West Indians or Black English-Speakers in the Honduran Caribbean: Actors and Discourses That Cast Them as a Threat to the Image of the Nation, 1903–32

Examining the question of Black migrants from Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Grand Cayman, and Belize in the Honduran Caribbean between 1903 and 1932 also means engaging with the historical context in which the modern state took shape and a discourse of Honduras as an Indigenous and mestizo nation was consolidated. This period also corresponds to the second phase of the Liberal Reform (1876–1949), when the state included or excluded subaltern subjects through public health, immigration, and colonization policies. Moreover, it forms part of a connected or transnational history of relations between the United States and the Caribbean, linked in part by the dynamics generated by the banana plantation economy, a context shared across Central America.

Within this context, the paper identifies a range of political, social, and intellectual actors who expressed opposition to a culturally heterogeneous migrant population marked by distinctive discourses and cultural practices. These characteristics made this population a target of exclusion from the image of the nation that took shape between 1910 and 1930.