In honor of our 17th birthday, SPACE is excited to present this concert as a FREE community event, co-presented with Indigo Arts Alliance!
The Garifuna Collective is a pan-generational musical group from Belize that has been performing the music of the Garifuna people for more than 20 years. They have performed in over 30 countries across 5 continents. Their critically acclaimed album Wátina was a recipient of the Womex and BBC World Music Awards and voted by Amazon as the “#1 World Music Album of All Time” (besting albums by Bob Marley, Celia Cruz, Ravi Shankar, and others).
The Garifuna are descendants of Afro-indigenous people from the Caribbean island of St. Vincent, who were exiled to Central America by the British in the 18th century. Garifuna culture was forged when slave ships carrying captured Africans wrecked off the coast of St Vincent in the 1600s. The survivors swam ashore, mixed with the island’s indigenous Arawak population, and created a unique, resilient culture of free people that resisted European colonial powers for over 100 years. Their defiant culture persists to this day, in communities in Honduras, Belize, Guatemala and Nicaragua, where their distinctive language, customs and music are preserved and continue to evolve.