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Punta and the Garifuna story

The Garifuna were deported en masse from Saint Vincent in the eighteenth century and kept their language, religion and music intact through the whole of it.

Saint Vincent, 1797

The Garifuna — also called Garinagu — descend from Africans and Indigenous Caribs who intermarried on Saint Vincent, forming a distinct people. Uniquely in the region, they were never enslaved on the island; they held territory and fought the British to keep it.

After the Second Carib War the British deported them. Some five thousand were removed to the island of Baliceaux, where roughly half died, and the survivors were shipped to Roatán off the coast of Honduras. From there they settled along the Caribbean coasts of Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Belize.

They arrived on Belizean shores in the early nineteenth century, and the date is now commemorated as Garifuna Settlement Day on 19 November — marked with a re-enactment of the landing by dugout canoe at Dangriga and Punta Gorda, and drumming that runs through the night.

Through deportation and dispersal across four countries, they kept their language, their religion and their music. UNESCO has recognised the culture for exactly that reason.

Punta

Punta is the best-known Garifuna rhythm, traditionally played on two drums — the primero and segunda, made from hollowed hardwood with deerskin heads — with shakers, turtle shells and call-and-response singing, most often led by women.

It is dance music with a specific and quite demanding movement, and it is associated with wakes and celebrations of life as much as with parties. The lyrics are in Garifuna, an Arawakan language with Carib and African elements that is unrelated to Spanish or English.

Punta is not a folkloric survival performed for visitors. It is current, functional music, and children learn the drumming.

Punta rock

In the late 1970s and 1980s the Belizean musician and painter Pen Cayetano electrified it. Punta rock adds guitars, keyboards and modern production to the traditional drums and rhythm, and it became Belize's national popular music.

The timing mattered. Belize was moving toward independence, and punta rock arrived as a distinctly Belizean sound at a moment when the country was defining itself against both British colonial inheritance and its Spanish-speaking neighbours.

It spread to the Garifuna communities in Honduras and Guatemala and to the large Belizean diaspora in Los Angeles, New York and Houston, and it remains the music most identified with the country.

Paranda and the quieter side

Paranda is punta's counterpart: Garifuna singing with acoustic guitar, slower and more melancholy, closer to a ballad tradition. It absorbed Latin American guitar styles from the surrounding countries and produced some of the most affecting music in the region.

It came close to disappearing. A recording project in the 1990s tracked down elderly paranderos across Belize, Honduras and Guatemala and documented them, which brought international attention and encouraged younger musicians to take it up. Andy Palacio's work in particular carried Garifuna music to audiences that had never heard of the culture.

Alongside these sit the sacred forms — the dügü ceremony and its associated drumming and song — which are not performed for outside audiences and are not recorded.

How to listen

Belizean stations are the primary source, and the two peaks in the year are September, when Saint George's Caye Day and Independence Day combine into weeks of celebration, and 19 November for Garifuna Settlement Day, when the dial turns over almost entirely.

Saint Vincent — where the story starts — has its own connection, and the relationship between the island and the Garifuna diaspora has been actively revived in recent decades. Very little Garifuna music is carried outside Central America and the diaspora, so streaming is effectively the only route to it. The stations below carry it live.

Stations from Belize and Saint Vincent (23)

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