An Interview with Recuerdos de Nicaragua, Part Three

George Schmidt, Recuerdos de Nicaraguaua: Rancho de mineros chinos, ca. 1900.

Chinese people first arrived in the Caribbean Coast in the late nineteenth century and lived in the cities of Bluefields, Puerto Cabezas, El Bluff and Laguna de Perlas. The majority of Chinese immigrants were from the Guangdong province. Many were likely attracted to the job opportunities in mining and logging. Later, many Chinese-Nicaraguans became entrepreneurs and opened general and clothing stores. The Chinese community in the Bluefields is believed to be the largest in Central America.

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): I asked you guys about your ties to the Mosquito Coast already. Melanie, did you have anything you wanted to add in terms of doing work on a region that you have personal ties to? I know, for me, as a person of Caribbean descent, I find that studying the region is always also an intimate and personal journey. And I'm wondering how your ties to the region have informed what's bringing each of you to the project. We’ve spoken a little bit about this already, but I’ll pose it again.

Melanie White (MW): For me, my ties to the coast are on my mom's side of the family. So, because of my mom, I am Creole, or Afro-Nicaraguan, from Corn Island on the Caribbean Coast. My dad was an Afro-Cuban man of mixed descent. My interest in researching the region started in high school. It goes back to a lot of what we were saying, which is that the history of this region is so little known. I would say that even certain British Latin American colonies like Belize and Guyana which are a bit more well known, are still spoken about as anomalies; however the Mosquito Coast is even lesser known in the history of the Americas and the history of colonialism on the continent. There were just so few resources about the region while I was growing up. What I wanted to learn about was its history. In large part, that is because I wasn't getting any information from my family because the education system in the region has been dominated by the Nicaraguan state, so the curriculum has come from them and reflected nationalist Nicaraguan history while marginalizing that of the Mosquito Coast. Today, many, if not the majority, of teachers are Mestizx Nicaraguans. Many people from the region don't know their history with great depth. 

It was in high school that I had this deep yearning to know more about the people and place that I come from. I did a lot of digging and historical research on my own and that carried through my undergraduate studies, my master's degree, and now my PhD. I've really been interested in being able to talk about the history of the region in a way that doesn't continue to recite the baseline, “Oh, this was a region that the British and the Spanish were fighting over.” We need that general overview, but I find that in other sites in the Caribbean or across the Black diaspora people are able to enter the work, and there's this - I don't want to say shared understanding - but there's a baseline understanding that then allows them to do, for example, critical cultural studies or look at photographic images of Black women and girls, which is what I wanted to do. But I find that a lot of the time I get bogged down in reciting this neat chronological narrative of the region because of how little known it is. And so, that was a huge contribution of the archive, to archive is to lay that foundation and claim the Caribbean Coast as a Caribbean region and skip some of those preliminary things that I find annoying sometimes, in order to do deeper historical, anti-colonial, and recontextualizing work. Here I would like to give a shout out to the work of scholars and activists like Edmund T. Gordon, Juliet Hooker, Charles R. Hale, Karl Offen, Jennifer Goett, Courtney Desiree Morris, Larry Montenegro Baena, and Socorro Woods Downs, each of whom have done the heavy lifting when it comes to documenting the histories, cultures, and politics of Black and Indigenous Mosquitians and who continue to pave the way for other scholars such as myself to also take up this important work. 

Doing historical and archival research, as so many scholars of the Black diaspora and Indigenous communities have pointed out, is so difficult because most of the objects, images, and texts we engage with are either produced by or documented, arranged, and categorized by colonizers. We encounter all this colonial violence in the archive, and it's traumatizing because you don't know your history, or you know it from this very limited and confined lens. We have to do that digging and contextualizing work to push the boundaries of what's there and connect the dots and connect different pieces to uncover more detailed, larger, and fuller histories. Despite how difficult it can be to see missionary men gazing at Black women and girls on the Mosquito Coast in my research, for example, one of the contradictions of this work is that a lot of these images are so striking and beautiful. So, I feel like there's this unstated - not unstated - but it's just the contradiction of doing this kind of historical work. We are so thirsty for these images that it's easy to almost say, “Oh, look, I found this image from this colonial context. It's so beautiful, look, this is our people.” But no, it's really important to not fall into that trap, and always have that critical eye and do deeper contextualizing work. 

I will say that even for my family, they might not be as interested in the historical context as I am, but it's been really meaningful just for them to see an image of someone who comes from the community that they come from. Just because for so long, you're made to feel like you don't have a history. My family members who grew up on the Caribbean coast were so confused about their identity because they're Afro-Caribbean, but they're under the control of this Spanish-speaking predominantly Mestizo nation state that erases their history and is intent on continuing to erase that history. And they grew up having to learn Spanish in school by writing and reading in Spanish, but not speaking Spanish at all. That is, they continued to speak their native Creole English in the classroom with their Creole teachers, but were forced to read and write in Spanish and in many cases never learned to read or write in English at all. The situation there really messed them up in terms of identity, and so, I think it's really meaningful when I'm able to find a text, even if it's a colonial ethnographic text, that provides a glimpse into life in the region. I think it is just really meaningful to know not only that you have a history, but to identify pieces and fragments of and to color in your imagination what that history might have been like.

Jasmine Chavez Helm (JCH): To touch on what Melanie was saying, reading that material, especially from the Moravians and the Germans, is very difficult. During the presentation I gave in Palermo, I made sure to use pull quotes that I thought were important in terms of how the communities and people that were photographed or spoken to were racialized. There's so much minutiae in it. It was very categorical in terms of, “Oh, the Zambo Mískitus are much stronger and leaner and more boisterous than the pure Tawira Mískitu. The pure Tawira Mískitu have straight hair, not kinky hair.” Things like that. The most disturbing thing I read was when - I think it was Karl Anton Mueller, or it might have been C. Napier Bell - but they refer to an Indigenous child as a “chocolate boy.” It was just such a loaded sentence. Maybe he meant it as a harmless type of comment, but it's cannibalistic. It's racist as well as pedophilic. I don't know if that's a word, but there's pedophilia in that line, and that made my stomach turn. So, there's a lot of healing and space you have to take for yourself after reading these sources and looking at these images and mining for them and trying to contextualize them, and not have them bring harm to the community. That's why captioning is going to be so important for us because we don't want to reenact that violence, that colonial violence, onto ourselves.

EAM: One of the reasons why I think the project is so radical is that it really is “indigenizing the archive,” as you say, and turning the colonial gaze on its head so that viewers within the community and outside the community can appreciate it. I wanted to ask, although you both have spoken to this a bit already, I've spent time mining Instagram and seeing how different folks from the region have connected with it. Could you talk a bit about the importance of establishing and maintaining community ties? I know that you have someone on the board who's in charge of that as well.

JCH: Yeah, Kmercial is amazing because he's a musician. He's a DJ and a hip hop artist. He's very connected to the music community and the Mosquito Coast, especially when it comes to reggae and dancehall. I'm not sure if he includes Punta, but he's familiar with a lot of those artists. He and his wife travel to the coast as often as, you know, they actually can. He is, I would say, a musical archivist and an Instagram connector. So, having him be in touch with the community, and Melanie, as well, is just so important. Whenever someone comments or messages us, I always share my gratitude and have conversations with them. I've made really great friends through this platform. We just have really dynamic conversations about the archive, history, and culture. I make sure to anyone who messages, I try to open a door or extend a hand, and I think that's essential to our practice. 

MW: I just want to say, about accessibility - I'm not on TikTok, so I don't know too much about TikTok - but what Instagram allows for, even the geolocation, geotag, or how Jasmine includes lots of relevant tags, and people sharing the posts, I think that it allows for the proliferation of the archive in ways that are really helpful and useful. 

JCH: What's great with TikTok is, there's so many creators on there, and there are niches of communities. So, there's Indigenous TikTok or Native TikTok. And there's Latinx TikTok. So, being able to tap into those communities there made sense. And it also provides me some more space in order to connect to show a physical person. For a long time, I didn't really want to show my face or take up that space myself as an individual because I didn't want to make it about me. But then I realized, well, I'm the one doing all this work, I should probably share it. I'm taking up this space anyway. [I should] let people know who I am, where I come from. And I think personalizing it, especially on a platform like TikTok, is really useful.  People love to learn. I've learned so much on TikTok. I follow this Romani TikToker, and his posts are so informative about Roma culture, and I love it. So, you find really radical, and amazing content creators - and funny. I mean, I love silly videos, as well. We won't be making those unless we find a Nicaraguan comedian.

EAM: What's next for “Recuerdos de Nicaragua”? And also, both of you wear many hats outside of “Recuerdos de Nicaragua.” How does the project fit into your larger bodies of work?

JCH: Right now we launched a GoFundMe for $5,000 to fund projects that we want to do, which include we want to do digital and in-person programming either featuring Melanie's research or Kmercial’s music or Andy's photography. But even moving beyond sharing with the community, I recently met the founder of Garifunarerobics, which combines aerobic and Garifuna dance exercises. I went to one of his classes and it was amazing to talk to him. He's interested in collaborating with us to talk about the history of Punta and Garifuna, and talk about Garifuna culture, but also maybe do a dance program that’s live on our platforms. 

We're also looking to the most important thing, which is our website. Our website is going to include the digital physical archive, which has about twenty-five to thirty pieces. And I just acquired two more pieces this week, which is very exciting: a postcard and a glass lantern slide. The glass lantern slide is particularly interesting because the Magic Lantern was a projection machine from the nineteenth century that the Moravians would use in their conversion practice. So, they would take pictures of their converts or their church, or what a “heathen” looks like, and then they would teach their missionaries the proper conversion practices. I found a bunch on eBay. So, I'm in the process of trying to collect those, and they're just ten bucks. These historical photographs, no one wants to collect. We also want to grow our collections, so funds will be used to purchase more items. The next thing is a publication of our postcard collections specifically; that's the largest part of our collection.

The other thing we want to do is an exhibition. There are so many angles we can do. I already wrote a proposal that was accepted to CCCADI for the fellowship about fashion and the Mosquito Coast and its history, but I want to go beyond fashion and really talk about the photography, the history of the Moravian Church, and colonialism. And luckily, the archive is so rich in angles that you can even talk about environmental justice. We have postcards of miners and loggers and that would be a great angle to go into our borders or lack of borders there. Our first exhibition, I think it will be so exciting. But I'm also wondering which way we want to go with it, whether it's just showing the archive or really curating, maybe curating sections. 

I started curating in 2010 in Los Angeles at this gallery called Gallery Nucleus. It's all on my website. My last curated exhibition was Yinka Shonibare Colonial Arrangements at the Morris-Jumel Mansion, which is really exciting. The piece that Shonibare created for the show is actually in the exhibition at MAD, at the Museum of Art and Design. It's the ghost of Eliza Jamel, and it's the first piece he's made of a sculpture that’s site-specific, and of someone specifically, of a woman specifically. My friend, Jonathan Michael Square, who's the founder of Fashioning the Self, an amazing scholar and human being. He's been such a great resource. My first piece of writing about the archive was published at Fashioning the Self there, his zine, and that was just such a privilege. 

I've also been archiving since 2010, mainly in fashion. I started at The Museum at FIT, and then, after leaving Morris Jumel, I went to this company called Garde Robe and then The Wall Group, and then PVH. My last archiving job was at a Catholic nonprofit called CNEWA, which focuses on Eastern Christianity and Catholicism in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, including the Ukraine, in addition to Ethiopia, as well as India, so it was really interesting. 

EAM: And Melanie, do you want to talk a little bit about the hats you wear outside of “Recuerdos de Nicaragua”?

MW: I don't even wear that many hats. Just one. I'm about to graduate with my PhD and will be a Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Georgetown this fall. The following year I’ll begin my position as Assistant Professor in Georgetown’s Department of African American Studies and Program in Women's and Gender Studies. I'm really looking forward to being in DC and having access to resources like the National Archives and the National Gallery of Art because my research also focuses on art, particularly Black women's art from Caribbean Nicaragua, as well as Afro-Latin American and Caribbean women’s art more generally. I’m also eager and excited for the hemispheric conversations on Black and Indigenous histories, politics, feminisms, and art I plan on organizing at Georgetown. I intend to leverage my position as a scholar, researcher, and professor to not only advocate for the anti-colonial struggle in the Mosquitia but also to facilitate transnational dialogues that reveal and center the interlinked struggles of Black and Indigenous communities everywhere.

How “Recuerdos de Nicaragua” fits into my larger body of work, or at least my dissertation and  first book project, is that I'm really interested in tracing what I call a history of intimate colonial violence on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. And to do that the primary archival documents I work with are the wills of enslavers. I also look at Moravian photography, and US canal survey photography, which I was telling you about earlier. I also look at the history of Nicaraguan painting, particularly by Mestizx artists, and the ways that they've imagined the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. I'm really interested in visual culture, and the representational iterations of intimate colonial violence, or how we can read these representations, and trace these more intimate colonial encounters that happened. Because I feel like it's one of the few ways that I've been able to think about the actual material, physical violence that occured in colonial Mosquitia. It's possible to do that through analyzing these  representations. I'm really excited to merge the images that I found in doing my dissertation and adding that to “Recuerdos de Nicaragua,” and then also, as that archive develops and grows, I'm sure it'll be a mutually beneficial relationship because I still intend to look at the visual culture of the region as it intersects with many other  issues. 

Even after my first book, I still want to work on the Caribbean coast of Central America. I'm really interested in questions of our visual culture and radical politics. The fact that the archive is focused on the Mosquito Coast, not just the Nicaraguan portion, but in general, and that the Mosquito Coast was a region that also encompassed the wider Caribbean coast of Central America at different points in time means that I will be able to continue growing the archive through my future research. I'm just really excited to continue to have the archive as a resource and to contribute to it with my work. 

EAM: So that, that completes my list of questions. I don't know if there's anything that either of you want to add. 

JCH: Something I want to add is, over time, I do plan on incorporating Chinese and Asian communities. Because of my descent being Afro-Indigenous, that's why I've focused on that representation. I want to note: I also have a cultural Asian background because my step grandfather who raised me was Japanese American. So, that's also why the coast was so interesting to me, because it really was, I use the term melting pot, but it was at the center of so many different cultures interacting, that I think a lot of people forget about the Asian presence and contributions to Latin America and the Caribbean. My ex-sister-in-law is Guyanese, and she’s of Chinese and Bangladeshi descent. People don't realize how many East Asians and South Asians migrated to the Caribbean, either by force or through enslavement. It's definitely something I want to focus on, but I want to give it its rightful attention. We do have a postcard of Chinese miners in the collection, where we discuss it a little bit. I want to do more research on it, because the Chinese community not only came to be miners, but then they opened up general businesses and restaurants. I want to do more research on that at some point, and maybe we can bring someone specifically of that background onto the committee, which would be wonderful, or someone who wants to research that aspect at the very least. I don't want to exclude any of the communities on the Coast.

Further Readings

Conzemius, Eduard. Ethnographical Survey of the Miskito And Sumu Indians of Honduras And Nicaragua. Washington: U.S. Govt. print. off., 1932.

Goett, Jennifer. Black Autonomy: Race, Gender, and Afro-Nicaraguan Activism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016). 

Gordon, Edmund T. Disparate Diasporas: Identity and Politics in an African Nicaraguan Community (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998). 

Hale, Charles. Resistance and Contradiction: Miskitu Indians and the Nicaraguan State, 1894-1987 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). 

Hooker, Juliet. “Race and the Space of Citizenship: The Mosquito Coast and the Place of Blackness and Indigeneity in Nicaragua,” in Blacks and Blackness in Central America: Between Race and Place, ed. Lowell Gudmundson and Justin Wolfe (Duke University Press, 2010).

Hooker, Juliet. Race and the Politics of Solidarity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

Hooker, Juliet. "Afro-descendant Struggles for Collective Rights in Latin America: Between Race and Culture." Souls, vol. 10, no. 3, 2008, pp. 279-291.

Hooker, Juliet. "Beloved Enemies": Race and Official Mestizo Nationalism in Nicaragua." Latin American Research Review, vol. 40, no. 3, 2005, pp. 14-39.

Morris, Courtney Desiree. To Defend This Sunrise: Black Women’s Activism and the Authoritarian Turn in Nicaragua (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2023).

Morris, Courtney Desiree. “Toward a Geography of Solidarity: Afro-Nicaraguan Women’s Land Activism and Autonomy in the South Caribbean Coast Autonomous Region.” The Bulletin of Latin American Research. 35(3): 355-369, 2016.

Mueller, Karl Anton. Among Creoles, Miskitos And Sumos: Eastern Nicaragua And Its Moravian Missions. Bethlehem, Pa.: Christian Education Board of the Moravian Church in America, North, 1932.

Offen, Karl H. "The Sambo and Tawira Miskitu: the colonial origins and geography of intra-Miskitu differentiation in eastern Nicaragua and Honduras." Ethnohistory 49, no. 2 (2002): 319-372.

Offen, Karl H. "Narrating place and identity, or mapping Miskitu land claims in northeastern Nicaragua." Human organization 62, no. 4 (2003): 382-392.

Offen, Karl H. "Creating Mosquitia: mapping Amerindian spatial practices in eastern Central America, 1629–1779." Journal of Historical Geography 33, no. 2 (2007): 254-282. 

Eds. Trans. Karl Offen and Terry Rugeley, The Awakening Coast: An Anthology of Moravian Writings from Mosquitia and Eastern Nicaragua, 1849-1899. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014.

White, Melanie. "Afro-Nicaraguan Diasporas of Sexual Violence and Black Women’s Art as a Space for Healing." Caribbean Quarterly 67, no. 4 (2021): 453-472.
Woods Downs, Socorro. "I've Never Shared this with Anybody": Creole Women's Experience of Racial and Sexual Discrimination and Their Need for Self-recovery. Managua: CEIMM, 2005.