The Garifuna, Punta And Punta Rock
...with. Visiting a Garifuna community on the island of Roatán, Honduras in 2007 sparked my interest in their culture and especially their most popular dance, the punta. In this essay I will introduce a brief history of the culture and song/dance style the punta, as well as talk about the creation of the highly popular style of world music, punta rock. This one category of music, punta, will be used to help explain the history, traditional practices and future expansions of the culture.
History of the Garifuna People
The Garinagu people are an ethnic group that was formed by the fusion of the Black Carib Indians and Nigerians. They are now referred to more commonly as the Garifuna people. Their history began in 1635 when the Spaniards had gone to West Africa and taken ships full of men and women to be used as slaves in the Americas. Fortunately for the Nigerians, the boats shipwrecked off the coast of the island of St. Vincent and they were able to swim ashore and seek refuge within the settlements of the Black Caribs. The Garifuna people take pride in fact that they were never enslaved. For the next century the Caribs and Nigerians intermixed and intermarried to form a single culture, the Garifuna (Kirtsoglou & Theodossopoulos, 2004).
Other inhibitors of the island were the French, allies of the Garifuna, and the British, enemies of the Garifuna. In 1795, the British took control of St. Vincent to start sugar cane plantations. Two years later they relocated the Garifuna prisoners to the island of Roatán in Honduras. Almost 2,500 Garifuna were deported. The island was too small and the land too unproductive to support their population forcing the Garifuna to petition the Spanish authorities to allow them to settle on the mainland of the area we now call Central America. Garifunas arrived in Trujillo, Honduras on May 17th, 1797. The Spanish...
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