When Yolanda Castillo was a little girl in Belize, she learned to make hudut baruru by laboriously pounding green and ripened boiled plantains in a deep, carved wooden mortar with a long wooden pestle.
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The West African castaways escaped from the slavers and integrated with the islanders, a mix of Arawak and Carib peoples. When British colonists showed up on Saint Vincent in 1763, the “Black Caribs,” as the Brits called the Garifuna, resisted alongside French settlers for decades, eventually surrendering in 1796. The British rounded up some 5,000 Garifuna and moved them to the Honduran island of Roatan, an ordeal during which half the population died from starvation and disease. Many survivors migrated to mainland Honduras, where most of the approximately 250,000 Garifuna worldwide live now; others moved to coastal southern Belize. Their descendants have branched out into U.S. cities such as Los Angeles, New York, and—like the Castillos, who came in 1986—Chicago.
Garifuna culture hasn’t been invisible in Chicago. Yolanda’s husband, Rhodel, has helped organize music and dance performances at the Evanston Arts Festival, the Field Museum, the Museum of Science and Industry, and the Chicago Cultural Center and consulted on The Garifuna Journey, a documentary by Evanston filmmaker Andrea Leland that features one of his poems. Musician Andy Palacio, who used rhythms in the Garifuna dance music punta to develop punta rock, played Millennium Park in 2007, a year before his death at age 47. But until about a year and a half ago, apart from a restaurant operated by a Honduran couple that closed about ten years ago, there’d been no place to taste Garifuna food.
The restaurant has become a hub for local Garifuna, but they’re not the only clientele. “We have Belizean Creoles coming in,” says Rhodel. “We have African-Americans, Mayan, Spanish. Belizean mestizo people. We have Caucasians.” So Yolanda also has a repertoire of Belizean and more familiar Caribbean dishes not exclusive to the Garifuna: tostones, jerk chicken, stewed oxtails, a giant tamale encasing a whole chicken leg, and panades, deep-fried mini empanadas for which she spends whole days boning the buffalo fish that gets hashed and stuffed inside. You can also find garnaches, tostadas topped with a schmear of black beans and, oddly, shredded cheddar cheese and ketchup; these are vastly improved by a dose of the thin, oniony habanero salsa that comes on the table.
2516 W. 63rd, 773-776-7440, garifunaflava.com
