MAYANS, GARIFUNAS, ARAWAKS AND KARIBS

When the Africans who escaped the slave-trading ships and joined the Karibs in the smaller Antilles, south of Puerto Rico, they formed a new community, known today as Garifunas; later on expelled by the Europeans, who were not able to enslaved them, and forcibly moved them to the Caribbean coasts of Central America. Many of their descendants live now in the Bronx. The Karibs were originally from the Northern region of what today is Venezuela and Colombia and were not called Karibs; were part of the larger Arawak societies; that had already begun -prior to the European’s colonization- to move south as far as what is today the frontiers with Bolivia and Paraguay. There, they mixed with the Quechuas and Guaranis, forming new communities with new names. The Arawaks had a unique practice: when invading or mixing with other societies: they would create a new name for the new formed communities. In consequence, when mixed with the Igneris -the first colonizers in the Caribbean- they became Tainos. Once they colonized a place, they continued moving into new territories. Artifacts found by archeologists suggest that they had also moved as far North as the Bahamas, Florida and the Yucatán peninsula, and west to what is today Central America. When a student at a conference asked a University of Merida anthropologist, dressed-up in a type of indigenous Central American outfit, at a conference I organized at CCNY, if he was a Mayan, he answered, “No, I am a Mexican who happens to be a Mayan speaker. He also suggested that they were researching the influence of the Arawaks in the Caribbean coasts of Central America. (to be continued)