Construcción de pensamientos: Esquemas y creencias

Somewhat in contrast to language planning for BC in Belize, which has focused on status- and prestige- planning, Garifuna language planning in Belize has focused on maintenance, revival, and preservation. Many of the language-planning efforts on behalf of Garifuna have originated in the National Garifuna Council, established in 1981 with the mission “[t]o preserve strengthen and develop our culture as well as promote economic development of the Garifuna people” (www.ngcbelize.org). Language planning-related activities have included a Garifuna-English dictionary (Cayetano 1993); the 1997 Language Policy Statement of the Garifuna Nation and Garifuna National Language Preservation Plan (discussed in Langworthy 2002), the 2001 UNESCO declaration of the music, dance and language of the Garinagu as a “Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity” (Cayetano and Cayetano 2005); a bilingual Garifuna-English primary school opened in Dangriga in 2007; and the Miss Garifuna pageant, a popular annual competition where young women from each of the Garinagu communities in Belize competes by dancing a traditional Garifuna dance, performing a short skit, speech or song, and introducing herself and answering questions in Garifuna.

The efforts and rhetoric of both the National Kriol Council and the National Garifuna Council have emphasized the link between language and cultural or ethnic identity. For BC, as I mentioned above, this results in the exclusion of all other non-

Creole BC speakers. On the flip side, in the case of Garifuna, this potentially means the exclusion of all Garinagu children who are no longer speakers of the language.

The possibility of losing one’s culture as a result of no longer speaking the language is something that comes up often in Hopkins, in two related, but different, ways. First, it is not at all uncommon to hear of someone becoming Creole because they no longer speak Garifuna. I have even heard people say this of their own relatives – people who are as Garinagu in heritage as the person telling me the story. Nonetheless, if the person can no longer speak Garifuna, or especially if he or she has married a Creole man or woman and does not speak Garifuna with their children, they are thought of as having lost their Garinagu ethnicity and of having become Creole. One interviewee, a woman in her 50’s, spoke to me about Garinagu people she knows who have become Creole. “He’s a Creole now,” she said of one Garinagu man from Hopkins who had stopped speaking Garifuna and never used Garifuna with his children. And on at least three different occasions I heard people speak about people from Dangriga or Seine Bight as being Creole – presumably as a result of no longer speaking the language, since both of these communities are considered to be Garifuna communities. One woman in her 20’s told me that she considered the other students in her high school outside of Dangriga to be Creole, since they did not speak Garifuna. Another young man in his 20’s told me, in discussing the difference between Hopkins and other Garinagu communities,“in Seine Bight, Dangriga, all of them are Creoles.” And finally, when answering the question “What do you think the differences are between Hopkins and Dangriga?” one 13-year old girl answered (in Garifuna), that Dangriga has a lot more Creoles.

This concept of Creole as a loss or a lack of culture also comes up in a second way and was exemplified by one woman who was watching a cultural presentation on the national television station. In the presentation groups from Belize City were performing indigenous dances. A Garinagu group danced a traditional Garifuna dance, a Maya group played traditional music, and a Creole dance group danced a samba, considered to be a part of Creole culture. The Hopkins woman scoffed when the Creole group came on, saying that samba was just a dance they copied from Garinagu, and suggesting that Creole culture was in fact at best a mixture of and at worst just copying from other ethnic groups in Belize.

Externally, there is nothing to distinguish someone who calls themselves a Creole from someone who calls themselves a Garinagu. Creole people in Belize count as their ancestors both Africans and Europeans (as well sometimes a mixture of Central American, Lebanese and other groups) and their racial makeup reflects this mixed background, ranging from very light- to very dark-skinned. Wright (1986) explored the racial relationship between Garinagu and others with her informants in Dangriga and Barranco, showing that Garinagu would accept the first statement below, indicating confusion between a Creole and a Garifuna, but not the last, indicating confusion between a Garifuna and a “Spanish” (Hispanic) man.

lenege garifuna pero gio le

He seems Garifuna but Creole this. (This man looks like a Garifuna but he is Creole)

*lenege garifuna pero muladu le

He seems Garifuna but Spanish this. (This man looks like a Garifuna but he is Spanish)

Thus with nothing to distinguish the Garinagu racially from Creoles, it is left to language and culture to bear the weight of ethnic identity. As many of the other distinguishing aspects of Garifuna culture are slowly being lost to modern Belizean culture and many of the traditional ways of life are lost, language remains the one identifying feature of a Garifuna, and without it, one can easily lose one’s identity and become Creole.

Understandably, the potential loss of one’s Garifuna identity as a result of not speaking the language makes many urban Garinagu, whose children may no longer be Garifuna speakers, uncomfortable. Largely as a result of this, the issue of language as a symbol of Garifuna ethnicity emerges in the discussion over whether to take out the requirement to speak Garifuna in the annual Miss Garifuna pageant. All that I know about this is from conversations with people in Hopkins, and I was not present for any discussion of this issue at the national level or in the National Garifuna Council, so I don’t know what arguments were presented at that level, but it is not difficult to imagine why it would come up. It has become harder and harder for the Garifuna communities other than Hopkins to put forward a young woman to compete in the annual competition leading up to Garifuna Settlement Day in November, simply because one of the requirements is that the young woman introduce herself in, answer a question in, and give a short presentation in Garifuna.

Even Hopkins people complain that the pageant has “gotten boring,” with the same dances and performances every year, and the inevitable win of the young woman who can express herself the best in Garifuna and who is almost always claimed to be a native of Hopkins in some way (if she is not actually the Hopkins queen then she is often

someone who grew up in Hopkins and since moved elsewhere or spent summers in Hopkins with relatives). But, Hopkins people will complain even more vociferously if language is taken out of the competition, and it will likely be seen as the last straw in a annual tradition with increasingly diminishing interest for its Hopkins audience.

Garinagu who are not from Hopkins do not deny that language is a strong symbol of their ethnicity and a part of their Garifuna culture and heritage. However, they simultaneously do not want to deny their children their Garifuna birthright. So they therefore seek (by their actions if not by their words) to diminish the symbolic value of the language as a marker of ethnic identity. As with the Creole language activists and the connection between ethnic identity and language I believe that this potential decoupling of ethnic identity and language may have the unintended consequence of strengthening the covert prestige of Garifuna in Hopkins.