The Ends of Paradise: Race, Extraction, and the Struggle for Black Life in Honduras

The future of Honduras begins and ends on the white sand beaches of Tela Bay on the country's northeastern coast where Garifuna, a Black Indigenous people, have resided for over two hundred years. In The Ends of Paradise, Christopher Loperena examines the Garifuna struggle for life and collective autonomy, and he demonstrates how this struggle challenges concerted efforts by the state and multilateral institutions to render both their lands and their culture into fungible tourism products. He reveals how purportedly inclusive tourism projects form part of a larger neoliberal, extractivist development regime, which remakes Black and Indigenous territories into frontiers of progress for the mestizo majority. Loperena is an associate professor in the PhD program in anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Sponsored by: Teaching, Learning, and Campus Life Committee: The Agnes Moreland Jackson Diversity Program Fund; Latin American Studies Program @ Pomona College & Latin American Studies Lectureship; Institute for Global/Local Action & Study (IGLAS); Chicano Latino Student Affairs (CLSA); Chicanx Latinx Transnational Studies @ Pitzer College; Intercollegiate Department of Chicanx Latinx Studies (IDCLS).