Bodoma Garifuna Cultural Band

Great performance at the 2nd Annual Bronx Celebration Day at Fordham University!
The garínagu (plural for garífuna), an ethnic group made up of Africans who were never enslaved and Arawaks and Carib indigenous people, have inhabited the coasts of Honduras and other Central American countries since the late 18th Century and have their own language and culture, according to the non-profit North American Congress on Latin America.
The band was started in 2002, and meets and rehearses from a first-floor apartment facing the street in a NYCHA building on Longfellow Avenue. Bodoma Norales, 42 and the band’s leader, regularly speaks in parables, recounting the culture’s history to anyone who is interested in learning about Garífuna culture. In his view, the 400-year-old ancestral chants that are passed from generation to generation hold proof that their people already inhabited the ancestral lands when his home country of Honduras was founded, making them indigenous.