The History of the Garifuna: Indigenous Legacies in the Caribbean with Dr. Paul Joseph López Oro

The Garifuna are an Afro-indigenous community  native to Saint Vincent who,  in the late eighteenth century, were forcibly exiled to Central America after surrendering to the British during the Second Carib War. Dr. Paul Joseph López Oro joins this episode to discuss this history and the preservation and legacy of Garifuna traditions throughout Central America and the US today.

Dr. Paul Joseph López Oro is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Africana Studies at Smith College and the 2021-2022 Miriam Jiménez Román Fellow at The LatinX Project at New York University. His research and teaching interests are on Black Latin American and U.S. Black Latinx social movements, Black Feminist & LGBTQ activism and political mobilizations, and Black Queer Feminist ethnographies in the Américas. His in-progress manuscript, Indigenous Blackness in the Americas: The Queer Politics of Self-Making Garifuna New York is a transdisciplinary ethnography on how gender and sexuality shapes the ways in which transgenerational Garifuna New Yorkers of Central American descent negotiate, perform, and articulate their multiple subjectivities as Black, Indigenous, and Central American Caribbeans. Follow Dr. López Oro on Twitter.