The Mermaid and the Lobster Diver

Gender, Sexuality, and Money on the Miskito Coast

Laura Hobson Herlihy

• Publisher: UNM Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780826350930
• eBook ISBN: 9780826350947
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: Social Sciences

Approximately 90 percent of Miskitu boys and men in the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve along the north coast of Honduras have worked as deepwater divers in the lobster industry and their participation has left an indelible imprint on their society. While lobster diving is lucrative, it is also a life-threatening occupation and many divers have been injured or killed from decompression sickness—locally referred to as liwa mairin siknis (Mermaid sickness). According to Miskitu folklore, the Mermaid is the main water spirit, owner of all fresh and saltwater resources and capable of punishing male divers for extracting too many of her lobsters. Wary of the wrath of the supernatural liwa mairin, these men face another threat on shore: Miskitu women who use sexual magic—praidi saihka—as a tool to control men’s wages and ensure that they continue to provide them with money.

Interspersed with short stories, songs, and incantations, The Mermaid and the Lobster Diver demonstrates the archetypes of femininity and masculinity within Miskitu society, highlighting the power associated with women’s sexuality—as manifested in both goddess and human form—and the vulnerable position of men.

PART I: Historical Fact and Anthropological Fiction

Chapter I: The Miskito Coast

History, Place, Identity

The Miskito Coast (northeastern Honduras and Nicaragua) is the binational homeland of the indigenous Miskitu people.

Miskitu people trace their ancestry to the mid-seventeenth century, when Misumalpan, Macro-Chibchan-speaking Amerindian women residing at Cape Gracias a Dios married British and other Europeans, mulattos, and black free men and slaves. In 1710, ethnohistorian Mary W. Helms reports, nine hundred blacks were brought to the Miskito Coast from Ghana, Gambia, Togo, and Benin. The black men married Indian women, who then raised their mixed-race children as culturally Miskitu (Helms 1971:23–28; Newson 1986:283). Helms (1971) and Eduard Conzemius (1932) contend that intermarriage continued from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century. Helms (1976:9) says of the Miskitu: “These so-called Indians are a biologically mixed people originating during the colonial period from miscegenation between indigenous women of eastern Nicaragua and British settlers, buccaneers, and especially Negro freemen and slaves who sought the isolated shore as refugees from Spanish and West Indian colonies or were brought to the coast as laborers by English planters.”

Map 1. The Miskito Coast (Map Credit: Kendra McSweeney, 2011)

Due to their mixed-race identity (black and Indian), the colonial Miskitu became known as Zambos y Mosquitos, Zambos-Mosquitos, or just Zambos.1 The Zambos-Mosquitos expanded as a population group during the colonial era, while most other Amerindian populations diminished in numbers and experienced significant culture and language loss. Helms (1977:158–59) reports that the success of the colonial Miskitu people was due to their positive interactions with outside economies (see also Holm 1978:186). Most significantly, they expanded their territory and refortified their ethnic identity through interactions with the British. The British made political and economic alliances with the Miskitu, armed them with muskets, and hired the men to fight against the Spanish. Miskitu militiamen also raised their muskets to dominate the neighboring Pech (commonly called Paya) and Tawahka-Sumu (who speak one of the Misumalpan languages) indigenous groups through a “raiding and trading” economy. Some scholars have theorized that the name of the Miskitu people came from the word “musket,” yet geographer Bill Davidson (personal communication, Honduras, 1997) contends that the people were named for the Mosquito Keys, a group of small islands located just off the coast of Cape Gracias a Dios.

The British Presence

The British originally colonized the Central American Caribbean lowlands mainly because the Spanish Crown had rejected the idea, due to the region’s small population numbers and the lack of gold, silver, and other precious metals. By the mid-seventeenth century the British more broadly established their presence in the Greater Antilles along the Miskito Coast, in the islands off the Nicaraguan coast, and in Jamaica, Grand Cayman, and later, Belize. Jamaica became the seat of the British Crown and Grand Cayman, its military outpost. Belize was dec...

Table of contents

• Figures, Maps, and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I: Historical Fact and Anthropological Fiction
• PART II: Social Economies of Power
• Part III: Supernatural Women
• Conclusion
• Afterword
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index