An Afro-Indigenous people of the Caribbean coast of Central America — chiefly Honduras, Belize, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, with a large diaspora in the United States. The Garifuna (or Garínagu) formed on the island of St. Vincent from the mixing of Indigenous Island Caribs with Africans, were deported by the British in 1797 after years of resistance, and carried across the sea an Indigenous language, a distinctive music and spirituality, and a way of life that UNESCO named a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.
In 1797, British ships carried more than two thousand people across the Caribbean Sea and put them ashore on a small island off the coast of Honduras. The British called them Black Caribs and wanted them gone. These people were largely African in descent, yet they did not speak any African language, nor English, nor Spanish. They spoke an Indigenous tongue of the islands they had just lost. They had been born as a new people on the island of St. Vincent, out of shipwreck, escape, intermarriage, and years of resistance to British rule. From that beach, they spread along the coast and became the Garifuna.