Mapping Deception: The Politics of Mapping Miskito and Garifuna Space in Honduras

Abstract

In Latin America, indigenous and Afro-descendant land movements find traction in participatory mapping projects. The success of these projects is measured in a variety of ways: from the abatement of land conflicts to the employment of these maps in winning state-sanctioned ownership “rights.” Although worthy of celebration, such “countermapping” projects (Peluso 1995), often exemplified by the practice of binding a particular culture (or ethnicity) to a particular space, might arouse contradictory outcomes. Drawing from ethnographic interviews with Miskito and Garifuna communities on the Honduran Atlantic coast, this article reflects on the Consensus Mapping of Shared Boundaries Project (CMSBP), an indigenous countermapping initiative inside the Honduran Mosquitia. In this work I argue that racial power and racialized processes constrain the emancipatory possibilities of countermapping in multiple ways. Such power and processes legitimate the devaluation of subaltern land claims and, in Honduras, contribute to the legitimacy of ladino incursions inside Miskito and Garifuna space.