The Deployment of Difference: The Space of Possibility and Garifuna Resistance to Dispossession in Honduras

This dissertation focusses on Garifuna struggles against dispossession from their territories in Honduras. My work focusses on two organizations and their affiliates in the present and is based on an ethnographic analysis of their activities in two locations in Honduras. The Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH) supports a growing Garifuna land defense movement that engages tactics of land occupation or recuperation in the Bay of Trujillo. The Ethnic Community Development Organization (ODECO) focuses on Garifuna inclusion in the nation state in order to re-claim Garifuna place in the Honduran city of La Ceiba. I analyze these organizations and sites to argue that Garifuna attempts to make and defend place in Honduras are rooted in opposition to ideas and practices underpinning racial capitalism since Conquest. Garifuna claims to place in Honduras depend upon a (re)making of a discursive space between races, which I name the space of possibility. The Garifuna exist across numerous national borders and increasingly traverse multiple shifting discourses of racial formation. Garifuna organizations navigate these complex and overlapping social contexts in a multitude of ways, so as to advance their struggle for land and place in Honduras. In the case of OFRANEH, Garifuna migration to the United States (U.S.) and return to Honduras has allowed for a number of points of solidarity. This signals to the possibility of challenging the racialized dynamics of dispossession in Honduras, along the lines of Indigeneity. In the case of ODECO, Garifuna migration to urban centers in Honduras and the U.S. has fostered the organizations links to regional activist networks centered on Afro-descent. This supports Garifuna claims to place in the Honduran city of La Ceiba. While these two organizations and their affiliates engage divergent routings of the space of possibility in their defenses of rural and urban Garifuna place, I conclude this dissertation by arguing that this twin-pronged approach is essential to maintaining the discursive space between races that the Garinagu so skilfully occupy.