The Life and Times of Santos Centeno García: A Black and Indigenous Communist Confronts US Imperialism in Caribbean Honduras (1933–1963)

Abstract This article explores the political struggles of Central America’s Black and Indigenous peoples, particularly the Afro-Indigenous Garífuna and the Afro-Caribbean communities of Honduras in the 1950s and 1960s. Although these communities have not always articulated their struggles within the discourse of decolonization, their positionality as Black and Black-and-Indigenous subjects and their race- and class-conscious politics nonetheless represent decolonizing aspirations and strategies. Honduran mestizo nationalism has erased the country’s African and Indigenous heritage while exacerbating anti-Black racism and poverty. This article showcases this history of radicalism by highlighting the life and organizing work of Santos Centeno García, a communist, labor leader, and organic public intellectual. Facing poverty, racism, and displacement, he and other Black radicals took on the brave fight to organize militantly against US imperialism and racial capitalism on multiple fronts, including in labor unions, the Communist Party, and an antiracist organization called the Abraham Lincoln Cultural Society. Importantly, their struggles were both deeply rooted in centuries-long anticolonial practices and informed by the country’s radical working-class movements. Scholars of decolonization can learn from the Honduran case, in which freedom and justice were expressed in terms of race and class, even in a broadly race-blind society.