A Review of The Ends of Paradise: Race, Extraction, and the Struggle for Black Life in Honduras

The Ends of Paradise: Race, Extraction, and the Struggle for Black Life in Honduras by Christopher A. Loperena (Stanford University Press, 2023)

Christopher Loperena’s book, aptly titled the Ends of Paradise, brings forth sharp analysis of the threats to Garifuna life in Honduras through what he calls a “racialized extractivism” (13) that involves land theft supported by the state, state-developed tourism and appropriation of culture by the mestizo nation. Garifuna communities, who self-describe as free Blacks who were never enslaved, were deported to the Bay Islands in what would become Honduras from Saint Vincent by the British in 1797 after resistance movements in the island. Later, they migrated to the shores of the Caribbean Coast of Central America and settled in 46 village communities in Honduras. (5-6).

Loperena posits that Garifuna people are treated as commodities, on the one hand, utilized by the state as “cultura viva” (living culture) and then expelled to satisfy the mestizo desire for wealth (13), and on the other hand, unrecognized and historically marginalized within the country’s history. In his analysis, the nation project in Honduras is a form of settler colonialism that has historically decimated Garifuna, Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous communities. While the Honduran state recognized its pluricultural and multiethnic make-up in 1994 and signed on to the International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention 169 in 1995, Afro-Indigenous communities are often tokenized and manipulated to accommodate and promote tourism and capitalist development. This state-sanctioned “inclusion” is “predatory,” as “neoliberal multiculturalism” (58) serves extractivist practices, he asserts. Ends of Paradise aims to center blackness in Honduras, a nation state, not unlike other Central American nations, where a racial regime prioritizes whiteness, and Black and Indigenous communities lack their full rights as deserving citizens.

The Ends of Paradise is organized in two parts. Part one examines the extractivist logics and politics of coercive inclusion by the state in two chapters (25-78). Part two delves deeply into a discussion of the future of Black and Indigenous autonomy (81-165). Loperena analyzes the various ways in which communities mobilize within the country and internationally to protect and defend the land and its future. Loperena documents the impact of the country’s and the region’s transition to a neoliberal economy in which Black and Indigenous communities must organize in a variety of ways to maintain their land and livelihood.

The book ends with an analysis of the impact litigation to protect their ancestral land by Garifuna communities against the state of Honduras and foreign investors in Garifuna Community of Triunfo de la Cruz v. Honduras. Loperena offers a compelling critique of the state defense in this important case.  In its opposition to Garifuna charges of land theft, the state seeks to reinforce the project and power of mestizaje by recasting Garifuna communities as foreigners, and non-Indigenous, in their own land, establishing competition among mestizo campesinos in demand for land and resources, Loperena explains.

“Despite the state’s official recognition of Garifuna cultural difference, and the repeated denial that the country had any “problems of racial nature,” the argument that Garifuna are not Indigenous is racist, precisely because it has been used to disavow them of their material rights in order to protect mestizo property and commercial land interest in the region.” (154)

In the face of the state’s pitting of mestizo and ladino campesinos against Garifuna communities and negation of their rights to ancestral lands, this case brought by Garifuna leaders, and others since, exemplify tactics of the oppressed to use available mechanisms in the international courts to lift their voices and force the state of Honduras to acquiesce and back off the land.

The Ends of Paradise is profoundly moving and effective in its endeavor to center Garifuna and women-led organization Fraternal Organization of Black People in Honduras (OFRANEH), in the story of community resistance, which has persisted in organizing for the preservation of land, culture and the right to a future as a Garifuna community under capitalist encroachment of the mestizo nation. The book details the role of OFRANEH and its work with the communities to build consciousness while empowering it to organize with the people and not for the people as they confront tourism, land theft, forced displacement, migration and racism.

Loperena introduces the idea of “territorial mothering” to analyze the work of women in Garifuna communities who defend the land, life and their children’s future. To them the value of the land is unmeasurable enacting not only their own liberation, but their own vision for the future of the entire community, as Loperena explains, despite the challenges of neoliberalism, narcotrafficking and land grabbing that aim to destroy Indigenous lives in their paths. Black mothering is fundamental to the struggle for Garifuna life centering Garifuna women organizers and leaders, who defy the odds of extinction, disappearance and violence every day, to imagine and view a future for everyone.

Loperena offers an analysis of power—and race—and the systemic exclusion of Garifuna community from national, local and regional structures in Honduras. The Ends of Paradise introduces a few key concepts in this text that are forward thinking for the context of Honduras and Central America: he presents he notion of “racial extraction/extractivism” as an appropriation of territory that specifically targets Black and Indigenous communities, who are seen as an estorbo or a hindrance to larger development projects supported by the state—albeit often in collusion with capitalist forces and underground criminal networks. Loperena explains that histories of colonialism and slavery in this Caribbean coast of Honduras have created pathologies of structural racism that have deeply influenced extractivism practices and have allowed these practices to continue against the life of Garifuna communities. The impact is the permanence of exploitative practices against Black and Indigenous communities, displacement and the enactment of laws and policies that serve outside powers and the state itself. Further, there is extraction of land and of people. This is important to underscore in a Honduras where the struggle for civil and political recognition and defense of the lives of Garifuna and Indigenous people continues, despite the election of the LIBRE party under the leftist presidency of Xiomara Castro de Zelaya.

Loperena’s analysis of an extraction model that operates against Black and Indigenous community values and priorities is poignant. He exposes what he calls “the inclusionary politics of expulsion” – in which the multicultural state sees the Caribbean coast and its people as commodities to be exhibited in tourist projects, and “showing off” Black bodies, all the while sidelining issues of civil and political rights or claims to the territory by these very people and communities.  The mestizo narrative and performance of inclusion is an underhanded way to invalidate and disappear the Garifuna, their people and history. State-driven tourism as an “economic development” agenda pits the state against the collective land rights and Garifuna autonomy.

Loperena’s meticulous analysis covers various communities. In this text, he highlights Barra Vieja, Triunfo de la Cruz and those communities in peril of displacement and extinction. He reveals intricacies of how power operates—both within and outside the communities—as they negotiate their lives and rights to the land. The Ends of Paradise powerfully articulates the struggle for resistance and survival in the Garifuna communities in Honduras.

The impacts of narcotrafficking and the pseudo-dictatorship of former President Juan Orlando Hernandez, as well as climate change and forced displacement and migration, have all affected the Garifuna community’s ability to stay in their land. Loperena confronts these unflinchingly—yet he presents powerfully the promise and sense of the future palpable in the community, particularly among women, children, and an adamant desire to live and thrive despite devastation.

I was fortunate to write this review after reading the book alongside Introduction to Central American Studies and Black and Indigenous Central America in my classes, and it was so profound to see students respond passionately to the book.  Loperena’s arguments resonated clearly, and students embraced the takeaway that Black and Indigenous peoples, and particularly women in those communities, are holding up half the sky in the quest for territorial rights, leading movements even as they confront the challenges of state repression, climate change, displacement and migration. Most inspiring to students is the Garifuna communities’ struggle and collectivity as a promising practice for futurity and hope.

I appreciated the tight focus on Honduras, yet I would have been excited to read an additional section on the ground-up organizing during the long duration of the post-coup d’état work by OFRANEH and their abiding desire to challenge the status quo in the current LIBRE party. Loperena opens the door to these interesting questions about tensions and self-determination. I wanted to be led all the way inside the room.

Regardless, Loperena has written an important book for the fields of Latin America, Central American Studies and Ethnic Studies. His contribution is an incisive critique of neoliberal and extractivist projects and calls attention to the specific targeting of and impact on Black and Indigenous communities.  He has written a beautiful testament to the power and endurance of Garifuna communities in resistance, with a recognition of the leadership and strategies of Garifuna women.

Suyapa Portillo Villeda is Professor of Chicanx Latinx Transnational Studies at Pitzer College. She is author of Roots of Resistance: A Story of Gender, Race, and Labor on the North Coast of Honduras (University of Texas Press, 2021).

A Review of The Brazil Chronicles

En los 80s