A Garífuna woman scrubs clothes on a washboard in the Honduran coastal village of Chachawuate.

The Garífuna culture was born when a slave ship wrecked off St. Vincent in 1635, throwing together West Africans aboard the vessel with St. Vincent’s Carib Indians, originally immigrants from South America. Today some 60 Garífuna fishing villages dot the Central American coast.

(Photo shot on assignment for, but not published in, “The Garífuna: Weaving a Future From a Tangled Past,” September 2001, National Geographic magazine)