Early Spanish colonial Honduras initially held great promise as an abundant source of precious metals. The first Africans arrived in 1540 to replace the rapidly declining, enslaved indigenous labour pool, especially in the silver mines, which proved more promising than gold retrieval. By the 1600s, many enslaved Africans had escaped and mixed in with indigenous people, poor Spanish migrants and freed blacks to form the range of identities that constitute the mainstream Honduran rural mestizo peasant culture.
The second important stream of Africans was brought by British colonists. They came to the Bay of Honduras in the 1600s and 1700s for plantation work and natural resource extraction. Many of these mixed with the Miskito population.
The other important Afro-Honduran group to arrive during the colonial era were English-speaking Afro-Caribbean Creoles. These were free persons who migrated to the Bay islands in the 1840s, along with a few white Cayman Islanders. Later they were joined by other Creoles from Jamaica and the Mosquitia.
Bay Island Creoles practised a self-sufficient lifestyle centred on fishing and agriculture and produced many of the basic commodities they needed. Throughout the nineteenth century, they existed as an autonomous economic and cultural entity with little or no contact with the Spanish-speaking Honduras, preferring to link their culture and economy to Belize.
From the 1920s, Bay Island Creoles began to abandon their agriculture-based lifestyle. English language skills enabled better-paying jobs for males on the Honduran mainland plantations and merchant ships.
Although Honduras was given sovereignty over the Bay Islands by the British in 1860, in exchange for Belize, it was not until the mid-twentieth century that the first official steps were taken to ‘hispanicize’ the islands. Starting in the late 1940s, Bay Island Creole children were routinely punished for speaking English in school, and English language instruction was forced underground into private home schools.
Nevertheless, assimilationist measures and ‘hispanicization’ did not gather significant momentum until the 1990s, with considerable mestizo in-migration prompted by the rapid growth of tourism. Mestizo immigrants from the mainland now comprise over 60 per cent of the Bay Island population.
These changes have prompted Bay Island Creoles to redouble their efforts to maintain their cultural identity and language preferences.
Garífuna and Creoles, as Afro-Hondurans, have a history of organizing together against racial discrimination. In the 1970s they founded the Fraternal Black Honduran Organization (La Organización Fraternal Negro Hondureño, OFRANEH) which still plays a prominent role in Honduran civil society.
