Tiny Spaces, Big Ideas - Daisy E. Guzman Nunez

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:08][no audio] [DAISY GUZMAN NUNEZ] Hello! My name is Daisy Guzman Nunez.

[00:00:13]I am the Global Black Studies professor in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, and my topic is “In Our Mother's Gardens: A Research and Ethnography On Garifuna Women's Migration From Guatemala To New York City” specifically Izabal Guatemala, the Caribbean coast of Guatemala, and going to the south Bronx of New York where I'm from.

[00:00:36]This  research takes place between 1963 and 1996 during the height of of the Guatamalan Civil War.

[00:00:44]The importance of these dates is in history, we see the dismantling and rearranging of history as told through the Mayan and K’iche history of this war, but we rarely see the voices of Guatemalan Garifuna people, especially Garifuna women. So, what I am doing in my work is putting forward the voices of Garifuna women and what was happening to them from Livingston to New York.

[00:01:12]How were they able to migrate during this time? How were they able to use mutual aid in order to get to New York City?

[00:01:20]What's important in 1963 to 1996 is the civil rights movement, the fact that women were not able to have bank accounts, and these women were able to bring 9-10 family members at a time from Guatemala to New York.

[00:01:35]Also, the Happy Land fire of the 1990s, which was the largest fire  in New York City since the fire of the factories, and at the same time the first black mayor of New York City, that shapes how we understand Garifuna-American life.

[00:01:50]So all of this I am doing through a  black feminist lens in order to add to the branch of Black women's intellectual history, but Black women's intellectual history from Central America, and also using Black ethnography, thinking of Zora Neale Hurston's work and using narratives and storytelling in order to engage histories in the way that we normally wouldn't see it, right?

[00:02:14]To use the voices of the women to tell that medical history, geography, also the uses of language because Garifuna women are operating in three languages simultaneously -- English, Garifuna and Spanish -- all learned through their interactions with diaspora in Guatemala, and then in New York City.

[00:02:35]Most of the books that we know now think people are introduced to Blackness and Black diaspora once they reach the United States, which is a very narrow understanding of how Black diaspora works across the Americas. So, with this work, I lean into Toni Morrison's “Site of Memory” where are we learning what Blackness means to Black people outside of the United States? I lean into bell hooks' understanding of geography, what becomes Garifuna spaces in Guatemala, but also in New York City. So this work is diasporic, but it's also ethnographic.

[00:03:12]It’s not retelling a history, but adding on to history. Think of Saidiya Hartman's work, “Wayward Lies,” but also “Venus in Two Acts,” where we're left in the margins,  and what happens when history is told from the  margins.

[00:03:26]And it also contributes to Latin-American studies in a way that centers the Blackness that shapes Central America, right?

[00:03:35]And how mestiza has built on anti-Blackness and the erasure of indigenous history and Black history that forms the nation. When we think of Garifuna people, they are a Black indigenous people that were exiled from St. Vincent in 1797, exiled to Honduras, and then moved to Belize, Guatemala, and Nicaragua.

[00:03:58]And through that diaspora, we form our own history in Central America that's usually left out of canonical history books.

[00:04:05]So when we think of a Central American migration, we rarely think of the Black migration that was  happening during the civil wars and dirty wars of the 1960s and ’70s. It is now that we're seeing a Haitian migration in Central America that we're now putting race in La Bestia, or that border crossing from Mexico into Texas. But there was a time when women were using race against border control and using racism against them because one of my interviewees said, "As long as I didn't speak, they thought I was African-American and I crossed the border with no problem."

[00:04:44]And those are the women that shape history and makes it whimsical, makes it interpersonal and takes out the continuous trauma that we see of Garifuna people just dying or just performing.

[00:04:59]And it puts agency back into the women in the way that they were able to tell each other, and tell the next generation, what requires from them, and how our ancestors did this over centuries, from St.  Vincent, to Livingston, and eventually, New York. What I do in my work is I build on my grandmother, and then I bring it to my generation, and what does it mean now to grieve these people, and to lose this history that's passed down orally, and what does it mean now to write it down, and write it in their voices and not from a Black feminist lens that we see in 2026, but how Black feminism was actually shaped by them in the 1960s.

[00:05:47]My name is Daisy Guzman, and that is my Big Idea.

[00:05:51][DEAN DAVIDSON] Awesome. [applause, fades to silence]