In my previous reflection, I wrote about remaining Honduran while becoming a citizen of the United States, about the relatives who taught me to carry our own history and grief without attempting to become another people, and about the continuity of the landscape connecting the place where I now stand with the place where I was born.

That continuity allows me to see a reality of persecution here and a reality of persecution there.

Here, immigrant communities are living under an expanding apparatus of ICE arrest, detention, transfer, removal, and fear. There, the Shield of the Americas is consolidating a United States-led security formation across a hemisphere in which Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous communities, territorial defenders, women, queer people, labor movements, and political dissenters already carry long histories of state violence.

ICE and the Shield of the Americas are distinct structures, and the people living their consequences cannot be collapsed into one another. Yet both emerge from a political logic that converts movement, difference, territory, and resistance into problems of security and control. The people pursued by ICE here may be fleeing governments, security forces, economic arrangements, and forms of violence strengthened there through United States policy. A person can escape one configuration of danger only to encounter another upon reaching the United States.

The land is uninterrupted, and increasingly, so is the apparatus of control.

This is the hemispheric context in which I want to speak about the Garinagu—the Garifuna people—the appropriation of Garifuna culture, and the assault upon Garifuna territory in Honduras.

Donald Trump’s pardon of former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández was more than an isolated act of clemency. Hernández had been convicted in the United States and sentenced to forty-five years in prison for conspiring to import cocaine and related firearms offenses. Trump pardoned him while publicly supporting Nasry Asfura, the National Party candidate in the 2025 Honduran election. Asfura was declared the winner after an extraordinarily close and disputed count and assumed the presidency in January 2026.

Trump’s intervention did not act alone, but it helped rehabilitate and strengthen the political formation associated with Hernández and signaled that the National Party could once again expect recognition and partnership from the United States.

The political message was clear to me: a former president convicted in a United States court for using political authority in service of a massive drug-trafficking conspiracy could be returned to freedom when his political restoration served the interests of the person occupying the White House.

That renewed alignment is now unfolding alongside the Shield of the Americas, a counter-cartel coalition launched by Trump in March 2026 with the participation of leaders from across Latin America and the Caribbean, including the president of Honduras. Its institutional form joins governments, military capacities, law enforcement, intelligence, and United States power around a shared definition of hemispheric threat.

Every shield must be examined according to whom it protects, whose power it strengthens, and whom it leaves exposed.

The Shield did not create the violence that already shapes life in Honduras. It enters a country with a long history of militarized public life, corruption, repression of labor and political movements, violence against women and queer people, and the criminalization of Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous territorial defense. The danger lies in placing expanded security cooperation into the hands of political and institutional formations that have repeatedly treated communities, bodies, and movements as threats when they stand in the way of extraction or control.

For Garifuna communities, an expansion of state security power does not arrive upon neutral ground. It enters territories where people defending collective land have already faced surveillance, threats, criminalization, displacement, disappearance, and death. It strengthens relationships with a Honduran state that has repeatedly treated Garifuna territorial authority as an obstacle to tourism, private development, agroindustry, extraction, and national control.

On July 6, 2026, Honduran state security forces carried out a violent eviction in the ancestral territory of the Garifuna community of San Juan in Tela. According to information provided by OFRANEH, hundreds of National Police officers entered the territory using tear gas, live ammunition, threats, and excessive force. At least five Garifuna human-rights defenders were arbitrarily detained, and OFRANEH’s legal team was initially denied access to them. The territory is protected by a binding 2023 judgment of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights recognizing the community’s ancestral rights and requiring the Honduran state to protect them.

This is a reality of persecution there.

It is also the political context within which Honduras continues to consume Garifuna culture.

The appropriation of Garifuna culture has become so normalized that many Hondurans no longer recognize it as appropriation. The pattern became especially visible through Punta.

Punta is a living Garifuna cultural form carrying language, memory, sensuality, courtship, humor, pleasure, grief, bodily intelligence, and communal relationship. Garifuna language, dance, music, and oral traditions bring Indigenous Caribbean and African elements together and carry historical memory and collective knowledge across generations. These traditions remain alive because Garifuna communities across Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, and Nicaragua continue to carry them.

Honduras embraced the rhythm while obscuring the people, history, and territorial relationships from which it came.

That pattern now extends across Garifuna culture. Garifuna music, food, language, clothing, imagery, spirituality, knowledge, aesthetics, and coastal ways of life are consumed as national culture, entertainment, tourism, and identity. Practices that are specifically Garifuna are casually renamed Honduran. Restaurants serve Garifuna foods without naming their origin. Public celebrations use Garifuna music and movement without acknowledging the people who created and preserved them. Tourism markets the beauty of Garifuna territories while the people who have sustained those territories for generations are pressured, displaced, criminalized, and excluded from decisions about their land.

Honduras celebrates Garifuna culture while the Garinagu struggle to protect the conditions that allow that culture to remain alive.

The structure becomes visible when we place a commercialized performance of Punta beside a community-rooted Garifuna performance.

In the commercialized performance, the cultural form remains while Garifuna authorship, language, ancestry, history, peoplehood, and authority disappear from the framing. The rhythm and movement become available as generalized Honduran entertainment.

The hips remain while the people disappear.

Movement is enlarged into caricature, and sexual display becomes the dominant public meaning of Punta. Language may remain as sound while being severed from understanding. Rhythm remains while its relationships with ancestry, land, community, grief, and obligation are removed.

In the community-rooted performance, language, voices, drums, bodies, collective presence, and cultural authority remain together. The performers are not costumes assembled around a rhythm. They are the people through whom the music lives. The beauty arises through relationship: voices answering one another, bodies moving with the drums, language carrying memory, and each person remaining within a collective field.

The distinction is between relationship and extraction.

Sensuality is part of life. Pleasure is part of life. The body is part of life. The corruption occurs through severance, when a multidimensional cultural form is flattened into marketable entertainment and one element is enlarged until it obscures the social, ancestral, linguistic, spiritual, and political world that gives it meaning.

Appropriated Punta keeps the excitement and discards the obligations. It takes the body without the ancestor, the rhythm without the land, the language without its meaning, and the beauty without the grief.

This reaches far beyond representation. It is the cultural expression of the same colonial process taking place upon Garifuna territory. It produces the coast without the communities, the food without the people who created it, Punta without the Garinagu, and culture without authority.

The appropriation of Garifuna culture and the seizure of Garifuna land belong to the same structure. In both cases, what others desire is retained while Garifuna political presence is treated as an obstacle. Culture is separated from the people who created it. The people are separated from their territory. The culture is then nationalized, commercialized, and made available for consumption while Garifuna demands for land, safety, governance, autonomy, and self-determination are treated as inconvenient.

The nation consumes the culture while the security apparatus contains the people.

This is coloniality in the present tense.

Yet Garifuna communities continue to generate the leadership required to withstand these conditions.

Garifuna leadership is carried throughout community life. It is present in those who defend territory, organize meetings, prepare food, care for children and elders, transmit language and memory, accompany people through grief, sustain ceremony, resolve conflict, document violations, raise resources, protect one another, and remain present through danger, exhaustion, and loss.

Much of this leadership receives little public recognition. It is exercised by people whose names may never circulate beyond their communities, yet whose daily labor makes collective continuity possible. They toil within the relationships through which a people remains a people.

This leadership is frequently carried by women whose political labor is hidden inside the language of service, care, kinship, and community responsibility. Feeding people, sustaining trust, transmitting memory, protecting the vulnerable, defending territory, and holding communities together are often described as support for leadership when they are leadership in their own right.

The visibility of particular individuals can help the world recognize a movement, but no individual carries a people alone. Every public expression of leadership arises from a wider field of organizers, elders, territorial defenders, caregivers, teachers, cooks, healers, cultural workers, and community members whose courage and discipline may never receive equal acknowledgment.

Garifuna leadership is extraordinary because communities living under sustained pressure continue to generate the care, political intelligence, courage, relationship, and collective discipline required to remain present as a people.

This, too, is erased through appropriation. When Garifuna culture is reduced to music, dance, food, tourism, or national imagery, the people whose labor sustains that culture disappear. The public consumes the visible expression while remaining separated from the daily work, political struggle, collective leadership, and relationships that allow it to live.

OFRANEH is one of the collective political homes through which this field of leadership is sustained. It works for Garifuna autonomy and collective social, economic, cultural, and territorial rights; defends ancestral territory; strengthens ancestral forms of governance and self-determination; and advances community radio, bilingual education, health, spirituality, and the leadership of women and young people.

Immigrant communities carry a particular responsibility in relation to this struggle.

Migration does not free us from the colonial relationships we inherited. Distance from our countries of origin does not give us greater permission to use Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous cultures as sources of identity, beauty, legitimacy, or nostalgia.

Some of us left as children without choosing. Some left because remaining became economically, politically, or personally dangerous. Some have been told that departure disqualified us from continuing to belong. These wounds are real. They cannot be repaired through appropriation.

Too often, immigrant communities reproduce abroad the same extraction practiced by the nation at home. We wear Maya textiles without relationship with the weavers and authorities who protect them. We consume Garifuna music, food, movement, and imagery while remaining silent about the seizure of Garifuna territory. We use Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous cultures to express where we come from while overlooking the living peoples whose authority makes those cultures possible.

This must stop.

We do not need to possess Garifuna or Maya culture to remain Honduran or Guatemalan. We can carry our own histories, departures, losses, and national relationships without becoming another people. The relatives who raised me taught me that grief for what had been disrupted in our own lineages created responsibility toward the peoples who had preserved collective continuity. It created no entitlement to become them or to take what they had protected.

Immigrant communities possess forms of power that can be redirected toward solidarity. We have access to money, universities, foundations, media, elected officials, cultural institutions, markets, and international networks. We send remittances, organize festivals, purchase cultural goods, shape public narratives, and influence how our countries are understood abroad.

That power should strengthen the peoples whose cultures we have too often treated as available for our use.

Rather than appropriating Garifuna culture, we should follow Garifuna leadership and support the defense of Garifuna territory, language, governance, safety, and collective life.

Rather than treating Maya textiles as generalized Central American beauty, we should recognize Maya weavers and authorities as the collective authors and protectors of living systems of knowledge. We should purchase directly and fairly, defend their collective intellectual and cultural rights, and support the movement Maya women have created to determine how their textiles, designs, images, and knowledge are used.

The National Maya Weavers Movement brings together Indigenous organizations from across Guatemala to secure recognition of Maya communities as the collective authors of their traditional textile designs and to challenge the extraction and commercialization of their knowledge without consent or compensation. Maya textiles carry extraordinary creativity and labor, yet much of their economic value is captured by tourism companies, exporters, retailers, and designers rather than reaching the Indigenous women and communities whose knowledge produced them.

Maya weavers are cultural and political authorities carrying collective knowledge. Garifuna leaders are authorities within living communities defending territory, memory, governance, and future. Our responsibility is to move resources, access, visibility, and protection toward them without attempting to direct, translate, possess, or replace their leadership.

The immigrant’s longing for home does not create a right to take from the peoples who remained. Our nostalgia cannot be repaired through their cultures. It must be transformed into responsibility toward their continuity.

We are therefore asking this community to move from recognition into material solidarity.

Through the For A Loving Future Solidarity Fund, we are raising support for OFRANEH and the National Mayan Weavers Movement. These movements carry the work of territorial defense, cultural continuity, collective authority, and the protection of knowledge that others have too often consumed without responsibility.

We ask those of us living outside Honduras and Guatemala, especially those who draw identity, memory, beauty, or belonging from Garifuna and Maya cultures, to contribute generously through the For A Loving Future Solidarity Fund.

When making your contribution, please include a note indicating that you want your donation directed to OFRANEH and the National Maya Weavers Movement. This will allow us to identify the contributions made in response to this appeal and direct them accordingly.

This support purchases no access, proximity, permission, authority, control, or recognition. It is an act of reciprocity and allegiance. The resources will move in support of priorities identified by the movements themselves, without requiring them to perform their suffering, translate their knowledge, or surrender authority over their work.

The alternative to appropriation is accountable relationship, material support, and allegiance to the authority of living peoples.

Here, ICE governs who may remain, who may be detained, and who may be removed. There, the Shield of the Americas extends a related security logic across governments, borders, and territories. These structures remain distinct, yet the architecture connecting them is becoming increasingly visible. The people pursued by ICE here may be fleeing conditions being militarized there. The communities defending territory there may face governments strengthened by the same country determining who is permitted to remain here.

We cannot allow the forces of control to coordinate across borders while the peoples living their consequences remain separated from one another.

The land is continuous. Our responsibility must become continuous as well.

Let us stop extracting culture and begin strengthening the peoples who carry it. Let our admiration become material support, our grief become responsibility, and our access become solidarity.

Celebrating Garifuna culture requires defending Garifuna life. Celebrating Garifuna life requires defending Garifuna land.