Book Talk: Christopher Loperena Presents "The Ends of Paradise"

Please join us when Christopher Loperena presents his book, The Ends of Paradise: Race, Extraction, and the Struggle for Black Life in Honduras (Stanford University Press, 2022).

The future of Honduras begins and ends on the white sand beaches of Tela Bay on the country's northeastern coast where Garifuna, a Black Indigenous people, have resided for over two hundred years. In The Ends of Paradise, Christopher Loperena examines the Garifuna struggle for life and collective autonomy, and demonstrates how this struggle challenges concerted efforts by the state and multilateral institutions to render both their lands and their culture into fungible tourism products. Using a combination of participant observation, courtroom ethnography, and archival research, Loperena reveals how purportedly inclusive tourism projects form part of a larger neoliberal, extractivist development regime, which remakes Black and Indigenous territories into frontiers of progress for the mestizo majority.

Christopher Loperena is an associate professor of anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His research examines Indigenous and Black territorial struggles, land, extractivism, and the socio-spatial politics of economic development.

Cosponsored by the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies, the Institute for Research on Labor & Employment, the Association for Economic Research of indigenous Peoples, the UCLA American Indian Studies Center, and the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center.