In Search of Our Mothers' Voices: An Auto-Ethnography on Garifuna Women’s Feminist Praxis

In the South Bronx, three generations of Garifuna New Yorkers continue to uphold the maternal network cultivated by Garifuna migrants. Through autoethnographic scenes, this article considers the public and private spaces of the Garifuna women’s matrilineal network in the South Bronx. By exploring my conversations with my mother and aunts, I actively navigate and form an intimate archive of race, gender, and migration through the lived experience of first-generation Garifuna-Guatemalan migrants in the Garifuna hub. Garinagu women navigate the South Bronx as cartographers, embodying an ancestral sense of space and creating maps and subjectivities that are simultaneously Black and Indigenous. Stories told in women-led spaces shape the subjectivity of Garifuna New Yorkers by utilizing the performativity of Garifuna(ness) to map the metropolis through their proximity to other Garinagu and Afro-diasporic communities. Black feminist ethnography and participatory mapping ground my experience as a Garifuna woman, a subjectivity constructed due to continuous displacement, dispossession, and racial violence. Garifuna women are embodied archives of ancestral memories, and I theorize that we remember our ancestors through autoethnographic work connected to my mother and matrilineal network.