By Ted Kleine
Belizeans began settling in Chicago in the early 1960s, after Hurricane Hattie flattened Belize City. Hoping to earn money to rebuild their families’ homes, thousands left their tropical homeland to find work in the U.S. Many of those who came here found work as domestics in North Shore mansions, which helps explain the large numbers of Belizeans in Rogers Park and Evanston. Today the community numbers almost 10,000, enough to support two restaurants, a travel agency, and a barbershop. Look in the window of any one and you’re likely to see a poster for a dance at a local banquet hall featuring “the hottest band from Belize.” Check out a car cruising Clark Street north of Devon and you may see a Belizean flag dangling from the rearview mirror.
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At a table in the middle of the parking lot sat three elderly Creoles who had come of age when the country was called British Honduras and the Union Jack flew from every flagpole. In the midst of this independence celebration, they were trying to keep alive Belize’s original patriotic holiday: Saint George’s Caye Day, which commemorates a battle in 1798 between the Baymen–English buccaneers loyal to the British Empire–and troops from Spain, which wanted to add the colony to its Central American empire. Because the British won, they said, Belize kept the English language–an incalculable advantage to immigrants–and avoided the cycle of coups and revolutions that has plagued its neighbors Guatemala and Honduras.
Guidebooks call Belize “mind-bogglingly diverse.” It’s a white supremacist’s worst nightmare, a portrait of what America might look like someday. The country’s prime minister is a Christian Arab named Said Musa. The Belizeans at the celebration mentioned ancestors from Spain, Africa, England, bloodlines that go back to the Mayan empire. Tony Young spoke of researching his Scottish ancestry. He seems not to consider this at all incompatible with his pride in his African ancestry. To Belizeans, “racial purity” is a ridiculous concept. Everybody comes from everywhere. A yearbook-style gallery of photos of the Belizean parliament shows every skin tone from English pink to equatorial coffee.
