Hurricane Hattie, which struck Belize City, Stann Creek Town, and all points in between, some fifty years ago on October 31, 1961, caused major, irreversible changes in Belize, which was then the colony of British Honduras. Even though the September 10, 1931 hurricane, whose eye demolished Belize Town, killed ten times as many as Hattie did, Hattie was more significant, in that Hattie changed our history in this settlement.

After Hattie, people in the capital began building out of reinforced concrete, the PUP government of First Minister George C. Price committed to building a new capital inland, and, perhaps most important historically, the ancient trickle of Belizean migration to the United States became a flood, an exodus in fact.

In a decision which is even more remarkable now, when viewed through the prism of fifty years of history, the United States Consulate in Belize announced a few days after Hattie that all those Belizeans who had relatives living in the United States would be allowed to fly to those relatives in the States. We do not even remember, if we ever knew, if the permission to migrate had any conditionalities, such as until the situation in Belize became normalized. We do not know if Belizeans had to buy airline tickets, or if the Consulate made airplanes available. For sure, where Belizeans in America were most numerous in 1961 were New York City, Chicago, and New Orleans. Los Angeles was just becoming a big deal in 1961, and today, fifty years later, L.A. may now be the biggest Belizean deal of all.

Over the thirty years from 1961 to 1991, the demographic of Belize changed in a visible and dramatic way. The majority black colony became a Hispanic independent nation. This process began with Hattie, and it is evidence of the weak intellectual life we have in Belize that Hattie and the migration have not been the focus of the research, analysis, and discussion that they should have been and should still be.

One of the reasons for the hostility of the Central American republics to Belizeans’ sovereign ambitions had been the majority black population, which leaders and thinkers in Central America considered an incongruous ethnic reality which imperial Great Britain had imposed on the region. Around 1978, when Panama’s General Omar Torrijos became the first Central American leader to endorse Belize’s aspirations for self-determination and independence, the composition of our population had changed enough that the Guatemalans, who claimed the territory of Belize was theirs by legacy from Spain, could not raise the bogeyman of blackness in Belize as successfully as they had been doing before. In a sense, perhaps, in contributing to the changing of the demographic of Belize, Hattie contributed to the political independence of Belize.

Before the self-governing colony of British Honduras officially became known as Belize in 1973, what we know today as Belize City was just plain Belize. And the capital of Belize, which housed one third of the population of British Honduras in 1961, dominated the overall life of the colony. The capital dominated public administration, education, banking, the media, sports, and everything else you could think of. The road system was horrible in 1961. It took six, seven hours to reach places like Corozal Town and Stann Creek Town from the capital, and literally all day to reach Punta Gorda. Children whose parents wished for them to attend high school, had to come in from the districts to live in Belize. It was as if they were entering a different world in the capital.

Today, while Belize City has grown and spread impressively over the five decades since Hattie, its prestige has declined massively. Belize City, whose families were tight and disciplined before Hurricane Hattie, is now notorious in the rest of Belize as a place where young people are involved in crime, violence, and murder to a horrifying degree. Even before the seat of government and public administration moved to Belmopan in 1970, the humbling of the arrogant city folk had begun. In the late 1960’s, a small sugar village in Corozal by the name of San Joaquin began to win the annual football tournament sponsored in Belize City. Cayo and Stann Creek had challenged Belize City football in the years before, but it was San Joaquin which triumphed. Things were never the same in Belizean football after San Joaquin. The districts had arisen. And Belize was never the same as a city after Hattie.