Benjamin Petersen and Dr. Jared Johnson, Department of Communications

The Garifuna are the descendents of West Africans brought to the Americas in the 1600s aboard slave ships. After a shipwreck in the Caribbean, they settled on the island of St. Vincent and mixed with the Carib Indians, creating a unique people and culture that thrived on spirituality, dance, music, language and tradition. Eventual land disputes with the British led to fierce battles, defeat and finally, deportation to the coast of Honduras. There, the Garifuna reestablished and adapted, eventually spreading along the coasts of present-day of Honduras, Belize, Guatemala and Nicaragua. Today, an estimated 300,000 Garifuna live in Central America and another 100,000 Garifuna immigrants live in the United States, with major concentrations in New York, New Orleans, Chicago, and Los Angeles. The Garifuna face the challenge of maintaining their rich culture across country borders; they are working to avoid cultural imperialism that could potentially eliminate their roots. It was this idea that catalyzed my research.

I wanted to find out what was keeping this relatively small group of people from being dissolved into the world’s melting pot. I was curious to find out what factors kept the culture intact and the people united as Garifunas. With Dr. Jared Johnson on board, we were able to secure ORCA funding as well as a Communications Department grant that allowed us to begin our research. Our project took on two forms: scholarly articles and a documentary film. Both objectives utilize the same original research; we are simply molding the final products into different mediums, with slightly different theses.

To begin the research, I networked with Garifuna cultural preservation groups online. These connections allowed my wife and me to interview and film within the Los Angeles Garifuna community in June 2011. We interviewed 14 Garifunas regarding their culture and their current efforts to maintain their heritage. We also gathered footage and information from a Garifuna language school, an online radio station and a social event. In the meantime, Dr. Johnson interviewed a Garifuna cultural activist and a Garifuna entrepreneur in New York. In July, Dr. Johnson and I traveled to New Orleans in order to film, interview and construct another perspective of Garifuna life in the U.S. From there, we went directly to Honduras where we spent 11 days along the coast, talking to Garifunas, interviewing and working to piece together the story of their culture and how they maintain it. While there, we immersed ourselves in the Garifuna experience. We visited schools, entered homes, drank coconut milk, danced the punta, and ate traditional food, all while gathering footage and interviewing members of the Garifuna community. We filmed a total of 16 depth interviews in Honduras and left with approximately 50 hours of video footage that I am compiling into a 30-minute documentary film. In total, we conducted 39 depth interviews in three states and two nations.

Our research provided details about Garifuna history, immigration patterns, language, dance, food and spirituality, with particular emphasis on the use of media in maintaining these cultural novelties. In short, the interviews we conducted are a sketch of Garifuna life, past and present, as well as a glimpse into what many hope will be the preservation and future of the culture. Our findings show that many Garifuna are using Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other Internet based platforms to connect with their community and culture on a global level. These venues allow the Garifuna to make great strides in maintaining their language and heritage, yet it is an uphill battle fraught with the constant intrusion of outside cultures that are often detrimental to Garifuna ideals.

Dr. Johnson and I are now using this information to complete our separate projects. On my end, I am working on the documentary film that highlights the Garifuna culture and their efforts to preserve it across national borders. I have finished transcribing all of the interviews and organizing the footage. I will begin writing the script in the coming weeks, with an in-depth focus on how they are maintaining their culture through social media. I will finish editing the documentary in June, at which point I will approach BYU-TV as broadcast venue. I will also submit the work to the Broadcast Education Association and other local and national film festivals. After the film has run its broadcast course, I will post it to YouTube, along with the complete interviews in order to increase cultural exposure and education. I feel a strong obligation to the ORCA donors as well as the Garifuna people to complete this documentary project in its entirety.

The second part of the project utilizes the same interview transcripts, but is dedicated to academic articles and submissions to academic conferences and journals. Dr. Johnson has written several academic papers about the Garifuna from the interview transcripts and is in the process of writing several more. One article has been accepted at a peer review conference at the International Communication Association. He will present findings that the Garifuna people are using social media in order to create a space to have a voice and reinvigorate their culture. These findings are the result of asking interviewees about their media habits and how they are using media to perpetuate their culture. Dr. Johnson also wrote another article that was accepted at the International Conference on Communication and Culture in Madrid. He will present findings that argue the Garifuna have a triple identity: black, Latin American, and Garifuna. This idea is supported by our findings that the Garifuna use whichever identity best suits the situations in which they find themselves.

In conclusion, the most profound lesson I have learned while doing this project is the complicated nature of human beings. I realized that telling the story of a culture, a people, or an individual is multifaceted, complex and will never be complete. Every interview gave us more understanding about the people and culture, yet more information also revealed the immense profundity of the topic and people we were studying. While I will never be able to tell the Garifuna story from every angle and perspective, my responsibility as a researcher and documentary filmmaker is to tell the story I discovered with accuracy and integrity.