It’s a fair bet that when Honduras take the field against France in their opening match at the 2014 World Cup they will have the whole of their small Central American nation behind them. But Marvin Chávez and the rest of the Catracho squad are also likely to carry the hopes of hundreds of thousands of people beyond the country’s borders for whom the team will be a dynamic expression of their little-known culture.

Chávez, a speedy winger with Chivas USA of Major League Soccer, is a member of the Garifuna ethnic group, along with other key members of the Honduras squad such as the Palacios brothers, Wilson and Jerry, and the Houston Dynamo striker Óscar Boniek García.

“If I’m not mistaken there’s nine of us – almost the majority!” he says, with pardonable exaggeration. Given that less than 2% of the Honduran population of nearly 8 million are Garifuna, nine out of 23 isn’t bad going.

The Garifuna people live along the Caribbean coast of Central America, from Belize in the north, through Guatemala and Honduras, all the way down to Nicaragua. Large Garifuna communities have also sprung up more recently in US cities, including New York and Los Angeles.

Chávez’s Garifuna identity was on display in Kingston, Jamaica, last November, when Honduras confirmed their qualification for Brazil 2014 with a 2-2 draw. Chávez, who was among the substitutes, caught the eye with a haircut that had the words Seremei Bungiu – “Thanks to God” in the Garifuna language – shaved in the side.

“I’m proud, more than proud of my culture,” he says. “Ours is a very special culture, a special history. It’s something that’s been recognised internationally.”

The ancestors of the Garifuna were a mixture of shipwrecked and runaway enslaved Africans and the native Amerindian inhabitants of the Caribbean island of St Vincent – where outsiders knew them as Black Caribs. In 1797, after decades of resistance to the British colonialists, the little over 2,000 survivors of a genocidal war were deported 1,700 miles away to Honduras. For more than 200 years, they have preserved their language and a unique culture that has been hailed by Unesco and has latterly reached a global audience through musicians such as Aurelio Martínez and the late Andy Palacio.

Chávez is adamant on the need to keep alive a language that is directly descended from the Arawak tongue spoken in the Caribbean at the time of Columbus.

“It’s a beautiful language and parents need to keep teaching our children so that they never forget the Garifuna dialect,” he says.

He is at a loss, though, to explain why the Garifuna make such good players. “I don’t know why we’re good at football,” he shrugs. “It’s a gift from God.”

Honduras have appeared twice before at World Cups but have yet to register a victory. Even scoring a goal would be an improvement on their showing four years ago in South Africa. Chávez is clear, though, about what the squad’s ambitions are for Brazil:

We’re in a difficult group. We know all about what France can do. Ecuador has good players. Switzerland we’re familiar with. But we believe in ourselves. We’re there to make history.

He is dismissive of the suggestion that facing the Swiss, with whom they drew 0-0 at the 2010 World Cup, in steamy Manaus in their third match could be an advantage. “I don’t know about that. We’ve got to concentrate on the first match. That’s the match that’s going to set the tone and the task for us.”



What Chávez lacks in height – he stands 5ft 5in – he more than makes up for in speed. His nickname, acquired in Honduras, where he represented his hometown club of Victoria in La Ceiba and Marathón in the commercial capital, San Pedro Sula, is Hijo del Viento – Son of the Wind.

Chávez scores twice on his Chivas USA debut.

For the past five years his pacy contributions have been sought after by a succession of clubs in the US, from FC Dallas to San Jose Earthquakes to Colorado Rapids. His latest move, to Chivas USA in California, which coincided with his selection for the World Cup squad, was marked with a two-goal cameo on debut against his previous club – demonstrating his potential as an impact substitute. He did, though, start Honduras’s final friendly, against England in Miami, and came as close as anyone to breaking the deadlock with a whipped free-kick just over the bar.

The World Cup is, of course, football’s biggest shop window, as the left-back Emilio Izaguirre found when he secured a £600,000 move to Celtic four years ago. Chávez believes some of his international team-mates could join him in the US.

I think that a league like the MLS is always looking for good players, whether it’s from Honduras or other countries. Every year it’s getting better. I’m lucky. I’m playing in an important league. Life has treated me well.

Chávez, 30, did not make the cut for the Honduran squad four years ago and mainly featured from the bench in the qualifiers. But he is determined to seize his chance in Brazil and he is sure that the presence of such a passionate non-Honduran support base will only spur the team on further.



“The fact that there are such a lot of Garifuna players in the group means that the Garifuna people will be supporting the whole team,” he says. “And that will make us try all the harder to do well and to work hard to make them happy.”



Chávez shoots during Honduras's World Cup warm-up match against Israel in Houston. Photograph: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images Photograph: JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images

Carlos Gamboa, a Garifuna community leader who lives in New Jersey, is confident that Garifunas in the US will come together to watch Honduras’s World Cup games: “Absolutely. I think we all will, aside from being of different nationalities – such as Belize, Nicaragua, Guatemala, the United States too – we’ll all rally behind them.”



For Gamboa, whose own uncle, Santín Gamboa, was a Guatemalan international, support for the Honduran team is an example of how Garifuna identity transcends national boundaries.

“And,” he adds, “I think it speaks volumes about how great Garifuna young men are at soccer.”

Chris Taylor is the author of The Black Carib Wars: Freedom, Survival, and the Making of the Garifuna.