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The strangest thing about the truth is how often it arrives late. A story your elders carried for years gets dismissed as “just talk” until an archive opens, a report drops, a government admits wrongdoing, or scholars finally confirm what communities already knew. When that happens, the past doesn’t simply become clearer. It becomes heavier, more complicated, and harder to tuck away. In today's episode, I offer a reflection on Caribbean history, memory, and what it means to relearn entire narratives, not just “humanize” individual historical figures. I think through why truth is less a single revelation and more a long process, shaped by silence, denial, and distortion.

Then comes the question that won’t let go: what does reconciliation actually require? Forgiveness, acknowledgement, accountability, compensation, structural change? And who gets to decide when it’s “done”? If you care about Caribbean history and culture, political violence, colonial legacies, activism, and public memory, this reflection is for you. Subscribe, share the episode with a friend, and leave a review, then tell me how you choose to carry your history forward.

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Today, we reshare our reasoning with Dr. Paul López Oro to trace the Garifuna story across Caribbean history, from St Vincent and the Carib Wars to forced exile in 1797 and the building of communities along the Central America Caribbean coast in Honduras, Belize, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and beyond. Along the way, we wrestle with what it means to be Black and Indigenous at the same time, especially in societies that insist those identities must be separate.

We dig into the “void in the archive” and why collective memory and oral tradition become more than storytelling. For Garifuna communities, memory shapes political life right now: claims to ancestral territories, fights for land rights, and daily resistance to anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity in nationalist narratives that erase contributions made long before the modern republics were born. From there, we explore Garifuna Settlement Day as an embodied archive and a public demand for visibility, first in Belize and later in New York City. We connect diaspora routes to labor history in the United States, including pathways through New Orleans and the long work of building community “in the company of” other Black populations.

Dr. Paul Joseph López Oro is an Assistant Professor and Director of Africana Studies at Bryn Mawr College. He is a transdisciplinary Black Studies scholar whose teaching and research interests are on Black Latin American and U.S. Black Latinx social movements, Black diaspora theories and ethnographies, and Black Queer Feminisms. His research interests include Black politics in Latin America, the Caribbean and U.S. AfroLatinidades, Black Latinx LGBTQ movements and performances, and Black transnationalism. He is working on his first book manuscript, Indigenous Blackness: The Queer Politics of Self-Making Garifuna New York, is a transdisciplinary ethnographic study analyzing oral histories, performances, social media, film, literary texts and visual cultures to unearth the political, intellectual, cultural and spiritual genealogies of Garifuna women and subaltern geographies of Garifuna LGBTQ+ folks at the forefront of Garifuna transnational movements in New York City.

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Headlines turn migration into a single story about borders and crisis. We open the lens, traveling through the Caribbean and Latin America to reveal routes, identities, and cultural worlds that rarely make it into the frame. Joined by co-editors Dr. Patsy Lewis and Dr. Kristen Kolenz, we share how our new book, Unbordering Migration Studies in the Caribbean and Latin America, brings together scholars and artists to map movement beyond the U.S.-centric view.

We dive into case studies that challenge assumptions: Venezuelans navigating layered sovereignties in Curaçao and Trinidad, Haitian communities negotiating visibility and exclusion, and Chinese migration in Central America shaped by shifting ties between Taiwan and China. We unpack racial triangulation and diaspora politics from Miami to New York, examining how belonging shifts across languages, borders, and Blackness. Along the way, we discuss a people-centered approach that recognizes migrants as creators of social worlds, economies, and culture. Through interdisciplinary methods, we build a toolkit for studying migration that is rigorous, humane, and usable for students, organizers, and policymakers.

Patsy Lewis is Research Professor, Department of Africana Studies, Brown University. She specializes in the political economy and development challenges of the Caribbean. Her publications include Caribbean Regional Integration: A Critical Development Approach; Caribbean Integration: Uncertainty in a Time of Global Fragmentation, Co-edited with Terri-Ann Gilbert-Roberts and Jessica Byron; and Surviving Small Size: Regional Integration in Caribbean Ministates.

Kristen Kolenz is an assistant professor in the international studies program and co-chair of the gender studies program at Centre College in Kentucky. Before joining the Centre faculty in 2022, she was a postdoctoral associate in the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown University and earned her PhD in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at The Ohio State University. She also recently published “Mesomapping the Borderlands: Seeing Life, Making Home, and Thinking Iteratively” in Aztlán.

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Looking to read more about the topics covered in this episode? Subscribe to the newsletter at www.strictlyfactspod.com to get the Strictly Facts Syllabus to your email!

Want to Support Strictly Facts?

• Rate & Leave a Review on your favorite platform
• Share this episode with someone or online and tag us
• Send us a DM or voice note to have your thoughts featured on an upcoming episode
• Donate to help us continue empowering listeners with Caribbean history and education

Produced by Breadfruit Media