An Interview with Recuerdos de Nicaragua, Part One

Artist not known. Saludes de Bluefields, Miskito Indian girls pressing sugar-cane, ca. 1900.

Last spring, Elise A. Mitchell recorded a conversation with members of Recuerdos de Nicaragua, the founder and head archivist, Jasmine Chavez Helm, and Melanie White, the research and content manager. Recuerdos de Nicaragua, is a physical and digital archive that chronicles the history of the Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities in the Mosquito Coast of Honduras and Nicaragua. They currently have a GoFundMe campaign to support their collections, digitization, and future programming. This published interview is based on their original conversation and has been edited for clarity.

Elise A. Mitchell (EAM): First, would you mind introducing us to the project. What is “Recuerdos de Nicaragua”? What are your roles in the project? Who else is involved?

Jasmine Chavez Helm (JCH): “Recuerdos de Nicaragua” is a physical and digital archive - and eventually a database - which chronicles and archives the history of the Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities in the Mosquito Coast of Honduras and Nicaragua. The Mosquito Coast itself covers southern Honduras on the eastern coastline as well as the entire eastern coastline of Nicaragua. I am the founder and the head archivist, and we have two other people, in addition to Melanie White, who are working on the project with me. They are Kmercial McKenzie, our community and outreach associate, and Andy Zalkin, our digital archive associate. She focuses specifically on digitizing the physical archive.

Melanie White (MW): Andy, Kmercial, and I joined the advisory committee for “Recuerdos de Nicaragua” in 2021. I am the research and content manager. I’ll be working with Jasmine to devise captions for all of our archival material. Also, in the future, I plan to host lectures and workshops on  the history of the region, and to contribute to the archive itself because a lot of my research overlaps with the mission of the archive. So, I’ll primarily be contributing to the Instagram archive, and as we further expand into publications and exhibits, I’ll contribute to those as well. 

EAM: This is so exciting.

JCH: I wanted to mention, the reason why I decided to have a committee was because in 2021, I became a CCCADI fellow for the Caribbean Center of Cultural Art African Diaspora Institute. Grace Ali was the head of the fellowship coordinator, and she's the head curator there. She recommended that I start a committee. She also encouraged all of the fellows to indigenize their curatorial practice. I took her advice to make it more community-based instead of just me being the holder. I became familiar with Melanie's work at the start of my research. And then, through the Recuerdos de Nicaragua Instagram, I met Kmercial, who's a musician. He's from Jamaica, but he has strong ties to the Mosquito Coast. His wife is from Nicaragua, and they have children together. And then Andy Zalkin is a photographer, and she's Nicaraguan and Ukrainian. I really wanted people either from the coastal community or from Nicaragua and its diaspora.

EAM: I want to circle back to the question of community engagement and also archival practice a little bit later in the interview. Some of our readers might not be familiar with the Central American coast. Could you tell us a bit more about the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua and the wider multicultural Mosquito Coast?

JCH: Sure. I'll start, and Melanie, if you want to jump in at any time, that would be awesome, because your research centers the region, and your family is from there. The Mosquito Coast goes beyond the border of Nicaragua into Honduras. What's unique about the coast is that it was never colonized by the Spanish, and it really was looked at as a resource for the British. It became a British protectorate in the eighteenth century, I believe, through the nineteenth century, and then it was incorporated into Nicaragua. I think, Melanie, correct me if I'm wrong, in the late nineteenth century.

MW: Yes, exactly. 1894.

JCH: But its government acts autonomously. Even though President Daniel Ortega is the president of all of Nicaragua, the region has a different type of government. The coast is so unique because it was such a center for trade and piracy. There are multiple ethnicities and cultures there. I’ll start off first with acknowledging the Indigenous communities that are there, which include the Mískitu, as well as a specific Afro-Indigenous group that were referred to as the Zambo Mískitu and they were the larger tribal leaders and group during the nineteenth century, the Mayangna - who are indigenous towards the center of the Mosquito Coast, along the Río Coco (River Wangki), I believe. There are the Ulwa, and the Rama, and then we have the Garifuna who are an Afro-Indigenous group and many of them live in a specific city, which I think is Pearl Lagoon, Melanie, do you remember?

MW: Orinoco. It’s near the town of Pearl Lagoon on the southern Caribbean Coast and is part of the Pearl Lagoon municipality.

JCH: When the Garifuna were exiled from Saint Vincent, they settled in coastal Honduras and later migrated to Belize, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. The Honduran Garifuna community is much larger than that of Nicaragua. And then we also have the Creoles, an Afro-Caribbean population of mixed African, European, and Indigenous ancestry whose presence in the region dates back to the early European settlements and the institution of slavery in the Mosquitia. The Jamaican and Afro-Caribbean populations that came to the coast during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to work in the logging, mining, and banana industries there form part of the Creole community. In the late nineteenth century, Chinese populations also migrated to the Nicaraguan Mosquitia to work in the mining and commerce industries. Those are the major communities that are there, in addition to smaller populations of German and British descendants. Currently you have an influx of Mestizo people coming from the Pacific and central regions of Nicaragua to participate in illegal farming and logging that is disrupting the region’s ecosystems, including its protected rainforests. In fact, the second largest rainforest in this hemisphere is in the Mosquito Coast. These industries have also led to the deaths of Indigenous people and to Indigenous people going missing. 

MW: That was an excellent overview. I would just add that due to this extremely long and contested colonial history, Black and Indigenous activists and organizers on the coast are still demanding autonomy and Black and Indigenous sovereignty over the region because, as has been mentioned, a lot of issues like the ongoing colonization of Caribbean coastal lands by farmers and cattle ranchers from other parts of Nicaragua are pretty much state-backed. There is also the issue of  capitalist mega projects. Back in 2013, the Nicaraguan state allied with this Hong Kong-based corporation to build a canal that would run directly through a lot of Black and Indigenous coastal communities, and also other Nicaraguan communities, and destroy the water supply and environment. A lot of this ongoing colonization is state-backed even though the state technically “granted” autonomy to the region in the 1980s.

When you look up the region, you might see that it's called the Autonomous Regions of the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua (Caribbean Coast Autonomous Regions). During the Nicaraguan Revolution in 1979, and in the eighties, there was a nationalist project that sought to integrate the Caribbean or Mosquito Coast - this region that had historically been separate and apart from the Nicaraguan nation. That did not sit well with a lot of Black and Indigenous populations due to their longer histories of semi-autonomous rule and control of their societies. Indigenous and Black organizing for autonomy following the Civil War in the eighties led to the granting of autonomy in 1987. What that really has led to, after heavy organizing on the part of Black and Indigenous communities on the coast, is the titling of Black and Indigenous territories and the rise of some Black and Indigenous people in local positions of government. But there are still ongoing issues, particularly the issue of state-backed Mestizo colonos and their occupation of coastal lands, of the state-based exploitation of the region’s natural resources, and of police violence and the militarization of coastal communities, to name a few. 

And so, I just wanted to note that the coast has a very rich history of political organizing.  They've been depicted as apolitical pawns captured between multiple colonial powers (Spain, Great Britain, Nicaragua), but I think it's really important to acknowledge that people on the coast are political subjects who are actively engaged with their history. And so, that can open up the conversation about the archive’s mission, which is highlighting and allowing people across the diaspora to engage with these histories, because all the objects and images in the archive are incredibly tied, as you mentioned Elise, to these histories of imperialism and colonialism in the region.

EAM: A lot of the photos in the archive come from postcards made by Moravian missionaries, and some images from the colonial period. Some are promoting US interests in the region. In many ways, these images are products of the sinister history of imperialism in the region. How does your archival practice confront this history? And how does your archival practice and digital projects serve as a form of healing and redress for these histories of violence?

JCH: That is an excellent question. I really appreciate you asking it because the project actually comes out of a place of healing familial and generational trauma. My father is of Afro- Nicaraguan descent. He is a Black Nicaraguan man who denies his Blackness, which is not uncommon in Latin America, unfortunately. I started the project because I wanted to learn more about Afro-Nicaraguan history. I have a more specific story that we can talk about in terms of how the archives and this research started, but I wanted to heal those gaping wounds. 

I was estranged from my Nicaraguan side of my family, and my father for about fifteen years, because he had a drug problem. This project was a way for me to access Nicaragua through research, specifically dress research, because I'm a fashion historian. It was a way for me to access my history and have a venue and an angle to look at Nicaraguan culture. I'm schooled in archival research, and I've worked in archives since 2010. I have been in and out of museums and the private sector. So, I have a very wide experience regarding that. But what I want to say “Recuerdos de Nicaragua” is about is archival justice and making sure that archives and collections are accessible to the cultures that they are about. And that's why we chose Instagram and TikTok as the digital platforms because they are publicly accessible. That's why we want to create a website which digitizes the physical archive, as well as links to databases and stuff like that, so people can learn about their history and heal. 

A lot of people from the coast and from Nicaragua have reached out to me and said that they're so thankful for the representation, and I think the captioning. I always try my best to caption as much as possible. I want it to be a teachable archive and a historical archive. And captioning is going to be really important for us when it comes to the website. By providing those histories and those contexts and indigenizing the space, I think we're able to provide healing for the communities of the coast and through the diaspora. Melanie, if you have any thoughts about the archives because we connected through this research, I would love to hear your thoughts.

MW: I totally agree. That's what I had in mind, too. I don't want to underestimate how important the mere act of captioning is because a lot of these images are dispersed or untitled. And so, I think you're doing that work of uncovering the context of these images, and even just uncovering them, because they're so difficult to find. I commend Jasmine hugely for the work that she's done digging through eBay, through all kinds of digital online archival repositories, and finding these images. A huge part is just uncovering this archive and making it, as Jasmine said, accessible to the Nicaraguan diaspora and the coastal diaspora. 

I think another important thing is to allow our interlocutors or our community to engage and produce social commentary, critique, and public opinion about the images. Going forward with our goals as an archive, we really want to receive feedback from the community that we are serving, and allow people to do that critical work as well. It's also important to note that Jasmine also provided a lot of resources and books in the early stages of the project. So, it's also a secondary resource for people to learn more about the historical context behind these images. Our work includes critical commentary in the way that we organize and curate these images and write about them, but then it also opens up that conversation for other people to engage in social critique.

JCH: Yeah, absolutely. And I just want to piggyback off of what you mentioned, Melanie, in terms of where I find these images. I've never been to Nicaragua, not even Managua, which is where my dad's family comes from. I started doing all this research digitally. I looked through the Moravian archives in Germany, I went to digital archives in Britain, and Central America, as well as where I’ve found most of the items: eBay and AbeBooks. I could find a $10 postcard or $100 postcard. One of the most recent, great finds that I just landed was a photograph by George Schmidt, which was published in  “Souvenirs de Nicaragua”. I found the actual gelatin silver print from a dealer in Paris. And so, that's really exciting. Because we're doing the GoFundMe, I'm hoping to actually purchase “Souvenirs de Nicaragua.” It's about $150. What's lucky is, because no one's doing this collecting work, it has been affordable for me to start the archive. I obviously can't do it forever because I'm not made of money. So, that's why we're funding. So, please pay me and pay us so we can continue to do this work.

Our conversation with Recuerdos de Nicaragua will continue with Part Two.