The Guatemala they don't want you to see 🇬🇹

[Music] [Music] right now i'm on the rio dolce which is a beautiful region on the caribbean coast in guatemala and i'm heading to the town of livingston which has no road connections so i'll be having to take a boat to get there to get to livingston i'm doing a boat ride from puerto barrios a larger town that is accessible by road so this boat ride it's about 20 minutes 25 minutes and i'm driving along the caribbean coast it's beautiful i i'm just thinking this way is guatemala if you go further that way you're in the caribbean islands and seeing the sunset over livingston was only the best experience you could get coming into this town now it's time to search for speakers of gurifuna in livingston and understand more about this beautiful little town's history in livingston the main population is garifuna so the gerifuna language is actually arawakan this is a family that stretches all the way from paraguay to puerto rico well there used to be a language called taino that is now extinct but this was all part of the arawakan family and garifuna actually happens to be one of the most widely spoken arawakan languages in the central american region so i start my journey in livingston i get off the boat and i head into town to search for speakers of the garifuna language in guatemala there's about 12 000 speakers almost all of them in livingston so i start my journey by heading to the area of town where they all live you from america see you what brings you guys here let's get it from us that's difficult to see hey that's not easy to see no no guys nice don't exist and they were home right yeah only living we're going like we're going extinct exactly a long time ago this was all black a long time ago but now we've lost we're going extinct all these businesses there's no blacks working it's all mayans my culture is totally going gone kaput we're trying to save little bit i'm a leader here oh yeah i'm phillip flores if you look in the internet and the books i'm in the lonely planet the rough guys are really yemen i am we're fighting to save much of what is left of gallery flood they use garifuna to call tourists but it when you read all the books everything when you go livingston you will see a different culture a whole different anomaly that is huge we have just been used as a but not but when you get here you say to yourself where are they because we don't exist it's like we're non-existent when you guys come the first thing they pull you on that side to the foreign hotels so you support them yeah they know and but they're not in cahoots with us to say oh man you guys should go see the gary sooner they're telling they don't include us we are totally out of it right now we're fighting to save the educative system the garifuna language they gave on our way of doing things in our cuisine our arts our culture is totally not here this is our chinese so you come here to see garifuna very interesting what do you know about arizona i know a little bit about the language what is the language we got it gotti but i don't i'm trying to like find just some speakers that can talk about the language like you are right now and the language has totally done the food that language there is very it's very little left with the language we're more speaking french more french the guy is nice friends when the friends like the numbers right the numbers the weekdays laindy marty jody method wanna do something the most of the words window for net you know uh amidi ah the names of the animals the first was a higher language at that time so so the people aspire to become to speak french so most of the the friends when they help us out on the water against the british i would say okay wherever i am no it is gay that language is a mixture of french and arawa right the arawa and carib right a little white carrot i think is it were they like mixing with the islanders is that it who are they carrots they're from south america right they're like the guyanas yeah who are they not sure you have to do your history friend yeah where do you think the black people here come from i don't it seems like i'm not sure it's either like a slave slave we are the carrots our ancestors are the carrots we man this we control this we inhabited this the sea was named for us the caribbean we are the carrots the africans came after they came around the cave corn they had coming from africa they had to come to five different cities to come into [Music] right the africans you find jamaica jamaica africa cuba africa haiti africa but they don't speak they can't speak caribbean they speak patois girls and pacquiao a mix of african and english instead of saying where you're going it's a way away instead of yeah all right my language the care is completely different from that yeah it's otherwise you know the jamaica when you're hearing people that's a whole completely different language they have to adhere to the white man's language they've been whipped so in order to get that whip away from i have to try and understand you it makes sense hey man we met but you have internet yes yeah we do yeah look at look at google phillip flores yeah google just look my name is p-h-i-l-i-p f-l-o-r-e-s of livingston of livingston look for it uh how many people speak garifuna here we are only twelve thousand here twelve thousand and do all of them speak or is it we're fighting to teach that right let me i'm here in there awesome i don't like some i won't lie to you because this is why i deal with truth yes everything there is um i've been there it's a lot a lot of people put me in vlogs there i just before i went to germany on a symposium i'm in those things there cuz we also imposed him about you speaking so speaking yeah you do some speeches yeah yeah yeah he has a a uh youtube channel uh tj his name is tj it's called the planet project and uh the purpose of the channel is to identify uh cultures and languages like like yours that are at risk or endangered and to well this is really at risk and endangered you know so this is my culture so we have a big effort into saving it mostly our emphasis is on the kids you know did you go to the village no we just started walking down this way here no you've never been to the gym here during the civil war when the civil war in guatemala the wire never reached here so they come running in cape for a tasty what is livingston only caring for so they hate me see this is where garifuna will start from here this is it but i'll make that's the flag what is this that's the original name of this place not living la buga is the name ingarison it means isolated isolated i mean i always wondered why livingston is right from the english and even though we see the color of our flag [Music] you have to grate the coconut before we cook we have to beat the platano this is derived from the africa and we eat i will make our bread out of the most poisonous root there is there you go the a snake trying to eat a foreigner's frog we made a thing like a snake i have the poisonous milk upgraded past in there foreign this is here from here ah this one oh after the hurricane when was the hurricane what year 98 98 this is our area see but it's divided over there where you watch my aladdin foreigner but i'm glad they don't come mess with us because we are left alone our father is still in touch that's good question why is happy me as an indian he speaks my language better than me oh yeah and after the hurricane we adopted him when his parents died [Music] he's in the wheelchair so we feed him i'm just just now that he's too early when it's working like completely look is this our village this is it this is the authentic and the ring arizona village tourists not know how to get here they don't see this um [Applause] well foreign foreign this is our culture this is now but this is we live like what you call basically a part-time apartment [Applause] separate foreign okay can i take pictures can i take a picture okay so how many years have you spent in the united states twelve years [Applause] my favorite house commercial below [Music] so when did from and then it was the reason they came to the center on there because no reason they got they get kicked out they got shipped by the english it was designed for us to drown the waves that's watched us [Applause] so it's um if any surprise that i rest up why not smoke something you know i pass on that we have to set examples for the yeah this is how they want us to be this is the very platform they want us in you know i try to tell this is not the platform we need to be out of this platform i'll be doing [Music] things so when did it start when they started to get treated so poorly or just living in not so good conditions being black is being worse be black in guatemala is one time you guys have a way of cleaning it up afro-american afro this you don't say black guy's offensive being black and sunny was worse cause you'll always be black negro negro negro negro within it so stigma take my time do people see germaphone as like uh i don't know but we're ghetto or like like they're gonna rob you and stuff like that is there that oh yeah you got that big man oh that's why i'm surprised they didn't tell you that oh you don't go around there watch out these guys below these guys are cannibals you know one guy told me that one i mean he told me an american i read you guys were cared about i said maybe we were wiser we don't kill you to waste you kill it for me no i just turned his back on i heard you guys calling about i said maybe we were smarter we don't kill you to waste you get it for me man thank you so much you gotta give me your phone yeah your number you don't have a card no i do have your number but okay you gotta find that i'm gonna figure it out and once i can figure it out if you get a call it'll probably be for me from the united states i'll figure it out thank you thank you thank you [Music] [Music] to get back to the mainland i have to take a boat from livingston to puerto barrios so i do that and it's about 30 minutes yet again while on this boat i just think of all of the amazing things that i saw in this small town and i also think about the conditions under which the garifuna live in a lot of these endangered languages that i've encountered sometimes it's hard for a lot of cultures to preserve their culture when their lifestyle isn't the best and sometimes it's hard for them to preserve it when they decide to choose another culture over their own or speak another language like spanish and livingston but i do have hope for the gerifuna because they seem to be a quite resilient race and they're beyond prideful of their language their culture and their practices and i can't wait to see the future of the gurifuna people in this area um uh okay

Channel: The Planet Project

Views: 621,780

Rating: 4.8825974 out of 5

Keywords: Garifuna, Livingston, Guatemala, Caribbean, Arawak, Carib, Garif, Central America, Latin America, The Planet Project, TJ Huizar, TJ Languages, Black, Indigenous

Id: 9VcE5iV1Wm4

Length: 28min 42sec (1722 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 19 2021