VOICES OF SPIRIT AND BLOOD GARIFUNA LANGUAGE ENDANGERMENT Alison Broach Baton Rouge, Louisiana M.A. Anthropology, University of Virginia 2012 B.A. Theater, Louisiana State University, 2002 A Dissertation Presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Anthropology University of Virginia August, 2019 Committee: Eve Danziger Lise Dobrin George Mentore Susan McKinnon Acknowledgements I cannot submit this work without acknowledging several of the people who have guided me and contributed meaningfully to this work and my formation as an anthropologist. I offer heartfelt thanks to my doctoral committee, Eve Danziger, Susan McKinnon, Lise Dobrin, and George Mentore, for listening to me all of these years and helping me find my footing in this field. I am especially grateful to my committee chair, Eve, for her time, commitment, and friendship. I also wish to thank my community of peers and professors the University of Virginia. Thank you for helping me grow. I am also overwhelmed with gratitude for the kindness and support that the Los Angeles Garifuna community has given me both in California and as my work continued in Central America. Rony and Cheryl Figueroa, I am constantly inspired by your vigilance in the effort to revitalize Garifuna language and culture. Thank you for sharing your knowledge with me and giving so freely of your time to help. I hope that what I have written reflects some of that knowledge. I look forward to continuing to learn from you and am in awe of the enthusiasm you create for Garifuna culture through your podcasts and your work through the Garifuna American Heritage Foundation. Special thanks to Ruben Reyes for sharing your home in Honduras and providing me with contacts during my visits along the coast. The warmth, enthusiasm, and positivity that you have exuded since the first time we met outside of the museum has kept me hopeful about the direction of Garifuna language revitalization. The Garifuna language education to which you are contributing in Honduran schools is incredible. I truly value your friendship. The insight and direction provided by scholars working with the Garifuna language has been invaluable to my formation, my fieldwork, this dissertation, and the Garifuna language recordings that I have been able to publish at the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (https://ailla.utexas.org/islandora/object/ailla%3A257374). I offer my sincerest thanks to Pamela Munro for allowing me to sit in on her classes and for providing guidance, advice, and perspective. I have also been humbled by the help offered to me by Roy Cayetano and Joseph Palacio. Thank you Dr. Palacio for your correspondence and meeting with me in Barranco, and thank you to James Lovell and Roy Cayetano for helping me deliver quality work to the archive to safeguard Garifuna language recordings for future generations. To my Livingston family, words cannot capture the gratitude and affection I have for you. Special thanks to Rodney Bonilla, Gouule Francisco, Erick Arzu Nuéz, and Wilson Noralez Trigueño for allowing me to learn from you. Your generation is a powerhouse and what you are doing offers incredible promise for language revitalization. Thank you to Ericka Nery and the Escuela Oficial Urbana de Varones Justo Rufino Barrios for allowing me to observe language classes. I am also grateful to the collective of Garifuna farmers, Tomas Sanchez, Fermin Arzu, David Leiva, who often brought me with them to Gangadiwali. To my spiritual guides, Fermin Arzu and Juan Carlos Sanchez, thank you for sharing your wisdom with me. I hope that you find my analyses accurate and honorable. Finally, I must thank several people from the bottom of my heart for their friendship and support. There is not proper space to state the many ways that these individuals have contributed to my life and helped me understand what it means to be a Garifuna person and the value of Garifuna culture and language. You have been master teachers and will always be my Garifuna family: Cesar Gregorio, Diana Martinez de Franzua and her dear mother Petrona Leiba, Gloria Nuñez, Tomas Sanchez, Claudia Lucas, Digna Nuñez, Blanca and her family at the Hotel Garifuna, and my neighbor Bibi who fought snakes for me and was always ready with a smile. I wish to also thank the National Science Foundation – Documenting Endangered Languages program for helping to fund this work, and the Garifuna organizations who allowed me to observe and participate in their affairs, including: the Garifuna American Heritage Foundation United, Beluba Luba Furendei, Kevin Flores and the Fomento Salvaguarda de la Cultura Garifuna, and the Organización Negra Guatemalteca. Thanks also to the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America and to the Garinagu who allowed me to record them, some of whom have now passed on and are with us in spirit: Martina Marcelino, Petrona Leiba, Alejandra Amaya, Rosa Amaya, Damadis Madrid Arana, Isabel Ramirez Catatu. Diana Martinez and Tomas Sanchez, thank you for assisting me with interviews and for helping me organize meetings with Garinagu in Livingston. I look forward to the day we meet again. Abstract Languages around the world are being lost at an alarming rate. While this is relatively common knowledge, the sociocultural situations of endangerment and their impact on communities remain largely unknown. As ethnographic research about endangered languages consistently shows, “researchers and communities must come to understand what is happening to the speakers, not just what is happening to the language” (Granadillo and Orcutt-Gachiri 2011:3). This dissertation takes that claim seriously by exploring the effects of and reactions to language shift in the Livingston, Guatemala Garifuna community. The Garifuna language is an indigenous Arawakan language, spoken by Garifuna people who trace their origins to the mixture of West African and indigenous Island Carib peoples on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent during the seventeenth century. Today’s Garifuna Nation spans Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and the United States, as well as St. Vincent. Garifuna language loss is occurring across this transnational community. There is also an unseen population who are profoundly troubled by language loss—deceased Garifuna ancestors who are active members of Garifuna family networks. These exclusively Garifuna-speaking ancestors communicate with living kin through spirit possession and in dreams. Understanding language endangerment among Garifuna people is therefore a matter of learning how language is involved with Garifuna kinship and spirituality. In this work, I discuss ways that language is ontologically placed in the spiritual and physical makeup of the Garifuna person as it relates to kinship. I find that the experiences and language of Garifuna ancestors reside in the blood, bones, and spirit of descendants. According to elders, the growing lack of Garifuna fluency among youth threatens to fracture the crucial relations between the living and the dead—relationships upon which the entire Garifuna world and identity rely. I show how Garifuna efforts to revitalize language utilize this logic, and also how the practices that sustain the connection between language, spirituality, and kinship drive revitalization in unexpected ways. In particular, observations of ways that youth employ language suggest that Garifuna language use is emerging in new situations and forms. In these contexts, spirituality and language are woven onto contemporary social landscapes in ways that appear to draw from, but not necessarily replicate, the very spirituality that elders point to as threatened. This is especially true of song as it is currently being employed by the younger generation through popular Garifuna music. The details I have selected for this work demonstrate the importance of recognizing the particular social role that the Garifuna language plays as a connective force between the living and the dead. It reflects a recent move among scholars and language revitalization activists which insists that each language endangerment situation is culturally distinct, and that the specific cultural features of each case should guide the form of maintenance programs (Dobrin 2008; Nevins 2004). TABLE OF CONTENTS [1] Introduction: "We Have A Problem" ..................................................................................5 [2] The Rumbling of Bones: Ancestors and Language at the Core of Garifuna Being ............ 19 [3] Revitalization on the Ground: Garifuna Language Revival and Intergenerational Interaction ....................................................................................................................... 74 [4] Separation and Unity Reconfigured: An Emergent Change in Form of the Garifuna Veluria .......................................................................................................................... 107 [5] "One Love": Garifuna Language as Ancestral Influence in Livingston's Contemporary Music Scene .................................................................................................................. 148 [6] Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 175 [7] Appendix ....................................................................................................................... 190 [8] Bibliography .................................................................................................................