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PEOPLES OF BELIZE

Belize is small, but its population of less than 200,000 is miniscule, even for a country of its size. With all the available elbow room, and the lack of roads and other communications, several ethnic groups have been able to maintain their separate identities. The different peoples of Belize eat and think and dress in their own ways. Even the houses of one group differ from those of another.

How did they all get here? The ancestors of some of today's Belizeans inhabited the country for thousands of years. Others came as slaves. But Belize has also been a haven for the oppressed and the outcast. The forebears of many a Belizean arrived as refugees from war, servitude, and laws that encroached on their ways. If they found no riches, they were at least able to live unmolested.

African heritage predominates among Belizeans, followed by American Indian and European. According to the 1980 census, 40 percent of Belizeans are Creoles, 33 percent are mestizos, about 10 percent are American Indian, or Mayan, 8 percent are Garifuna, and 4 percent are white. The remainder are of some other descent, including East Indian, Lebanese, and Chinese. But cultural groups in Belize transcend racial lines, and with intermarriage, and occasional crossovers in cultural identity, the picture is even more complicated than the figures indicate.

CREOLES are the dominant ethnic group in Belize. They make up more than half the population, and are the people who most think of themselves as Belizean. Though predominantly African in origin, Creoles come in all shades, and it's perfectly possible to be blond, blue-eyed and a Creole, for the term also denotes a way of life.

Most Creoles are descended from the first Scottish buccaneers and wood merchants and their slaves. Social relations in the early days of the Bay Settlement were remarkably easy for the times. Labor was in short supply, and masters could not afford to mistreat their slaves. The racial prejudices of strait-laced society and of the plantation had no place, and interracial unions were never anything but the norm. Racial distinctions between black and white soon blurred, and social distinctions as well.

Creoles dominate the commerce and administration of Belize. For the most part, they live in Belize City and the larger towns. Traditionally class-conscious, they have always spurned farming as beneath their dignity, a heritage from the boom days when logging was lucrative and nobody worked the land.

The Creole language is mellifluous, picturesque, and hardly intelligible to outsiders who speak English. Archaic usages and phrases abound. A backra is a white man, the term deriving from the raw backs of whites who stayed in the sun too long. A meal is tea, as it still is in Ireland. Syllables are stressed as if to maximize rhythm. No social stigma attaches to speaking Creole, as it does in some of the former British islands; all classes converse in the lingua franca. Fortunately for outsiders, Creole Belizeans are also adept at a more standard and equally charming form of English.

It is not a racial stereotype or a prejudice to say that Creoles love partying and good times. In the old days, workers spent their advances at the start of the logging season on liquor. Other wild times were seen at the end of the season, and throughout the idle time when the forests were too wet to be worked. The carousing tradition has been carried to the present. Labor is not the only part of life; there are love and liquor when the work is done, and dancing and music. The Creole brukdown, recognizably Caribbean, is Belize's national music.

The Creole diet is another legacy of the logging life. Rice and beans, easily stored and carried to lumber camps, are still staples. Though spiced up with fish or meat and fruits at home, Creole food, as served to outsiders, is usually bland.

A few African values survive among Creoles: some believe in spirits, charms and black magic. Drinking gatherings, with communal stews of game, take place at holidays in rural areas. But, despite the traditional distance between cultures in Belize, practices have been inevitably exchanged. Anthropologists have noted Creoles in the western Cayo district seeking cures from Mayan prayer men; and Catholicism, once the religion only of the Mayans and mestizos, now counts many adherents among the Creole population.

In central and southern Belize live the BLACK CARIBS, also known as Garífunas, or Garinagu, a people unique to the eastern shore of Central America. To outsiders, a Black Carib may be indistinguishable from a Creole Belizean. But Caribs jealously guard their separate identity and language. Though less than eight percent of the population, they play an important part in national life.

The origin of the Caribs lies in an obscure bit of colonial history. The Carib Indians of South America had, by the seventeenth century, conquered a number of islands in the Lesser Antilles. After Europeans arrived in the Caribbean, escaped and shipwrecked slaves found refuge among the Caribs. Intermarriage resulted in a people predominantly African in racial makeup, but speaking an Indian language, and with a culture that combined African and Red Carib customs.

The conflicting paths of the Caribs and British eventually led to armed conflict. Caribs on the island of St. Vincent rebelled against British authority in 1795. They were subdued and deported to the island of Roatan, off the coast of Honduras, and from there, traded and settled along the coast of Central America. By the 1820s, several thousand were living in southern Belize.

For outsiders, Carib culture is fairly impenetrable, and that is the way the proud Caribs prefer it. Legends about the Caribs abound. Some speak of dark religious practices, or a secret royalty. With or without legends, however, they are a fascinating people.

Caribs are gifted linguists. Many are fluent in the Spanish of nearby Guatemala and Honduras, and some speak the Mayan Indian tongues of the interior, as well as Creole English.

When a Carib dies, days of chanting follow the burial. On festive occasions, Caribs celebrate with street dancing and processions, often in masks and costumes. John-Canoe (or Yankunu) dancers perform before Christmas for money, drink, or homemade candies. A conch shell is blown at midnight on December 24. But other ceremonies are kept by the Caribs to themselves. The religious practices of the Caribs combine African and Indian ceremonies with the Catholicism brought by Europeans.

Many Caribs are fishermen and traders, and the group is well represented among Belize's schoolteachers. Unlike most Creoles, Caribs also work the land. The staple of their diet is cassava, a root that requires laborious processing to remove harmful acids.

Among visitors, and maybe even among Belizeans, Caribs are best known, perhaps, for their music. Cungo is a local offshoot of Jamaican reggae. Punta rock, most notably performed by Andy Palacio and Children of the Most High, is machine music with the syncopations of the islands, appended through maracas, drums and turtle shells.

Caribs often have Hispanic surnames which, for outsiders, serve as a clue to ethnic identity when other signs are confusing.

MESTIZOS are the second-largest cultural group in Belize. Most are descended from refugees from the Caste War in Yucatan in the nineteenth century. Others migrated to the western Cayo district from Guatemala, and more recently, refugees from El Salvador have made their way to Belize.

Mestizos speak English in commerce and when dealing with outsiders, but Spanish is their language at home. Spanish has official status in Belize, and many non-Hispanic Belizeans can get along in the language, which is becoming increasingly important as trade links with Mexico and Central America develop. In the north and in Belize City, the accent is Mexican; in the west and south, Guatemalan.

The mestizo areas of Belize have much in common with neighboring Yucatan and Guatemala. Towns center on a main square, and social life focuses on the Catholic church built on one side of it. The humdrum of small-town existence is punctuated throughout the year by fiestas—religious celebrations—at Christmas, Good Friday and Easter, and on the day of a town's patron saint.

For many years, Mestizo towns were virtually independent of Belize City. The colonial administration, with few services to offer, kept out of strictly local matters. Law and order were in the hands of an alcalde, or headman, selected by consensus of the more important townspeople. This system lived on in Belize after it had been discarded in neighboring lands. Local government in mestizo towns, as elsewhere, in now in the hands of elected councils and courts.

Mestizo food is, of course, mainly Mexican food. Black beans and tortillas—pancakes made from ground, lime-soaked corn—are staples. The diet includes squash and plantains, and peppers and spices. Nowadays, Mexican food is as popular with non-Hispanic Belizeans as it is with gringos in the States: nearly everybody in Belize enjoys tamales and tacos.

Many mestizos are farmers, raising corn and beans and sometimes pigs for themselves, along with a few cash crops. The principal of these is sugar cane, the source of Belize's main export, refined sugar.

MAYANS were the earliest inhabitants of Belize.

Even after the collapse of Classic Mayan civilization, Mayans continued to live in what is now Belize. By the time Europeans arrived, the population was semi-permanent, moving from time to time as milpas—corn fields—were burned and cleared and planted and abandoned.

All of the indigenous people of Belize today are called Maya, though they belong to three distinct ethnic groups, and are only partly descended from the original inhabitants. Their languages are related, but different enough from each other that members of one group cannot understand those of another. Though they live mostly apart from each other, they have come to share a common identity as Indians.

Yucatecan-speaking Maya have inhabited the north of Belize for hundreds of years. Their numbers were bolstered by immigration during the Caste War in Yucatan in the nineteenth century. The Yucatecan Maya are almost entirely a rural people. Many still move periodically to burn off and plant new corn patches. Now, they sometimes must pay a rental fee to a private owner or the government for the use of land.

Living among mestizos as they do, many Yucatecan Maya speak Spanish as well as their own language. Most live in distinctive huts of plastered limestone with steep thatched roofs, though modern concrete houses are becoming more common.

The Kekchi Indian inhabitants of the southern Toledo district first came to Belize from Guatemala in the nineteenth century to labor on sugar plantations. When the plantations were abandoned, some returned to Guatemala, but others turned to subsistence agriculture. Paradoxically, the Kekchi immigrants included descendants of the Chol Indians who originally populated the south, but were deported by the Spaniards hundreds of years before. When forced labor was introduced on coffee plantations in Guatemala in the late nineteenth century, more Kekchis migrated to the forests of southern Belize, away from interfering authority.

The Kekchis settled San Pedro Columbia and a few nearby villages, where for years they lived virtually independent of the rest of Belize. They built their houses entirely of rough-hewn planks and palm thatch from the surrounding forests, and made their own utensils and furniture. Their trading links were with distant Cobán in Guatemala, from where merchants brought cloth by forest trail.

Kekchi isolation has lessened in recent years, as roads and teachers have reached their settlements. Government-guaranteed prices have brought the Kekchis into the market economy: some grow rice and red beans to sell in the Carib towns on the coast. Others have worked at times in the forests or as agricultural laborers to earn money to buy radios and other consumer items.

The third group of Mayas, the Mopan, live in the western part of the Cayo district at Succotz, near Benque Viejo, and in the south, at San Antonio and in smaller settlements. Despite their proximity, the Mopan and Kekchi in the south have mostly kept to their separate villages.

All three Indian groups of Belize have a rich cultural heritage. Their religion is a combination of the Catholicism brought by early missionaries, and the native practices that continued to flourish despite church teachings. The traditional native gods of the harvest and rain and thunder and of the other key elements of Indian life were retained after the conquest, though some were given the names of Catholic saints. Prayer men, who were able to cure illness with chants and charms, and communicate with the powers of the universe, and herbal healers, continue to function in the absence of priests and doctors. The oral tradition of the Indians tells of demons who inhabit the forests and must be avoided or tricked, of clever animals with human attributes, of spirits who must be appeased with incense and prayers before a corn plot is cleared. These old practices and beliefs are slowly being lost as radios, satellite television, roads, churches, teachers and clinics bring in the ways of the outside world.

Among the smaller minorities in Belize are whites (or Europeans), East Indians, Chinese and Lebanese. The Lebanese form a small and highly successful urban trading class, as they do in much of Latin America. The few Chinese Belizeans, both descendants of agricultural laborers and recent immigrants, are now mostly proprietors of small shops.

Creole society absorbed the descendants of the early Scottish settlers, but there has always been a small white minority. Some were British colonial administrators, others were Europeans who saw commercial opportunities in Belize. North Americans, from unreconstructed Southerners to timber entrepreneurs to bankers, have come to Belize over the years in small numbers. Recently arrived American farmers and ranchers are growing rice and vegetables and raising cattle both for the local market and for export.

Some of the most visible of the recent immigrants are Mennonites, members of an Anabaptist religious sect who trace their origin to sixteenth-century Switzerland. Over the years, the Mennonites have wandered to Russia, Canada, the United States, Mexico and Paraguay, closing themselves into tight-knit communities, refusing military service, preserving their archaic Low German dialect, and shunning as flamboyant and ungodly any but the simplest clothing and decoration. Most Mennonite sects reject mechanization, and employ only human and animal labor. In 1959, 3000 Mennonites from Chihuahua—members of a community that had fled to Mexico from encroaching modernity in Canada thirty years before—settled in the Orange Walk area. Their pact with the government exempted them from military service and compulsory insurance programs. Later immigration increased the Mennonite population.

The Mennonites faced great difficulties in adapting their traditional grain cultivation to the tropical climate, and some natives were initially hostile. But gradually, they have transformed themselves into Belize's premier market gardeners, and are now the major producers of poultry and eggs, as well as suppliers of fruits and vegetables. As they have entered more and more into the world of commerce, some Belizean Mennonites have become less strict about adhering to the old ways. The most conservative have emigrated to more isolated communities in Bolivia. Mennonite men and women, in denim coveralls and simple print frocks, are now seen not only near their settlements in the Orange Walk district and in the west, but wherever in Belize their business takes them.