Not "A Nation of Immigrants": Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Since independence, the United States has never allowed Central Americans to pursue their own destiny. With its foothold of British Honduras (now Belize) as a colony and indirect economic control of eastern Honduras and Nicaragua (the Mosquitia), British imperialism, through unequal trade in Central America after its independence, paved the way for US economic dominance and military interventions. The Federal Republic of Central America did not survive British imperialism, and the small separate states, governed by elites of two warring parties and reliant on mono-agribusiness—bananas and coffee—owned by foreign companies, were too weak to defend their countries from the predatory Great Britain and United States.