Honduran Sayings Quotes

One might say that modern Honduran history began in 1873, when Jules Verne introduced Americans to the banana in his novel Around the World in 80 Days, where he praised it as being “as healthy as bread and as succulent as cream.

San Pedro Sula: second-largest city in Honduras, a million and a half people, murder capital of the world. Out loud, he says, “Ah, you are Honduran.” “No,” Rebeca corrects him. “Ch’orti’.” Luca makes his face into a question. “Indian,” she explains. “My people are Ch’orti’.” Luca nods, even though he doesn’t really understand the difference.

Trust the holy instincts within you—the instincts of compassion aroused by the Holy Spirit. Yes, politics are always complicated, but what does Jesus want your attitude to be toward Syrian refugees, Honduran asylum seekers, and undocumented day laborers? You already know. You’ve always known. Some will say power trumps everything, but you’ve always known that mercy triumphs over judgment.

In many places, the past fifteen years have been a time of economic turmoil and widening disparities. Anger and resentment are high. And yet economic policies that might address these concerns seem nearly impossible to enact. Instead of the seeds of reform, we are given the yoke of misdirection. We are told to forget the sources of our discontent because something more important is at stake: the fate of our civilization. Yet what are these civilizations, these notions of Muslim-ness, Western-ness, European-ness, American-ness, that attempt to describe where, and with whom, we belong? They are illusions: arbitrarily drawn constructs with porous, brittle, and overlapping borders. To what civilization does a Syrian atheist belong? A Muslim soldier in the US army? A Chinese professor in Germany? A lesbian fashion designer in Nigeria? After how many decades of US citizenship does a Spanish-speaking Honduran-born couple, with two generations of American children and grandchildren descended from them, cease to belong to a Latin American civilization and take their place in an American one? Civilizations are illusions, but these illusions are pervasive, dangerous, and powerful. They contribute to globalization’s brutality. They allow us, for example, to say that we believe in global free markets and, in the same breath, to discount as impossible the global free movement of labor; to claim that we believe in democracy and human equality, and yet to stymie the creation of global institutions based on one-person-one-vote and equality before the law. Civilizations encourage our hypocrisies to flourish. And by so doing, they undermine globalization’s only plausible promise: that we be free to invent ourselves. Why, exactly, can’t a Muslim be European? Why can’t an unreligious person be Pakistani? Why can’t a man be a woman? Why can’t someone who is gay be married? Mongrel. Miscegenator. Half-breed. Outcast. Deviant. Heretic. Our words for hybridity are so often epithets. They shouldn’t be. Hybridity need not be the problem. It could be the solution. Hybrids do more than embody mixtures between groups. Hybrids reveal the boundaries between groups to be false.

The main perpetrators of violence against the homeless tend to be other homeless people, or drug dealers, according to people who have lived on the streets. “There wasn’t a day that went by without violence on the street,” said Tom about his time living homeless in the Tenderloin. “Someone getting in a fight. Beat up. Shot for drugs. One of the Hondurans [drug dealers] would whip out a machete and chop at a guy’s arm because he had used a counterfeit five-dollar bill. That doesn’t get brought up at the community meetings. The only people talking to the Board of Supervisors are Harm Reduction Coalition and homeless advocates who paint this very different picture of the homeless being victimized. They point at the politicians saying, ‘You’re all victimizing them!’ with the sweeps.