garinagu sexualities are expressed and lived within the matrilineal heteronormative boundaries of Garifunaness. Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, writing about sexuality in Puerto Rico, states that “Homosexuality, lesbianism, and bisexuality are tolerated as long as they are not disclosed or are negotiated strictly as an ‘open secret’ or secreto a voces/secreto abierto.” [10]
However, the concept of el secreto abierto, or the open secret, exists in the rest of the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States as well. Allen, for example, in ¡Venceremos?: The Erotics of Black Self-making in Cuba, repeatedly uses two phrases learned from his Afro-Cuban interlocutors: “no dice nada, se hace todo” and “entendido, pero no dicho” (128). Both phrases have similar meanings, depending on the context they both point to the secrecy of queer, non-heteronormative sexualities. Queerness is a secret that is not private at all, but rather well-known in the Black geographies of the Américas. Yet, many of these studies on Garifuna communities forgo a closer look into sexuality as an analytic to understand the intimate workings of Garifuna life and political cultural expressions of Garifunaness.
Garinagu folks despite their collective memorialization as shipwrecked slaves and their marronage in St. Vincent, are not divorced from the horrors of the Middle Passage and the afterlife of slavery. Likewise, Garinagu sexuality does not escape from the global white supremacist ideologies that construct Black sexuality as animalistic, deviant, and non-human. [11] Latinidad within Central America and the United States is rendered mestizo, and as such Garifuna bodies are hypersexualized and hypervisible. The anti-Black racism of mestizaje positions Black people as desirable, erotic, fetish objects for sexual consumption with limited marital prospects.
One of the persistent ideological mantras of mestizaje is adelantando la raza or mejorando la raza; an ideology embedded to this very day in the social interactions of Black folks throughout Spanish-speaking Latin America and the Caribbean. Therefore, Black bodies in these mestizo nation-states have to navigate their gender presentations and sexualities in complex and nuanced ways that challenge or at times reinscribe anti-Black racist tropes of el negro caliente or la negra puta. These racist archetypes travel quite easily into U.S. Latinidad where notions of colorism, hypersexualization, and animalistic notions of Black genders and sexualities are seen in daily popular culture references in reggaetón, GOYA commercials, and in street harassment.
It is thus important to note that Garifuna folks have to navigate and negotiate their gender and sexuality within multiple, racialized zones. The common thread, whether in Central America or the United States, is that the racial Blackness of Garifuna folks situates them within the histories of captivity, enslavement, non-humanity, genderlessness or misgenderings in the Middle Passage and plantation life in the Americas. [12] Yet, queer Garinagu create spaces of survival, resistance, and life in the midst of erasure, death, silencing, and marginalization. Through dance—whether through the punta, dance companies/collectives, or through queer communion in clubs—Garinagu folks are able to make movement and joy out of backbone and sinew.
Notes
[1] Interview with Derick Martinez.
[2] Interview with Mariano Martinez.
[3] Jafari Sinclaire Allen, “For ‘the Children’ Dancing the Beloved Community,” SOULS: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, Vol. 11, No. 3 (2009): p. 315. Allen’s auto-ethnographic experiences within Black and Brown LGBTQ clubs in New York City and his close readings of Black lesbian and gay theory make for an important intervention into the literature of Black queer everyday life. He particularly looks into “queer time” in the past, present, and futures, yearned for and denied; and “queer place.” He provides an intimate analysis of the Black queer club as a sacred place of not only individual desire and autonomy, but also community. Here, I will use Allen’s Black queer lens on community, congregation, and place-making as the theoretical grounding to further examine how Garifuna dance collectives in New York City carve out a subaltern space for LGBTQ Garinagu youth and elders.
[4] Jose Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009): p. 1. Performance studies scholar Muñoz articulates a utopian version of queerness that highlights insufficiency. For Muñoz, wherever there is an outside, a possibility for difference, there is also a perception of the insufficiency of one’s present circumstances. In that sense of insufficiency, in the haunting gap between here and there, queerness resides. This insight guides my study of Garifuna New Yorkers’ political subjectivities and racial identity formations as an urgent desire for an outside: an outside of the nation, an outside of empire, an outside of plantation life, an outside of traditional forms of genealogy and family relations, an outside of chronological and spatial limitations.
[5] See Juliet Hooker, “‘Beloved Enemies’: Race and Official Mestizo Nationalism in Nicaragua,” Latin American Research Review, Vol. 40, No. 3 (October 2005): pp. 14-39.
[6] I use “win” here very loosely to gesture to a positive victory that certainly did not dismantle the centuries of anti-Black racism present to this day in the region.
[7] I will go back and forth between using the term dance company or dance collectives to signal the distinction between formal and informal organizations. For example, dance collectives have been present on Central America’s Caribbean Coasts since the 1980s and were referred to as cuadros de danza. Many Garifuna dance companies evolve or morph into “official companies” to highlight a formal institutional structure in the hopes of gaining external success. Based on my observations and one-on-one conversations with dancers, this distinction changes who is included/excluded from the dancing space. There is a further intersectional analysis needed here to look closely at how class, gender presentation, sexuality markers, and colorism are at play in terms of which Garifuna dance companies/collectives get to perform at Lincoln Center or at Crotona Park in the South Bronx.
[8] In “The Black Body as Archive: Writing Black Dance” a symposium convened by Jasmine E. Johnson in 2014, she urges us to think of dance as a theoretical genre that has always provided a kaleidoscopic lens through which to theorize the African diaspora. After all, as she writes “the African diaspora is intrinsically a movement project. Coerced movement rendered a constellation of Black communities. In addition to bodies moving through space, there is also a figurative travel of the imagination through which Black diasporic identities have been constructed. ‘Moving’ is diaspora’s basic verb.”
[9] I place quotation marks around the term “the field” to highlight my insider-outsider relationship. My subject-position is very much present in this research and my embodied queerness and Garifunaness is what guided the majority of my interlocutors to open up about their lived experiences. In fact, due to Garinagu politics of sexuality many heterosexual interlocutors put walls/barriers up with me at the beginning phases of this research. Indeed, the Garifuna women central to this research were women who have sons, daughters, uncles, cousins, dear family friends who are part of the LGBTQ community. Also, an added layer to “the field” is that New York City is my birthplace, my hometown, and most scholarship on Garifuna folks focuses on Central America, where I am an outsider. Yet Central America’s Caribbean Coasts as a geo-political space of origins/homeland/home is very much present for Garinagu New Yorkers, it has to be. Blackness is hemispheric. Indigeneity is hemispheric. Garifuna folks migrate to the United States with centuries of witnessing/living anti-Black racism. My subject-position and the field will thus forever have an unresolved relationship.
[10] Lawrence M. La Fountain-Stokes, Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009): p. xvii. La Fountain-Stokes’s trailblazing exploration of queer Puerto Rican and Diasporic poetics and expressive culture makes significant contributions to multiple lines of inquiry in Latinx cultural and performance studies. His conceptualization of “un secreto abierto” is useful as I think about how queerness is always already present in plain sight. What is helpful here for framing a Garifuna sexuality politics of respectability is that it is here in this very act/space of secrecy, where queerness flourishes as a subaltern and transgressive act of living, loving, expressing, and in the context of Garifuna dance companies/collectives—dancing.
[11] Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (New York: Routledge, 2004). Black feminist sociologist Patricia Hill Collins’s intersectional framing of Black gender and sexuality politics is an especially important contribution as she looks at a supposedly post-racial moment and reiterates the ways in which peoples of African descent in the United States and the Americas have had to navigate and articulate their own understandings of gender and sexuality through epistemes imprisoned by controlling images and archetypes.
[12] Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics, Vol. 17, No. 2, Culture and Countermemory: The “American” Connection, (Summer 1987): pp. 64-81. In this formative essay, Spillers introduces The Moynihan Report (1965) as a text that adheres to dehumanizing discourses about Black people. Spillers argues that The Report rehearses the naming practices of slavery. The discursive work that the family performs within The Report replicates violences that are found in Black captivity. Under captivity, Black bodies are reduced to non-human flesh. For Spillers, under enslavement, captive flesh and kinship lose their meanings. The enslaved therefore did not constitute human families or humans for that matter in the eyes of slave-owners.
References
Allen, Jafari S. ¡Venceremos?: The Erotics of Black Self-making in Cuba. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
Allen, Jafari S. “Black/Queer/Diaspora at the Current Conjuncture.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2-3 (2012): 211–248.
Dr. Pablo José López Oro is a transdisciplinary Black Studies scholar whose research and teaching interests lie at the intersections of Black Latin American/Black Latinx Studies, Black Queer Feminist ethnographies & theories, and hemispheric Black political movements. His in-progress manuscript tentatively titled Indigenous Blackness in the Américas: The Queer Politics of Self-Making Garifuna New York is a critical ethnography on how gender and sexuality shape the ways in which transgenerational Garifuna New Yorkers of Central American descent negotiate, perform, and self-make their multiple subjectivities as Black, Indigenous, and Central American Caribbeans.