In Search of Our Mother’s Voices: An Autoethnography on Garifuna Women’s Feminist Praxis

In the south Bronx, three generations of Garifuna New Yorkers of Caribbean Central American descent continue to uphold the maternal network cultivated by Garifuna migrants. Through autoethnographic vignettes, this article is grounded in the public and private spaces of the Garifuna women’s matrilineal network in the south Bronx. By exploring my conversations with my mother and aunts, I actively navigate and form an intimate archive of race, gender, and migration through the lived experience of first-generation Garifuna-Guatemalan migrants in the Garifuna hub of the south Bronx. Garinagu women navigate the south Bronx as cartographers, embodying an ancestral sense of space and creating maps and subjectivities that are simultaneously Black and Indigenous. Stories told in women-led spaces shape the subjectivity of Garifuna New Yorkers by utilizing the performativity of Garifuna(ness) to map the metropolis through their proximity to other Garinagu and Afro-diasporic communities. Black feminist ethnography and participatory mapping ground my experience as a Garifuna woman, a subjectivity embodied vis-á-vis continuous displacement, dispossession, and racial gendered violence. Garifuna women are embodied archives of ancestral memories, and I theorize that we remember our ancestors through autoethnographic work connected to my mother and matrilineal network.