The National Archive of Honduras and state irresponsibility

That's the headline on an editorial by historian Edgar Soriano Ortiz published in Sunday's edition of Honduras' Tiempo.

This documentary resource, urgently important for the history of the country, was moved in 2007 to the Antigua Casa Presidencial, a building turned into a national monument and at the time designated as the home of a new center for documentary research. It began the processes Soriano Ortiz notes are urgently needed:

A process of classification and advanced digitization that would permit investigators and people interested in the assignment of legal titles to land to have access with better facilities.

Soriano Ortiz reports particular neglect of the national archives during the current administration, saying that

in the present administration the situation of the National Archive has becoming increasingly chaotic to the extent that for the past half year, the colonial document collection, that has documents from 1605, fell on the floor after the old shelving on which they were supported collapsed and the authorities of the Secretariat of Culture, Arts and Sports are stalling the topic of buying new and strong shelves on which to place this valuable national patrimony. Without doubt, someone here is visibly irresponsible, it is necessary to demand responsibility of Tulio Mariano González (the Secretary of Culture) and the rest of the officials so that they don't continue to commit such barbarities.

This neglect, he argues, is not random. The National Archives can be threatening to people in power, and he says that Honduran intellectuals have noticed a pattern of "intentional neglect" of cultural institutions under the current administration:

the institutions that safeguard the cultural patrimony and the few artistic spaces have been condemned for a long time to intentional neglect. These spaces are vital to fortify civic participation and consequently are a threat to the political and economic elites that govern the country by force.

That may sound like an extreme claim, but there has been an incredible decay of management of cultural institutions under the appointees to the Secretary of Culture and Arts position, starting with the amazingly ignorant Myrna Castro, appointed during the de facto regime of Roberto Micheletti.

The pattern has been pretty clear: withdrawn support from grass-roots initiatives that supported local historians; a renewed focus on Copan, valuable as a tourist attraction, to the exclusion of support of the development of other archaeological sites as spaces for public understanding of the broader history of the nation; the lack of funding for major historic museums; all of these are part of a pattern, within which the neglect of the National Archives is a consistent piece.

Is the issue that knowledge is power, so encouraging public development of historical knowledge is threatening?

Archival documents do offer a specific opportunity that may challenge power: land documents can be used to support legal claims when land has been alienated from communities or individuals marginalized in Honduran society, such as indigenous people or the Garifuna.

Documents from the recent past were recovered from the National Hemeroteca (the newspaper archive) during the de facto regime, showing that the architects of the coup were themselves part of an earlier attempt to change the constitution to allow re-election to the presidency.

So yes, a case can be made that the neglect is a deliberate response to a sense that history can threaten the powerful.

But equally, it may simply be that appointing unqualified people to positions dealing with cultural affairs introduces management that doesn't understand that a fragile piece of paper from 1605 has any value whatsoever.

Myrna Castro clearly had no time for the past, or even for conventional forms of culture: she famously said "Fashion, too, is culture" when called on using the ministry's resources for Tegucigalpa Fashion Week in 2009.

Bernard Martinez, her successor, revealed a bizarre understanding of the very word culture, not as a shared heritage of a people, but perhaps more in line with the nineteenth century idea of culture as "cultivation", an attribute of the cultured class.

Myrna Castro's hand-picked appointee to run the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History, whose expertise is in management, has shown confusion about the role of the Institute (which is to protect the cultural heritage and share knowledge with the public), describing his goals as increasing tourist visitation to Copan, before completely falling into pseudo-science with his outrageous claims that "Ciudad Blanca" is a vast and unknown city lurking in the Honduran jungle.

Curiously, Soriano Ortiz describes the neglect of the National Archives as a constant feature of modern Honduran policy, missing the opportunity to underline another possible reason for the active policy of neglect that has afflicted the cultural sector of Honduras.

In fact, during the administration of Manuel Zelaya, the Minister of Culture, Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle, was a professional historian who supported all the programs that were abandoned or actively reversed by Myrna Castro and her successors.

He appointed as head of the Institute of Anthropology and History another Honduran historian, Darío Euraque, who moved the archives to its present home in the Antigua Casa Presidencial, and lost his position in part by publicly opposing the attempt to use that historic building for military reserve officers, a violation of the 1954 Convention of the Hague.

Euraque did more than just move the documents into this space. He created the Centro de Investigaciones Históricas de Honduras (CDIHH), which (among other things) began the process of digitization Soriano Ortiz notes is critically needed.

Scholars and artists called attention to the disaster in Honduran culture, publishing memos in August 2010 from Bernard Martinez, saying his ministry needed office space, and asking the director of the National Art Gallery to provide space for the National Archives.

The tragedy of the National Archives is not just collapsing shelves and foot-dragging about replacing them. It is a continued outcome of the coup of 2009.

Whether current neglect is malice, crafty policy to prevent populist use of records, or just plain ignorance, it is not just Honduras' loss: the entire world is diminished when we lose the capacity for surprise about the past that primary documents can give us.

Mario Felipe Martinez Castillo

When I became interested in the colonial history of Honduras, I read a lot of colonial history.  Among those who wrote about Honduras were people like the geographer William V. Davidson, and historians like Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle, Mario Argueta, Mario Ardon Mejia and for the more recent past, Dario Euraque.  But no one impressed me more than the work of Mario Felipe Martinez Castillo.

He was a founder of the History program at UNAH, and easily the most knowledgeable person about 16th century Honduras.  He wrote about colonial art, and the society that generated it.  He was interested in the "family" of Hondurans who both formed the colony and whose descendents still wield power today.

From 1970 to 1980 he lived in Spain and worked daily in the Archivo General de Indias researching the early history of Honduras.  It was there he found the 1558 declaration of the service and merits of Rodrigo Ruiz (AGI Patronato 69 R.5) which for the first time confirmed in a contemporary document, the existence of the national hero Lempira.  His book on Lempira in 1987 both analyzes that document, and transcribes it, challenging everything that Honduran school children still learn today about their national hero.

He authored 14 books, and co-authored several others:

2011  Los forjadores de nuestra identidad
2009  Temas históricos inéditos de Honduras
2004  El paternalismo y la esclavidtud negra en el Real Minas de Tegucigalpa
2004  La Intendencia de Comayagua
2000  Por las rutas de la plata y el añil:  desarrollo del arte colonial religioso hondureño
1993  Honduras en su historia y en su arte
1992  Cuatro centros de arte colonial provinciano hispano criollo en Honduras
1990  Honduras:  cultura e identidad
1988  Catedral de la Inmaculada Concepción de Valladolid de Comayagua
1987  Los últimos dias de Lempira y otros documentos:  el conquistador español que venció a Lempira
1982  Apuntamientos para una historia colonial de Honduras
1981  Presencia de grupos mexicanos antes y despues de la conquista de Honduras y pervivencia de la lengua Nahuatl en el área supuestamente Lenca.
1967  Capitulos sobre el Colegio Tridentino de Comayagua y la educación colonial en Honduras
1961  La escultura en Honduras

It's not often you get to meet one of your heroes.  In 2008, my friend Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle arranged for me to meet his "mentor", Mario Felipe Martinez Castilllo, while we were attending a conference on minor Atlantic ports in the colonial period.  He hosted a dinner at a beachfront restaurant in El Paraiso near Omoa where he introduced the two of us.  Mario Felipe was gracious and listened to me talk about my own research on the 16th and 18th centuries in Honduras, but it was clear that his years of work had given him a greater knowledge of the 16th century events in Honduras than he had ever had the time to write about.  I was both jealous and envious of the depth of that knowledge, and hope one day to be able to approach it.  After the meal ended, we wanted to talk more, but he didn't do email, and I almost never go to Tegucigalpa, so it never happened.

Mario Felipe Martinez Castillo died Monday at the age of 80.

Public Letter and Denunciation of a Menace to the Cultural Patrimony of Honduras

That's the title of a document posted today on Vos el Soberano, and circulated via email by the authors.

They are the Ex-Minister of Culture, Arts and Sports of Honduras during the Zelaya administration, Dr. Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle, and the last legally appointed Director of the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History, Dr. Dario Euraque.

Both noted historians, they explain clearly what is at stake in the actions taken to pacify politicians of the town of Copan Ruinas who have insisted they should get a cut of the sales of tickets to visit the World Heritage Site, Copan.

So far, no response from the government of Porfirio Lobo Sosa or, mysteriously, his Minister of Culture or the current occupant of the office of Director of the Institute of Anthropology and History, who (they note) are not listed as signing the agreement through which not only will income from Copan be illegally diverted to local politicians: the budget of the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History will be deprived of funding, and protection and interpretation of the entire national patrimony, including traditional cultures, archives, historic places, and archaeological sites across the country, will be destroyed.

Public Letter and Denunciation of a Menace to the Cultural Patrimony of Honduras

The 26th of February of the present year there was signed a public agreement on the part of the present Minister of the Interior of Honduras, Áfrico Madrid, the Mayor of the Municipality of Copan Ruinas, Helmy Giacoman, and the Congress member of the Department of Copan, Julio Cesar Gámez. Through the so-called "Agreement of Copan 2012", its signatories, supposedly in order to strengthen the impact of the government of San José de Copan in the protection of the national patrimony in the Copan Archaeological Park (PAC), rather prepared the destruction of the institution legally constituted to administrate and protect the Cultural Patrimony of Honduras: the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia (IHAH).

The Prosecutor for Heritage ought to investigate this unusual Agreement of Copan 2012 that commits the sin of an evident abuse of authority. First, because it ignores and disqualifies the functions of the maximum administrative authority legally responsible to keep watch over the Cultural Patrimony of the Nation: the Secretaria de Cultura, Artes y Deportes (SCAD), whose leader is at the same time President of the IHAH, who was not present and did not sign the act. The Agreement also doesn't carry the signature of the Director of the IHAH since the coup d'etat of 2009, who by law is obligated to defend his institution, although it can be supposed that he supports the accords of the Agreement that threatens it. Second, because via these and other transgressions, the Agreement of Copan 2012 violates the spirit and international compacts assumed by the State of Honduras in relation to the most important international instruments that guard the cultural patrimony of humanity.

The Agreement of Copan 2012 consists of nine understandings. Four of those (3, 4, 6, and 7) pretend to promote a greater participation by the government of Copan in the administration of the cultural patrimony of the region behind the back of the SCAD and of the technicians and specialists of IHAH and its international collaborators, who in their great majority are opposed to the Agreement in question. In fact these articles mask the principal objective: which is to permit the mayor of Copan to divert the income of the PAC with purposes outside the mission of the law that governs the Cultural Patrimony: Decree 220-97, the Law for the Protection of the Cultural Patrimony of the Nation.

This disastrous proposition is evident in the first article that, without authorization and the required proceedings, dismisses from his position the regional administrator of the IHAH in Copan and the Park. The agreement under its article number nine promotes investigations on the part of the Prosecutor of the officials and employees of the IHAH without cause or denunciation with the aim to intimidate and silence the technicians and specialists and sub-directors of this institution who refused to favor the evident concubinage between the Directorate of the IHAH and the signatories of the Agreement of Copan 2012. Article number five asks that President Porfirio Lobo sanction a pre-proposal for a law introduced to the National Congress by the congress member for Copan Gamez which would grant a percentage of the income of the Park to the government of San José de Copan.

The Agreement of Copan 2012 seeks to reform the Decree 220-97, without consulting the SCAD and to the discredit of the autonomy and the authority that Decree 220-97 grants the IHAH to gather resources of its own and to administer and protect not just the Copan Archaeological Park but all the Cultural Patrimony of the Nation, including from many archaeological sites and the Historic Centers of the historic cities, the documentary patrimony of our archives and the living cultures. The Honduran people should know that the IHAH will administer and protect this treasure that is the greatest treasure of the nation and the core of our National Identity with the resources from the income of the Copan Archaeological Park. And that therefore the agreement and the project to strip the institution of that income will contribute to destroy the IHAH and still more to deprive the Cultural Patrimony of Honduras of protection.

We urge the Honduran people and the international community, the Presidency of the Republic, the Minister of Culture, Arts, and Sports, and the Special Attorney for the Cultural Patrimony of Honduras so that, by common agreement, they can denounce the Agreement of Copan 2012 and they can investigate the circumstances in which the signatories ignored the institutions concerned, usurped their representation and functions, abused the attributes that the law grants them and played at demagoguery, with the Copan Archaeological Park as token on the board.

Currusté Archaeological Park Abandoned?

Earlier this month La Prensa published a story indicating that the Archaeological Park of Currusté, officially opened to the public in December, 2008, is reportedly abandoned by both the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia (IHAH), and the city government of San Pedro Sula.

Currusté, an archaeological site within the city limits of San Pedro Sula, became the country's fifth archaeological park when it opened on December 12, 2008. Prior to that it had been protected by IHAH, but closed to the public. Archaeologists first investigated the site in 1972 when archaeologist George Hasemann mapped the site and excavated in and around some of the largest structures at Currusté.

Under Dario Euraque's leadership, the IHAH formed a partnership with the city of San Pedro and the US Embassy to develop the park. Under IHAH guidance, the park was cleared, archaeological testing of the area destined to be a visitor's center, and of several of the structures was carried out, interpretive trails were built, signs were installed, and it was opened to the public. The city was supposed to pave the road leading to the site entrance, and build a visitor's center/museum on site.

Currusté was a popular location for field trips for school groups from the neighboring cities.

The coup in 2009 disrupted the plans for Currusté.

First, in July of that year, the de facto government removed the Mayor of San Pedro, Rodolfo Padilla Sunseri, who had been a party to the overall agreement for developing the park and replaced him with Micheletti's nephew, William Franklin Micheletti. Padilla Sunseri later fled to the US.

Then the de facto government removed Dario Euraque as head of IHAH that September. After the November, 2009 elections, when a new Mayor took office, he found the city badly underfunded and in debt. The funds for the visitor's center at Currusté were silently diverted to other projects.

La Prensa reports that today the park is closed to the public, and overgrown. The guard, they report, quit because he wasn't being paid.

Only the sign out on the main road remains; that and the mosquitoes.

Cultural Policy and the Coup: Interview on Honduras' Radio America

This Saturday, Radio América in Honduras will be broadcasting an interview with Yesenia Martínez, historian formerly employed by the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History, dismissed in the aftermath of the coup d'etat.

The interview will be about historian Dario Euraque's book, El golpe de Estado, el patrimonio cultural y la identidad nacional [The coup d'etat, cultural patrimony, and national identity], lauded by historian Marvin Barahona.

Martinez writes that German Reyes, the journalist who invited her to appear Radio América, which is widely recognized as a pro-coup media outlet, was "brave" to invite her to discuss this highly charged topic.

In Honduras, you can find Radio América at 610 AM and 94.7 FM. On the web, at www.radioamerica.hn.

Tune in tomorrow, January 29, from 8:15 to 8:30 AM for the program.

"Every Stone in its Place": Marvin Barahona

Why does cultural policy and historical knowledge matter in a place like Honduras?

Honduran historian Marvin Barahona, author of a number of books about Honduran identity and 20th century history, provides some answers in a long presentation of Dario Euraque's recently published book El golpe de Estado del 28 de junio de 2009, el Patrimonio Cultural y la Identidad Nacional ("The coup d'Etat of the 28th of June of 2009, Cultural Patrimony, and National Identity").

Barahona's essay is too long to translate in its entirety here. But it is worth citing how Euraque's important work is being received in Honduran intellectual circles, and why it is, more than a commentary on the coup, a critical work in Honduran historiography.

Barahona starts by saying he is resisting the temptation to either begin with the Honduran Congress discussing the Ruins of Copan at the beginning of the 20th century, or with words drawn from a magazine commenting on "the visit to the Copan Archaeological Park in January 2010 by the president of the de facto government, Roberto Micheletti Bain, invited by the Asociación Copán to show him the bounties of the site."

He then goes on:

The underworld of the tunnels designed by generations of archaeologists seem to have been waiting, in the last three decades, for a retinue like this, that emerged from the underworld of politics, as knowledgeable experts of the most ancient caverns of politics and as architects of the latest coup d'Etat that shocked the national conscience by its historical anachronism, and left a trail of instability and chaos in the governability of the country.

What links these two subjects-- archaeology and the de facto regime? Read on:

For that, if it were possible, I would want to extend an historic bridge between the most distant past and the most recent past, to link deeds that at first glance don't seem related, such as the use of official culture to make the collective consciousness forget its past and the abuse of the State to favor the interests of a minority to whom culture and the past has been of interest only as merchandise for tourists, as a business in which they could enrich themselves.

Barahona, following the lead of Euraque, identifies the commodification of national culture as yet one more regrettable product of the reactionary politics of contemporary Honduras.

The trajectory is complicated, but it includes the elevation of one part of the precolumbian Honduran past-- that of the Maya of western Honduras-- to stand for the entire nation, a process Euraque called "mayanization". In this process, Euraque's book shows that all political parties in Honduras and academics, both national and foreign, have played a part. The result is a failure to connect most contemporary Hondurans with a deep past of their own:

And when we recognize this incredible disproportion between the many books written about the Ruins of Copan and the few studies about the peoples and cultures that are still alive, such as the Tolupan or the Pech, the Tawahkas and the Miskitos, the Lenca and the Garifuna, then it is required to think that the cultural policies of the State are as unjust as the form in which national income is distributed, dedicated in the last two centuries to benefit a few wealthy families, to the detriment of thousands of meztizo, Indian and black families that don't fit in the official culture and still less in the economy and the national budget.

As Barahona notes, Euraque's book argues that the antidote to this poison lies in

a new cultural policy of the State, concretized in projects to rescue the cultural diversity of the peoples that give it flesh, to rescue national history in local archives, to give to archaeology its rightful place, to reconstruct the characteristic features of popular culture and provide communities with people qualified to recover local historical memory and that of the population marginalized by official culture.

Barahona argues that

the goal of giving to Honduras a democratic, inclusive, participatory cultural policy capable of responding to the challenges of the world today, continues to be a valid effort and an inescapable responsibility of the State and society...

Therefore it won't suffice, in the present day, to insist on mayanizing Honduras to sell to foreign tourists the bounties of our past, nor less will it do to continue privileging the value of the stones of the distant past...

And even putting each stone in its place, there remains no doubt that Honduras needs this new cultural policy to avoid letting the study of its archaeology continue in the hands of the same foreign institutions as at the beginning of the 20th century..

The alignment of archaeology, especially foreign archaeology, with conservative politics, in other words, may not be new but it is not to be supported in the future.

Knowledge of history, Barahona concludes, is indispensable, and democratization of history continues to be critical for Honduras:

every effort to reconstruct the national identity, including all its protagonists without exclusions of any kind, implies a large scale effort to re-elaborate national thought, to put it into action and place it at the level of the requirements of our time.

But the final words should go to Darío Euraque, whose summary account of his motivation in writing a memoir of his experiences during the coup d'Etat has also been published now:

Today there exists a new government in Honduras: nonetheless, the authorities imposed on the management of the Institute of Anthropology and History by means of the coup d'Etat, lacking in experience or intellectual vision of our culture, continue in their offices. I suspect that they continue violating the cultural policy that I promoted since 2006 in coordination with the Secretariat of Culture. Not only the Cultural Patrimony of Honduras suffered, but also our National Identity, the fragile institutionality of the State, and ironically even the support given to cultural tourism promoted by the Institute of Tourism and Chamber of Tourism of Honduras decreases.

“Alta es la noche y Morazán vigila.”

Dario Euraque: Required Reading

In cities across Honduras, the release of historian Darío Euraque's book, El golpe de Estado, el patrimonio cultural y la identidad nacional [The coup d'etat, cultural patrimony, and national identity] is being marked, starting this coming week.

The event marking the release of the book in San Pedro Sula will be December 11.

We won't be there in person; but as we have since June 28, we will be there in spirit for our colleague and for others who, like him, struggled and continue to struggle to bring Hondurans into a conversation of what it means to be a people without giving into the logics of the modern nation-state.

Euraque has a record of publication which is, quite simply, indispensable to anyone wanting to understand cultural identity in modern Honduras. A previous book, Conversaciones históricas con el mestizaje y su identidad nacional en Honduras [Historical conversations about mestizaje and national identity in Honduras], published in 2004, reframes the conversation about Honduras' roots in indigenous, African, and European populations and how that diversity has come to be misrecognized.

Even earlier, in the 1996 Reinterpreting the Banana Republic, Euraque established a unique focus that refused to homogenize the Honduran past, and that resisted easy simplification. For anyone studying the north coast, it was an unparalleled examination of the local social networks and their influence in the 20th century history of the Honduran state.

And of course, Euraque coined the term "mayanization" to label the process through which deliberate promotion of an image of the Honduran precolumbian past as entirely Maya-- thus making the histories of other Honduran indigenous groups valueless and invisible.

I have had the privilege of reading a draft of Euraque's latest book. It offers a unique, and to me still painful, record of how the practice of liberatory historical research became one of the targets of a reactionary right-wing coup in Honduras. Like all Euraque's works, it is meticulously supported by a rich documentary record. It is a kind of study that really is without equal, despite two decades (or more) of examinations of the pernicious tangle of nationalism and "cultural heritage" (the conceptualize of the physical remains of past people in an area as a property owned by the modern nation, often bolstering that nation's claim to coherent historical reality).

We do not know yet how the book will be distributed in the US. But we will relay that information as soon as we have it, and will hope readers of this blog who have sufficient Spanish will read it. And we look forward to a long future with Dr. Euraque's voice speaking clearly about issues of culture and politics in Honduras.

Culture, Peace and Contested National Identity

“Normally, the traditional politician has in his house a beautiful bar, but he does not have a library, they are enemies of the written word, they do not know Honduran music, they are fans of the narco-corrido, of ranchera and música procaz, and the proof of this is that this is the music they use in their political campaigns because it is the best representation of them and best identifies them...."

So, who might we imagine made this provocative statement? One of the Artists in Resistance who have kept the spotlight on the erosion of public culture that began with the appointment of Myrna Castro by the de facto regime, to replace Minister of Culture Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle?

Would you believe maybe a cartoonist who was elected to the Honduran Congress in 2009 as a Liberal representative in Congress?

Ángel Darío Banegas has been a political cartoonist since 1985. His work appears in La Prensa, and has been recognized internationally.

When he began his run for the Congreso Nacional in 2008, he was quoted as saying that he wanted to clear out the "monsters and dinosaurs that have discredited politics for years". He also made an apparently serious proposal at that time that Congress members receive only minimum wage.

Starting in 2000, Banegas began to teach courses on drawing and painting, especially for children. His latest move, described as "a permanent cultural activity to stimulate youth so that they stay away from idleness and violence", seems to be closely related.

It also highlights the contested nature of "culture" in the aftermath of a coup and a de facto regime that made cultural institutions central targets for attack.

As announced in La Tribuna this weekend, using his new position in Congress as head of its "Commission on Culture" Banegas has promoted the first Honduran "Festival de las Artes, Congreso, Cultura y Paz" (Festival of the Arts, Congress, Culture and Peace). Taking place in Danlí, it is supposed to be the first of a series in all departments of the country, "to convert public areas into spaces of expression that will contribute to the formation and consolidation of peace, as a culture".

Invoking "peace" as a culture echoes a public discourse in Honduras that predates the coup, but is strongly linked to it. Public concerts and marches as early as May, 2008, explicitly framed as attempts to persuade young people not to take drugs or become involved in street gangs, were organized with the support of the Catholic hierarchy and the business community.

In July 2008, we watched one of these marches in the former colonial capital city of Comayagua, ending at stages set up in front of the cathedral where inspirational speeches were given and Garifuna musicians and dancers performed, explicitly urging teenagers to adhere to "peace". The crowd included large numbers of people dressed in white.

Both before and after the coup, marches using similar rhetoric and clothing were mobilized against President Zelaya and later in support of the de facto regime by the right-wing Unión Civica Democratica and its allies. The rhetoric used in these marches equated "peace" with more intensive policing. As press coverage on June 5, 2009 of a demonstration in Choluteca organized by the Chamber of Commerce described it, marchers were "in favor of peace, security, and democracy and therefore asked for an end to high indices of violence and insecurity that afflict the country".

Banegas' campaign advances a second emphasis, on national identity. The first event in Danlí, and the other festivals of arts to follow, are described as intended to help identify students with artistic talent "who will contribute to local and national culture in the forge of identity".

Banegas personally emphasizes the link between art, national identity, and the outsider political stance on which he ran:

“Because of my critical attitude towards traditional politics, I committed myself strongly to not be the same and to be different; ...I was charged with presiding over the Commission of Culture and Arts, for which we are pledged with a group of partners to make a meaningful effort to manage to fortify national identity."

The first program to this end is the festivals of art. The second is equally ambitious:

"we have created an National Identity Prize that will be given every year, on the 20th of July, in the City of Gracias, Lempira, with the honor in 2010 going to the singer/songwriter Guillermo Anderson."

What is left unstated here is what stands as national identity.

Both programs represent incursions by Congress onto terrain of the executive branch's Ministry of Culture. Banegas seems to be directly taking aim at the Ministry through the Casas de Cultura it coordinates, saying that he will promote congressional initiatives

related to strengthening the Casas de la Cultura in all the country that... in many cases are empty shells, entities abandoned to their own luck.

Banegas repeatedly defines cultural activity as aimed at reinforcing a uniform national agenda and a singular national identity:

“culture is fundamental for the development of a country since it contributes to national identity and we ourselves regain faith in what we do, what he have and our own way of being".

The original mission of the Casas de Cultura was something quite different: "to provide conditions for the flourishing of local culture" through a "policy of decentralization of cultural material".

The Casas de Cultura were central to efforts under the Zelaya administration to promote pluralistic cultural identity; as Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle notes:

we almost tripled the number of Casas de la Cultura in capitals and important towns with their own identity and in remote ethnic communities, Garifuna, Cusuna, or Tawaka, each with bilingual libraries.

Politicization of culture is nothing particularly new, in Honduras or elsewhere. Pastor Fasquelle begins a review of governmental intervention in Honduran culture with the proposition that "the organizations of Honduran cultural institutionality, the Instituto de Antropología e Historia (I.H.A.H) and la Secretaria de Cultura (S.C.A.D.), were creatures of dictatorship":

The Institute was founded with the idea of glorifying ancient Copan as the historic navel of the nation, paradoxically by foreign inspiration, while the Secretariat was established with the primordial aim of co-opting intellectuals and creators. And it ended up deposited in the hands of the military, whose vision amalgamated a folk concept of the culture of the people and an elitist vision of bourgeois High Culture. These were its sins of origin.

Pastor Fasquelle writes that in his first term as Minister of Culture starting in 1994, he began "the professionalization [of these organizations] and the articulation of policy lines: decentralization, democratization, ethnic rescue and support for creators".

When he returned to that role in 2006 he again pushed forward an agenda of "diffusion [of information], rescue of the national patrimony, diversity, direct assistance to creators and decentralization of functions and resources".

Rather than aim to produce a single national identity by promoting a uniform culture, the Ministry of Culture in the Zelaya administration promoted projects designed to exemplify Honduras' cultural diversity.

Pastor Fasquelle argues (as does the former director of the Institute of Antropology and History, Dario Euraque) that the very direction of these policies-- pluralistic, democratizing, decentralizing-- is what brought on the de facto regime's suspicion, embodied memorably in the appointment of Myrna Castro, who denounced book distribution, labeled the Casas de Cultura "Casas de ALBA", and redirected funding to Fashion Week in Tegucigalpa.

But, Pastor Fasquelle argues, all of this "underlines as the moral that our principal function-- institutionally-- is to secure that the people appropriate their own patrimony". He notes that only when culture is locally produced and controlled can it actually survive, a principle that guided policies of the Ministry that encouraged mobilizing local historians and local stakeholders in presenting their own culture.

In stark contrast to the implicit argument that culture is weaker in Honduras today, Pastor Fasquelle suggests that resistance to the coup has awakened creators of the arts in Honduras to their role in public life:

the brave involvement of the great majority of the best thinkers and artists in the country in civic life is one of the unexpected fruits [of the coup], surprising and hopeful. ... our artists and intellectuals have subscribed-- for decades-- to skepticism, not just towards the public cultural institutions, but also towards the State and politics. This skepticism has been a problem for the culture and a headache for the public cultural institutions. But worse, it has been part of the civic problem. Because, to the degree that the critical and creative spirits absented themselves from the forum, politics remained orphaned of intelligence and imagination. The flourishing of culture in the Resistance has engendered a new consciousness, a new type of commitment, critical for the opposition and for the future reconstruction of a deeper and more authentic democracy.

So we have laid out for us a series of contrasts: decentralization versus centralization; State projects versus local appropriation of patrimony; an idealized culture of "peace" versus culture as the expression of critical consciousness.

A telling detail: the time and place cited for the new "National Identity Prize", on the Día de Lempira in the heartland of the Lenca people, implicitly invokes a national imaginary of mestizaje, but now stripped even of the nominal and token brandishing of the Lenca as the primordial people of Honduras.

In the aftermath of a coup that polarized the Honduran people, two models of cultural production are now in open competition. One argues for promoting a common Honduran national identity; the other to recognize the multiplicity of Honduran identities. In the absence of any coherent cultural policy emerging from the new Minister of Culture, the nationalist project enjoys the advantage of energetic promotion by a Congressional novice with a public profile and the means now to promote his own agenda on a national stage. Yet we cannot help wonder if it will prove so easy to put the genie of Honduran diversity back in the bottle of a uniform national culture.

August 25: Talk by Historian Dario Euraque

Based on his recently concluded book manuscript, El Golpe de Estado y su Impacto en el Patrimonio Cultural y la Identidad Nacional (The Coup d'Etat and its Impact on Cultural Patrimony and National Identity).

In Tegucigalpa, Wednesday August 25 at 5 PM.

Place: COPEMH (Colegio de Profesores de Educación Media de Honduras)

(Online sources give the address for COPEMH as Boulevard Centro América, Primera Entrada Colonia las Colinas, Tegucigalpa.)

The talk will be transmitted and viewable live on www.resistenciahonduras.net and
voselsoberano.com

"Collective memory" at risk: On moving the Honduran National Archives

It is easy, we have noted, to lose sight of the economic effects of the coup in the face of the horse race about politics of OAS recognition. And it is equally easy to forget the profound negative effect the coup and its continuing aftermath has had on Honduran culture.

After the coup d'etat of June 28, 2009, the appointment of Mirna Castro by the de facto regime to take over administration of the Ministry of Culture led to a series of developments that drew widespread outrage from artists, scholars, and writers in Honduras: denunciation of book distribution programs, firing of well-qualified office holders for political reasons, the infamous argument that, in a country with as high a level of economic stratification as Honduras, funding fashion design events was appropriate because fashion was culture, and more.

One of the more disturbing incidents was the proposal to provide space for a military reservists organization in a national monument, the old presidential palace, which also serves as the home to a unified national library and archives facility. The opposition carefully presented to this move by then-director of the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History, Dr. Dario Euraque, himself a noted historian and university professor in the United States, while staving off this misuse, contributed to the animosity that led to his removal from office.

With the transition to the Lobo Sosa government, a new minister of culture, the former presidential candidate of a small party, Bernard Martinez, was appointed. A few days ago a PDF copy of a letter from Martinez to the Director of the national gallery of art was widely circulated. In it, Martinez asks for space in that museum for the documentary archives, arguing that the ministry was experiencing severe space needs that, implicitly, were more important than housing and providing access to these irreplaceable historical records.

Then today, an "Open letter" directed to Minister Martinez circulated, signed by both Dr. Euraque and the former minister of culture, Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle. They open with a paragraph summing up their reactions to the proposal:

We want to make known to you that on proceeding according the cited letter, you will commit a grave administrative error, and an attempt against the Ley del Patrimonio Cultural de la Nación (Law of the Cultural Patrimony of the Nation), perhaps worse than those that the Attorney Myrna Castro committed when she functioned as Secretary of Culture, Arts, and Sports. And if you proceed as anticipated, the Prosecutor for the Patrimony will have to take action in the matter.

The signatories, both historians recognized internationally for the research as well as experienced administrators, argue that "The National Historic Archive is the patrimony of the Hondurans, principal reservois of their collective memory" and should only be moved, as it was in their administration, after serious study of the advantages for curating and providing access to the resources it represents.

They outline a well-documented process of consultation which obviously has not taken place before the current proposal, which seeks simply to remove the archives to make more space--for what is unclear-- in a national historic monument. They note that the building occupied as an art museum does not even belong to the Ministry of Culture: it belongs in equal parts to the UNAM and the National Congress, and was made available only for the purpose of being an art gallery.

And, as they note, the art gallery is inappropriate anyway:

Nor does the building that houses the National Gallery serive for the simple reason that there does not exist the necessary space to consult and conserve the National Archive there.

The National Archive was essentially rescued from neglect by being rehoused in a modern Center for Historical Documents, with computer facilities and space for study of the collection, under the administration of Euraque and Pastor Fasquelle. And for what reason would such a project be proposed?

In their letter, Euraque and Pastor Fasquelle imply that the purpose is to use the Old Presidential Palace for general office functions of the ministry. This, they note, would endanger the historical structure of that building as much as the archives would be endangered by being shifted to inadequate and inappropriate space. They write:

It is a National Monument (since 1989) that should breathe an air of culture, of esthetics, and not the hustle and bustle of the bureaucratic administration of the Ministry of Culture or any other branch of the State. For that reason, the "technical record" of its registry [as a national monument] classifies its use as "cultural".

Noting that caring for this historic structure is part of the mission of the Institute of Anthropology and History, they go on to say

Lamentably, the present maximal authority of IHAH, imposed under the administration of Abodaga Castro, totally lacks the experience or knowledge of these needs to collaborate in this sense [of guarding the historic character and fabric of the building]. In whatever way, the Prosecutor of Patrimony should monitor the actions of the present Manager of the IHAH in relation to this decision of his to move the National Archive to the National Gallery.

The authors make a special plea to Minister Martinez "not to make the same mistakes" as Mirna Castro, especially by disrupting the nascent historical research center that was formed during the Zelaya administration.

The question is, have the factors that made cultural analysis of history and identity of the nation in the broadest sense victims of Mirna Castro changed with the installation of the Lobo Sosa administration? Refraining from abusing the National Archives would be one way to show a less hostile cultural policy.

On April 8 Vos el Soberano posted a document dated March 18 issued by the union of the Ministry of Culture, SITRAECAD, demanding the immediate firing of Virgilio Paredes.

Who is Paredes? At present, he occupies the office of director of the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia (IHAH). During the de facto regime of Roberto Micheletti, he served Myrna Castro as administrator of the Ministry of Culture.

The union of workers in the Ministry of Culture accuse Paredes of continuing involvement in appointments to positions there, which they say went to relatives of Paredes. They specifically accuse Paredes and a colleague of manipulating the new Minister of Culture, Bernard Martinez, not letting him develop and exploiting the power that he is supposed to wield.

They also suggest that Paredes should be considered responsible for some of the financial irregularities that Minister of Culture Martinez publicized when he took over after the inauguration of Porfirio Lobo Sosa. They suggest the Tribunal Superior de Cuentas is ignoring these irregularities because Mirna Castro moved there as a high official after the end of the Micheletti regime.

The post notes that Castro named Virgilio Paredes as director of IHAH on December 14, 2009, filling the position left open when Castro moved against internationally respected historian Darío Euraque. As Vos el Soberano notes, Paredes lacks legally required qualifications: he does not have a degree in one of the academic fields specified (anthropology, archaeology, history) or a related discipline.

The inauguration of Lobo Sosa did not magically heal the damage done during the Micheletti regime. The ministry of culture, which went terribly off course under Myrna Castro, and the IHAH, where projects underway were canceled, are potentially important sites of creation of national identity, warped in the wake of the coup. The willingness of the unions to speak out shows that resistance extends broadly in Honduras today, and establishes a challenge for Minister Martinez.

Mayanization in action: erasing Pech history

A story that caught my eye today, from the Bulgarian site FOCUS Information Agency (billing itself as "the first Bulgarian private information agency" and "the most preferred Bulgarian electronic media both in Bulgaria and abroad"), simultaneously illustrates the complexity of Honduran cultural history, and the narrowing effects of what historian Dario Euraque has dubbed mayanization: the collapse of all the diversity of Honduras' pluralistic indigenous heritage into one category, as generalized "Maya".

The story reports on an initiative by the "Friendship Society Bulgaria – Honduras" who will be traveling to La Ceiba, a city on the north coast of Honduras, east of San Pedro Sula. There, they say, is found the only river in the world named after their native country, the Rio Bulgaria:

Inquiries have shown that a Bulgarian community has been living in the Central American country for 100 years. At the beginning of 20 century they discovered an unknown river and named it Bulgaria in honor of their native country.

That brought me only a moment's pause. While I had no previous knowledge of a Bulgarian immigrant population, the North Coast is incredibly diverse, and waves of immigrants around the turn of the 20th century were drawn there by the business opportunities created by internationalization of the banana industry.

The expedition will bring Honduran photographers Nimer Alvarado and Mervin Corales to trace the course of this river from its headwaters near Tegucigalpita (a small town, not the capital city), as it runs from Pico Bonito, one of Honduras' astonishing national parks, to La Ceiba.

So far, so good. The article notes that the photographic trek is

carried out in cooperation with the culture center in La Ceiba.

This is one of the local "Casas de Cultura", an initiative pushed forward under former Minister of Culture Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle beginning in his first term in that position between 1994 and 1996. Casas de Cultura are intended to encourage public participation in the exploration of specifically local histories. It would seem like nothing could be more localized than a coherent Bulgarian community with sufficient sense of national origin to lead them to name a local landmark in memory of that country.

But wait:

The photographs taken will be displayed in an exhibition called Rio Bulgaria – the Bulgarian Presence in the Land of Maya [emphasis added]

So in what sense were Bulgarians living near La Ceiba "in the land of the Maya"? None, really.

We do know quite a lot about the prehispanic people of the north coast of Honduras. They lived in towns, the largest of which probably had populations of a few thousand people, whose remains are recognizable as mounds today, mapped by archaeologists visiting the area since the first half of the 20th century. At least one large archaeological site is directly adjacent to La Ceiba itself, although not developed for visitation. Based on ceramics, it probably dated to the Classic period-- more or less 500-1000 AD. And, also based on these ceramics, the people living near La Ceiba were not the same as the people of Copan, who we refer to today as Maya.

Who were the people living near La Ceiba? To answer that question, we enter into speculative territory, and need to take into account how archaeologists know who lived anywhere. The common approach is to take the people who Europeans described in the 16th century as most likely descendants of those who had lived in the same place earlier. Notice that this means we assume that people stayed in place, unless there is some strong evidence that they moved; this conservative assumption can sometimes be misleading.

But if we take this common approach, then the likely people of the area around La Ceiba would be the ancestors of the indigenous group today known as Pech, previously called Paya. Pech are recognized as the indigenous people who occupied the island of Roatan in the sixteenth century. The northeast coast opposite the Bay Islands was the earliest focus of Spanish occupation, including massive slave raiding of the indigenous population. This began a long history of depletion of Pech population, including forced resettlement and voluntary movement away from exploitation.

The surviving Pech are among the indigenous groups officially recognized by the State of Honduras, under ILO 160, the Convention Concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries of 1989, which was ratified in 1995. According to Minority Rights Group International (MRG), an NGO tracking global diversity, today there are about 2000 Pech who

have resisted total assimilation and, under the national bilingual programme, have developed Pech-language courses and Pech teachers.

In fact, you can find a YouTube video of Pech children singing the Honduran national anthem in translation.

Does it matter that a promotional notice of a pretty bizarre "cultural" exchange between Bulgaria, of all places, and Honduras, erases the historical connection of Pech to the land they once occupied, and replaces it with a generalized "Maya" identity?

Well, yes, it does. Cultural diversity has been a focus of struggle in Honduras for decades. In these struggles, the erasure of other pasts and their replacement with a single Maya past breaks connections between contemporary people and the territory they once occupied. It can lead to investment in understanding one valued indigenous culture to the exclusion of understanding the others that Honduras recognizes. And it undermines attempts fostered by some Honduran intellectuals to forge a national identity that recognizes historical complexity for a nation today working to accommodate various forms of difference.

As MRG puts it

For most of its post-independence history the culture of national unity forged by the state has been on the basis of a mestizo ideal... As a consequence traditional indigenous and minority populations have historically been marginalized, ignored or discriminated against....

This despite the fact that

Unlike other countries of the region, in the 1980s Honduras officially recognized the multicultural composition of its society and the need to protect the economic, cultural and human rights of its ethnic peoples. This helped to create an official space for indigenous and minority populations to work towards having their rights recognized and their needs addressed.

So yes, it matters when a photographic exhibition planned to be shown nationally and internationally erases local identity. And it is especially ironic when this takes place in the context of re-discovering the complexity of European heritages of modern Honduras.

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A historical footnote: the erasure of Pech identity and its replacement by Maya identity has a long literary history.

When Christopher Columbus made his only landfall on the mainland of the Americas in 1502, it was on the north coast of Honduras, across from the Bay Islands-- that is, in the region of La Ceiba. He had first captured a canoe off the island of Guanaja, which, like Roatan, was likely inhabited by Pech speaking people. Most reports today identify the canoe as "Maya traders", ignoring the original accounts, written closest to the time of the incident. These clearly identify the canoe as coming from one of the islands, and its passengers as local people.

Most pernicious, modern accounts base the identification of this canoe on a sixteenth-century general historian, Peter Martyr d'Anghiera, who wrote that

this vast region [the mainland of northern Honduras] is divided into two parts, one called Taïa and the other called Maïa

Or, that is what he is said to have written. In fact, the manuscript of his book clearly has "Païa", not "Taïa", the name previously used for the people who call themselves Pech.