RIP Andy Palacio

I had just begun to get excited about Andy Palacio's music and his 2007 release Watina, when, shortly after arriving in New York, I learned he had died on Jan. 19, at the age of 47, of a massive stroke. A couple of weeks ago I attended an event at New York's City Hall where he was honored by proclamations and speeches; in attendance was Paul Nabor, a remarkable octogenarian who toured with Palacio's Garifuna Collective through Europe and elsewhere. It could be said that Palacio was to Belize and especially the Garifuna culture, what Bob Marley was to Jamaica and the Rastafarians in the 1970s and early 1980s. The Garifuna are descendants of African slaves shipwrecked in the 17th Century who intermarried with Arawak Indians; their unique language is a mixture of African and indigenous and also borrows from English and Spanish. The Garifuna live in Belize, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua, but arguably, their spiritual Mecca is a little fishing village in Belize named Hopkins. In Hopkins the local elementary school teaches kids in Garifuna, and generally the village is the most faithful repository of Garifuna culture and language (it is also the setting for the video below). The Garifuna are now even more a diaspora community than ever, with tens of thousands living in the Bronx, and in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities. Palacio was instrumental in inspiring Garifuna youth to identify with their endangered culture, and elevate their music (including raucous Punta Rock) into the world music pantheon. Here is "Watina", an exemplar of the mellow parranda genre: