Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion

By Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús

Santería is an African-inspired, Cuban diaspora religion long stigmatized as witchcraft and often dismissed as superstition, yet its spirit- and possession-based practices are rapidly winning adherents across the world. Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús introduces the term copresence” to capture the current transnational experience of Santería, in which racialized and gendered spirits, deities, priests, and religious travelers remake local, national, and political boundaries and reconfigure notions of technology and transnationalism. Drawing on eight years of ethnographic research in Havana and Matanzas, Cuba, and in New York City, Miami, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay area, Beliso-De Jesús traces the phenomenon of copresence in the lives of Santería practitioners, mapping its emergence in transnational places and historical moments and its ritual negotiation of race, imperialism, gender, sexuality, and religious travel. Santería’s spirits, deities, and practitioners allow digital technologies to be used in new ways, inciting unique encounters through video and other media. Doing away with traditional perceptions of Santería as a static, localized practice or as part of a mythologized past,” this book emphasizes the religion’s dynamic circulations and calls for nontranscendental understandings of religious transnationalisms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Sep 29, 2015
• ISBN: 9780231539913

Book preview

Electric Santería

GENDER, THEORY, AND RELIGION

GENDER, THEORY, AND RELIGION

Amy Hollywood, Editor

The Gender, Theory, and Religion series provides a forum for interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of the study of gender, sexuality, and religion.

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Elizabeth A. Castelli

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Susan Ackerman

Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity,

Jennifer Wright Knust

Bodily Citations: Religion and Judith Butler,

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Naming the Witch: Magic, Ideology, and Stereotype in the Ancient World,

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Dying to Be Men: Gender and Language in Early Christian Martyr Texts,

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Tracing the Sign of the Cross: Sexuality, Mourning, and the Future of American Catholicism,

Marian Ronan

Between a Man and a Woman? Why Conservatives Oppose Same-Sex Marriage,

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Promised Bodies: Time, Language, and Corporeality in Medieval Women’s Mystical Texts,

Patricia Dailey

Christ Without Adam: Subjectivity and Difference in the Philosophers’ Paul,

Benjamin H. Dunning

Electric Santería

RACIAL AND SEXUAL ASSEMBLAGES OF TRANSNATIONAL RELIGION

Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús

Columbia University Press

New York

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York   Chichester, West Sussex

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Copyright © 2015 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-53991-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Beliso-De Jesús, Aisha M.

Electric Santería : racial and sexual assemblages of transnational religion / Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús.

       pages cm. — (Gender, theory, and religion)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-17316-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-17317-9 (pbk.) — ISBN 978-0-231-53991-3 (electronic)

1. Santeria—Cuba. 2. Cuba—Religious life and customs. 3. Santeria—United States. 4. United States—Religious life and customs. I. Title.

BL2532.S3B45 2015

299.6'74—dc23

2014043951

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

COVER IMAGE: Jura, photograph, Marta María Pérez Bravo

COVER DESIGN: Milenda Nan Ok Lee

A version of chapter 5, Contaminating Feminities, was published as Contentious Diasporas: Gender, Sexuality, and Heteronationalisms in the Cuban Iyanifa Debate.

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 40, no. 4 (June 2015).

Portions of this book originally appeared in the following journal articles: Santería Copresence and the Making of African Diaspora Bodies,

Cultural Anthropology 29, no. 3 (Aug. 2014): 503–26.

Religious Cosmopolitanisms: Media, Transnational Santeria, and Travel Between the United States and Cuba, American Ethnologist 40, no. 4 (Nov. 2013): 704–20.

References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Para Padrino Alfredo

Obá Tolá niré elese Olodumare, alá Aganyú

Contents

AUTHOR’S NOTE

PREFACE   Despedidas

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION   Transnational Santería Assemblages

CHAPTER ONE   Electric Oricha

CHAPTER TWO   Transnational Caminos

CHAPTER THREE   Pacts with Darkness

CHAPTER FOUR   Scent of Empire

CHAPTER FIVE   Contaminating Femininities

EPILOGUE   A Death at Dawn

GLOSSARY

NOTES

REFERENCES

INDEX

Author’s Note

Transnational Santería practitioners are from diverse backgrounds, nations, and ethnicities, and those I worked with spoke Spanish or English with Lukumí words among other languages. Lukumí, the language of the oricha, is a Cuban-creole form of Spanish, Yoruba, and Congo languages from colonial times. This book reflects this use of Lukumí-creole Cuban orthography. For ethnographic interlocutors I have used some actual names of practitioners who wished to appear in this book and have their contributions noted publicly. However, for most American-based santeros traveling illegally between Cuba and the United States, and for Cuban nationals who engaged in sometimes compromising relationships with foreigners in Cuba, I have changed details to ensure ethnographic anonymity.

Preface

Despedidas

Alfredo Calvo Cano was born and died in Matanzas, Cuba. A life-long practitioner of several African-inspired Cuban religions, Alfredo bore many titles.¹ He was olú batá, owner of the sacred batá drums; tata mayombero, a palo-congo elder; iyamba, a leader in an abakuá men’s religious society; obá oriaté, a consecrator of Santería, and high priest of the oricha (deity) Aganyú. He was the head of a complex house of saints (casa de santo) that practiced multiple Afro-Cuban religions. Although he never left the island, he traveled more than anyone I knew. Playing Afro-Cuban drums from town to town, he was an itinerant godfather, caring for children in different cities, and with godchildren (ahijados) who came from across the world for his religious expertise. While his carnet de identidad (Cuban identity card) listed April 24, 1930, as his date of birth, others disputed this, claiming that he had taken five years off when he registered himself. As if traveling through time as well as territory, for all the years I knew him, he was always seventy-six. After four years in which he failed to advance to seven-seven, I teased him that if seventy-six was young, then he must really be old. Alfredo, eyes twinkling, pursed his lips in a smile that wrinkled his aged but smooth dark brown skin and chuckled at his own unknowable age. When I learned that Alfredo, a man legendary for his strength and good health, was gravely ill, I was shocked. Those who knew and loved him had planned to be in Cuba for his priesthood initiation day (cumpleaños de santo) celebration. Unfortunately, I, like several of his godchildren from Mexico and the United States, arrived too late. At the end of August 2011 I arrived in Cuba to observe Alfredo’s death rituals instead of what would have been the sixty-sixth year of his priesthood. Regla, the mother of one set of his children, who had known him longer and more intimately than most, swore to me that Alfredo was born in 1925. So Alfredo was either eighty-one or eighty-six on August 26, 2011, the day he died. Had he lived four more days, he would have celebrated sixty-six years as a priest of the oricha Aganyú.²

Since beginning field research on Santería in Cuba in 2002, I have spent most of my time in Alfredo’s house of saints. Alfredo was godfather to many Cubans and foreigners, most of whom addressed him as padrino. It is difficult to tally his initiates because Padrino Alfredo felt it was wrong to count heads. Unlike many Santería priests who proudly proclaim the exact number of crowns (priests) they have initiated, Padrino Alfredo told me that counting took away lives. The only way to estimate the number he initiated was by counting the notebooks (libretas) that record the signs (odu) of new priests as they begin their life paths (caminos) as santeros. The godchild usually copies one libreta, but the primary notebook stays with the godparent. At the time of his death, Alfredo had over seven hundred libretas—but those were only the ones he had kept. Toward his later years he would sometimes send the iyawó (new priest) home to copy their libreta, and it would never return. He was never too strict at tracking down libretas, so there is no way to be exact. However, given that most priests’ initiate anywhere from zero to forty crowns over their lifetime (with forty being a hefty number), over seven hundred initiates is an astonishing tally. Needless to say, Alfredo was an exceptional example of Santería productivity, and his influence across global oricha worlds is immeasurable.

Like the oricha Aganyú whom he served and embodied, Alfredo can also be described as a transatlantic traveler.³ He did not have to physically leave Cuba to be constantly moving. He was always on the go, working rituals in different small towns across the island, with famous godchildren in Havana, Santiago, Sancti Spiritus, Cárdenas, and Colón. The priests he spiritually birthed live in near and distant places; their corresponding oricha, in the sacred stones (otán) he had given them, also travel and live with them in Mexico, Canada, Spain, England, Brazil, and the United States. Several CDs and DVDs document Alfredo’s spiritual power and religious expertise.⁴ Like other religious elders, Alfredo’s presence continues to affect both through new media technologies and through his transnational connections. His godchildren play his DVDs and CDs, conjuring his presence and invoking his teachings. These recordings, played in small tenements in Matanzas and Havana, are also bought, uploaded, and shared among practitioners who have never stepped foot in Matanzas. With the increasing uses of new media technology, spirits, oricha, and even practitioners are understood to travel through television screens, and practitioners are sometimes possessed as they watch ritual videos. During an online chat, a young twenty-something priest in New York City told me that he was possessed with his oricha while watching a video online. He sent me a link to what he described as the most powerful Ocha [oricha] stuff he had ever seen. It was a clip from Padrino Alfredo’s DVD where he was singing to the oricha Changó. The young man had no idea that he was sending me a link to my own godfather. He had never traveled to Cuba or been possessed through a television screen, but since watching Alfredo’s video he told me, I’m going for sure. To Matanzas.

Santería-regla Ocha is no longer the religion of a particular ethnic group, but the spiritualistic response to the socioeconomic and cultural necessities of people with different educational or cultural backgrounds (Pollack-Eltz 2001, 121). Rather than attempt to understand Cuban identity or nationalisms through Santería, this book examines the multilateral construction and circulation of transnational religious assemblages. Religion, I suggest, becomes a key tool for intervening in transnational framings of Santería and is especially useful for exploring larger questions of how Cuban nationals and American-based religious travelers are producing religious cosmopolitanisms (Beliso-De Jesús 2013a). Combinations of diverse national, racial, sexual, gender, and socioeconomic positionalities of practitioners situate this religious experience transnationally.⁵

Electric Santería explores the transnational experience of this religion in what I call copresences—the spirits, deities (oricha), priests, video technology, and religious travelers that operate in contemporary transnational networks as active spiritual agents. Drawing on Santería philosophies of movement, this book examines the experience of these copresences in the everyday lives of transnational practice—how they are sensed in transnational places and different historical moments, and how practitioners must negotiate the politics of race, gender, sexuality, imperialism, and religious travel that are implicated in these feelings. I argue first that different religious notions of being (ontology) transform practitioners’ everyday experiences and lives. Second, by understanding Santería’s relationship with copresences, Electric Santería calls for an alternative understanding of media and transnationalism. By moving away from a representational analysis to one of assemblages, I suggest we can hold in tension how conceptions of being complicate the politics of race, gender, and sexuality in transnational religions. The prose of the text reflects the complexity of the various copresences that electrify transnational Santería. I deploy different writing styles to highlight the academic, spiritual, and political projects that compete and collide in this religious practice. Writing through copresences allows me to disrupt the fixity of any singular ethnographic present or historical moment. This book takes us on a tour of the sensual experience and transnational practice of this moving religion.

Acknowledgments

My father, Peter De Jesús (Obindé Omó Yesá), a Santería consecrator, master drummer, and priest of Ochún, first brought our family to Matanzas in the early 1990s. His guidance and inspiration, along with that of my mother, Dolores; my siblings, Lee Sandra, Amber, Isabella, Damian; and my stepmother, Janet, have shown me what the love and dedication of transnational oricha worship and family can foster. My two sons, Ernesto and Pilli, have endured all of the trials and tribulations of this journey and have motivated me in the most difficult times. My Cuban family also provided care, inspiration, and guidance. Milagros de la Caridad Velasco Oviedo, my research assistant and Cuban sister, made this work possible, accompanying me on interviews, lending moral support and crucial advice, and opening her home and heart. Padrino Alfredo (ibae) and his family, Juana Regla, Alberto, Agustín, Cosme, Damian, Regla and the many other members of the egguadó house in Matanzas, provided me with a profound entry into religious becomings. I am grateful to the many copresences who led me through this ethnographic camino: Ma Monserrate, Ma Fermina, Elpidio Alfonso, Cristobal Puertas, Roberto Clemente, Diane Mc Elhiney, Manuel Amador, Martin Bonney, María De Jesús, and the other loved ones who rest at the feet of Olofí.

This book could not have been written without generous support from the Ford Foundation, Harvard Divinity School (HDS), the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard, the Harvard University Provost’s Office for Faculty Development and Diversity, the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University, the Center for African Studies at Stanford, the Office of Graduate Diversity at Stanford, and the California State University Doctoral Incentive Program. The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard funded a book conference that provided productive dialogue. My thanks to the excellent scholars who participated in this event: Tracey Hucks, Alan West-Durán, Jacob Olupona, Michael Jackson, and Charlie Hallissey. Heartfelt thanks to Kamari Clarke, who, in addition to taking part in the book conference, served as my mentor during my Ford postdoctoral fellowship at Yale’s Department of Anthropology and continues to inspire me. John Jackson Jr. also participated in the workshop, and is a wonderful friend. Amy Hollywood, the editor of the Religion, Gender, and Culture Series with Columbia University Press, chaired the book conference and is a cherished colleague, mentor, and astute interlocutor.

Many read, gave feedback, and helped fine-tune this book. Students of the Religious Tourisms course at HDS and teaching fellows David Amponsah and Kate DeConinck read early selections and provided valuable insight. Amanda Ginsberg worked diligently as a research assistant. Solimar Otero read multiple versions of the text, always giving crucial feedback and making me smile. David Ikard and Kristina Wirtz also gave invaluable suggestions and have been amazing colleagues. Practitioners who provided early feedback include Tina Gallagher, Stephan Goldstone, Nurudafina Abena, Nelson Rodriguez, and Scott Hoag, modupué. The editorial skills of Wendy Lochner, Christine Dunbar, Anitra Grisales, and Brad Erickson have also been immeasurable.

While I cannot name all the transnational Santería practitioners who shared their stories, thank you for humoring me and allowing me to record your intimate accounts. In Cuba I would like to thank Graciela, Barbarita, Regla, Yorlacy, Teresita, Lisandra, Alexander Cairo, Ricardo Borfil, Alina, Gordo, Lázaro, Barbarito, Mansúnsún, Kiki, Michel, Oluo Fernando, and so many more. In the United States, Carlos Aldama Pérez, Yvette Aldama, Sergio Figueroa Torres, Christina Velasco, Greg Landau, Edgar Chamorro, Jesús Pérez, Bobi Céspedes, Jesús Suarez, Ernesto Pichardo, Michelle Martin, Jima Brown, Lisa Arieta-Hayes, Lupe Avila, Pilar Leto, Frank Leto, and Armando Ocanto Rodriquez.

The Stanford Department of Anthropology encouraged me to explore a complicated transnational topic. My doctoral committee chair and mentor, Sylvia Yanagisako, continues to provide witty advice and unwavering support, and Paulla Ebron always gives important nudges with kindness. I thank you both for your honest criticism and encouragement. My doctoral committee members, Jim Ferguson and Renato Rosaldo, also helped sharpen my analysis and provided crucial suggestions.

I am grateful to the committed scholars, students, and staff of Harvard University. Colleagues at HDS—Janet Gyatso, David Carrasco, Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Jonathan Walton, Mayra Rivera Rivera, Leila Ahmed, Anne Braude, Kevin Madigan, Stephanie Paulsell, Dan McKannan, Karen King, Laura Nasrallah, Ahmed Ragab, Charlie Stang, Giovanni Bazzana, Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, Diane Moore, Cheryl Giles, Dudley Rose, Kimberley Patton, and Mark Jordan—have been an inspiration. Deans David Hempton and Bill Graham provided important resources to enable research and writing. Darlene Slagle has given me critical guidance. Thanks to the Lowell House family: Diana Eck, Dorothy Austin, Beth Terry, Brett Flehinger, and Suzanne Lane. Many colleagues across the yard provided encouragement and friendship: Judy Singer, Jorge Dominguez, Marla Frederick, Larry Bobo, Marcyliena Morgan, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Merilee Grindle, Lorena Barbería, Vince Brown, and Ajantha Subramanian. A special thanks to Henry Louis (Skip) Gates, Jr., and the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, as well as Alejandro de la Fuente and the Afro-Latin American Research Institute. Alejandro facilitated the stunning cover image by the amazing Cuban artist, Marta María Pérez. ¡Muchísimas gracias!

Over the years, many scholars have taught me a great deal: Sima Shakhsari, Inderpal Grewal, Arlene Davila, Irene Mata, Stephan Palmié, Sean Brotherton, Jafari Sinclaire Allen, Minoo Moallem, Deborah Thomas, Saba Mahmood, Charles Hirschkind, J. Lorand Matory, Judith Casselberry, Barnor Hesse, Christen Smith, James Noel, Frank Guridy, Devyn Spence Benson, Andrés Rodríguez Reyes, Michael Ralph, and Ramón Grosfoguel. Belkis Quesada Guerra and Josefina Pérez Oceguera, from the Instituto de Historía de Cuba, were invaluable for completing archival research, and Antonio Castañeda at the Asociación Cultural Yoruba de Cuba assisted with research, visas, and much more. To L. Kaifa Roland, thank you for a chance encounter in Matanzas in 2001 that was transformative. Laurence Ralph, it has been both a pleasure and an inspiration.

Thanks to my friends and extended family: Rene A. Quiñonez, Susan Crandall, Steve Weymouth, Oriana Ides, Mariaynez Carrasco, Nailah Heckerman, Erica Williams, Alyssa Zelaya, Naomi Braggin, Michelle Munyer, Erica Cuellar, Mwapagha Mkonu, Genevieve Rodriguez, Dan Begonia, and Rafael Martinez. My aunts, Margaret Marsh and Petra De Jesús, have shown me the power of resilience. To my astute accomplice, most critical reader, respected priest, and cherished collaborator, Bashezo Boyd, I could not have done this without you!

INTRODUCTION

Transnational Santería Assemblages

In 2006, while Obá Bi, a priest living in New York City, and I were watching a video of a Santería ritual done in Cuba, he told me, My saints are wherever I go. Obá Bi, a black Puerto Rican American priest initiated in the United States, had traveled to Cuba several times in the early 2000s to undergo Santería rituals and had recorded videos of his ceremonies. While in Cuba he learned from and shared with other priests in Cuba and abroad. Obá Bi filmed many of his experiences and rituals to continue his religious learning in the United States. For him and other transnational practitioners, recordings have become an extension of Santería ritual spaces and presence. Obá Bi has films of the ritual butchering of sacrificial animals, ceremonial protocols, religious songs, and possessed practitioners. He described how, through technorituals, he could capture priests’ presence: The elders are passing and we need to capture their spirit while they are still here…. When I play them [videos], they are here with me, you know their teachings are captured in a way that books can’t record. Obá Bi used ritual videos and other media as part of his daily practice, seeing this as an expansion of spiritual transmissions. Although he was not a medium in the Santería sense of being possessed, he still felt the saints (oricha¹) and dead spirits (egun) in, on, and around his body and, increasingly, through the screen. Be careful what you watch! he told me, spirits like screens.

Like other priests I worked with, Obá Bi understood his oricha or santos, as the divinities are also called, as part of his body. The priesthood initiation ritual, described as making santo (also making ocha), seats the oricha on the crown of practitioners’ heads as people are remade into African diaspora bodies. It’s a blessing for black folks to know themselves in this way, and know where we came from and who we are, he described. "When we are made lukumí [initiated as priests] we are united with our past and present…the egun [spirits of the dead] and oricha. So, you know, wherever we go, wherever we are, they are here," touching his head.

In Santería, priests’ bodies are described ritually as being made lukumí (a colonial term used for enslaved Yoruba in Cuba) through a seating (asiento) process that entails two spiritual birthing (pariendo) ceremonies where oricha are physically and spiritually placed on the new initiates’ heads (Beliso-De Jesús 2014). The oricha are housed in sacred stones (otán) and shells (dilogún) and are considered to be reborn through the ritual process. Each initiation produces two new beings: oricha and iyawó (new priest). Oricha and initiate are cleansed, shaved, painted, fed, and united with each other, establishing their mutual livingness. For Obá Bi, this connection with spirits and oricha is reactivated through television screens. When I watch the DVD, the oricha is stimulated, touching the crown of his head. You know they [oricha] are alive, inside me, around us, in the atmosphere and natural world…and their energy can be tapped into. We plug into their energy. And I can feel it during a drum, a santo,…sitting on the train, watching a video. For many practitioners of Santería, the energy of spirits of the dead and oricha is electric. These African diaspora copresences, as I call them, are felt, in, on, and around the body (Beliso-De Jesús 2014). Their energy is sensed through electrifying spiritual currents (los corrientes espirituales).

Santería, a term used mostly by outsiders, is also known as la regla de ocha (the rule of ocha).² Regla ocha is a Yoruba-inspired, African-imagined, diasporic religion that emerged in Cuba through the transnational practices of slavery, imperialism, and colonialism since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and is a growing religion practiced throughout the world. Todd R. Ochoa’s (2010a) formulation of African-inspired, which he uses to analyze ways that Cuban palo practices draw upon forms of Africanness without relying on notions of original essences, is helpful in thinking about the various ethnic articulations that are brought into being through practices such as regla ocha and palo monte (also regla palo).³ Practitioners of Afro-Cuban religions call themselves by colonial ethnic names. For instance, regla ocha priests designate their Yoruba inspirations by describing themselves as lukumí, indicating Òyó and Ìlé Ifé lineages, or egguadó, hailing Égba descent.⁴ Congo, a common term referring to practitioners and the spirits of dead slaves in palo practices, similarly hails ethnic designations linked to notions of colonial Africanness and different forms of blackness. Rather than just epistemological, these designations are also ontological; that is, they transform senses of being. Scholarly assertions of inventive adaptation must therefore be understood as distinct from practitioners’ perceptions of the purity, transnationality, and consistency of their traditions across time, as Kamari Clarke (2004) has shown with Yoruba revivalists in the United States, and J. Lorand Matory (2005) with candomblé practices in Brazil. For inspirations to be seen as legitimate by practitioners of Santería, then, they are not understood as fresh innovations but rather as extensions of authentic tradition. These ontological inspirations bring racial formations into the everyday practice of understanding self in African diaspora practices. Ingenuity is legitimized only through connections to an authentically experienced past. We can see this, for instance, in the contentious transnational debates surrounding female initiation to ifá (iyanifá) in Cuba in 2004, which, although practiced historically in Nigerian ifá, were seen as new age feminism attempting to infiltrate age-old African traditions in Cuba. Inspirations are thus deeply wedded to perceptions, sensations, and feelings of historical consistency. In past-present moments such as in bodily possessions of black African spirits who fought enslavement during colonialism and continue to fight oppression through spiritual warfare on behalf of contemporary practitioners, these inspirations are crucial temporal deployments of tradition—deployments that hail particular logics of originality seen to be deteriorating through the experience of modernity.

Alfredo Calvo Cano, a legendary high priest of Santería from Matanzas, Cuba, like many other practitioners I worked with, was adamant about situating his authenticity within lineages of traditional African-inspired power. For instance, Alfredo’s deceased grandfather and great-uncle, both black Cuban congos, would possess his body, speaking through him, making prognostications, and assigning spiritual remedies for their religious and familial descendants. Similarly, his great-great-grandmother, Ma Monserrate Gonzalez, an Égba priestess born in Africa who arrived to Cuba in the 1840s or 1850s, was the founder of the Matanzas-based egguadó lineage of regla ocha that he practiced until death (Ramos 2003, 43). Obá Bi, on the other hand, followed an initiatory genealogy to access his African inspiration (Palmié 2013, 160). Although neither of his birth parents were Cuban or practiced the religion (he was initiated by a Puerto Rican priest in New York City), he claimed his lineage from Susana Cantero (Omí Toké), the owner of one of the early cabildos (African-inspired ethnic associations) of Yemayá in Havana and the religious granddaughter of Efuché (Ña Rosalía), another high priestess who reformulated lukumí initiations in the early twentieth century (Brown 2003, 320n32). Obá Bi hailed from the prestigious lineage of both Susana Cantero and Efuché, as a direct link to his brand of Havana Santería, which he saw as lending him their energy in contemporary ritual practice:⁵ "My rama [branch of religious practice] comes from black royalty in Havana."

As I have argued elsewhere, practitioners, regardless of ethnic or racial designation, are remade through complex rituals of making santo (priesthood) that hail blackened epistemologies (Beliso-De Jesús 2014). Practitioners, regardless of racial identification, are understood to be able to hail the racial codas of enslavement and be transformed into African diaspora bodies, made lukumí. For instance, a famous Cuban American Santería priest from Miami who self-identified as being of " ‘pure Spanish-French extraction’…claimed descent from the ara takuá people—a term associated with an Oyo-Yoruba name for the Nupe" (Palmié 2013, 160). Even as these forms of ritual descent lines might undermine certain North American biological formations of race (Palmié 2013), as I explore throughout this book, these African inspirations continue to be raced in other ways. Practitioners from Matanzas draw on blackened epistemologies as sources of transnational power in contemporary religious travel and tourism (chapter 3), and nonblack practitioners draw from various forms of blackness in their everyday engagements with spirits and oricha to access aché, or energetic life force mobilized for ritual power (chapter 2).

Santería has been historically practiced in a wide range of national contexts and in diverse ethnic, multicultural, multinational, and translocal spaces. It is a practice that, while long stigmatized, is nevertheless becoming hegemonic in particular African diaspora circuits. In the United States since the 1980s, Santería religious practices have been seen as backward superstitions brought in by Cuban immigrants (Wirtz 2007b, 48). Most well-known through sensationalized depictions in news media that focus on portrayals of animal sacrifice as inhumane, Santería has entered U.S. popular culture within the larger context of the fear of blackness, panics about alien immigrant contaminations, and the presumed criminality portrayed on televisions screens (Palmié 2013, 151–55). In Cuba Santería has similarly been the scapegoat for arguments of white Cuban racial superiority over black Cuban subjects who purportedly practiced what has been (and often still is) disparaged as witchcraft. Publicly demonized, Santería was used as a justification for racial dominance in the transition from Spanish colonial governance to a republican nation in the early twentieth century. This history of racial persecution has led to vows of secrecy, where practices are hidden from noninitiates and media technologies have been prohibited because they are seen to further demonize these black religions or seen as a form of spiritual contagion. However, the fantastical mythos of racial backwardness has not led to a decline in these practices or the uses of new media; rather, Santería has emerged as a growing transnational religion, and, as I will show, media technologies are central to contemporary understandings of travel and mobility.

Many practitioners continue to understand the religious communities that they participate in as operating transnationally and diasporically (Juárez Huet 2009). Practitioners imagine themselves as part of a larger world of Santería, made up of many different but interconnected translocal religious communities (Beliso-De Jesús 2013a). However, most studies of Santería have examined these practices in a more bounded national sense (see de la Torre 2004; Fernandes 2003; Hagedorn 2001; Hearn 2004; Kutzinski 1993; Ochoa 2007; Palmié 2002; Routon 2010; Wedel 2004; Wirtz 2007a, 2007b). National-based lenses have been useful to tease apart the roles that Santería (and other Afro-Cuban religions) play within particular local communities and their symbolic relationship to knowledge and power (Ochoa 2010b; Wirtz 2007b). Santería has been used to understand migration patterns with Cuban exiles (Palmié 1986), African American, Puerto Rican, and other Latino communities (see Gregory 1999; Pérez 2010; Schmidt 2001; Vidal-Ortiz 2006) as well as processes of Africanizing and Cubanizing these religions in the United States.⁶ It has been used to track emerging and conflicting questions of race, identity, and Cubanness (Delgado 2009; Hearn 2004; Holbraad 2005; Knauer 2009a, 2009b; Moore 2003; Palmié 2002; Routon 2010; Wedel 2004). Yet the relationship between translocal connections within emerging global experiences of Santería has yet to be explored ethnographically.⁷ Religion is key to trace a less binaristic transnationalism between Cubans on and off the island (Mahler and Hansing 2005b), and transnationalism is key to examine the interconnected experiences of Cuban and non-Cuban Santería practitioners.⁸ Transnational relations therefore not only transform local practice and ethos but also practitioners’ experiences with media and transnationalism.⁹ Through Santería ontologies, transnationalism and media are felt on and in different bodies as a form of sensual travel and electrifying mobility.¹⁰

In regla ocha, oricha and other spirits are said to travel through various bodies—and more recently even through filmed recordings themselves. As opposed to binary notions of home and away, which situate diaspora as a dislocated experience, the uses and understandings of these media technologies instead follow Santería logics that see spirits as traveling through electrifying spiritual currents. These spiritual currents are kinesthetic; in Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s (1999, xxii) terms, they are attenuated temporal dimensions of movement that are not linear but rather have an unfolding qualitative dynamic. Spirits, oricha, and even practitioners are understood to travel through television screens, and practitioners are sometimes possessed during the watching of ritual videos. Rather than simply automatic processes of self-movement (proprioception), these kinesthetic sensations in spiritual currents are movements of embodied perception and awareness (Noland 2009, 10). Electrifying currents actually shift practitioners’ experiences with media and transnational travel. How different spirits, deities, and practitioners interact and the spaces in which they do so make transnational Santería what it is today. These types of global religious mediascapes affect not only the internal dynamics of Santería religious communities but also create new translocal experiences of travel, ritual, knowledge, and power.

The various spirits, ancestors, and oricha that operate in transnational Santería communities form a broad range of material-immaterial beings that are increasingly moving through diverse Santería worlds. They are described as felt (se siente) on the body, and understood as presences (las presencias) within electrifying circuits and spiritual networks. I use the term copresences to reference the complex multiplicity of racial spiritual embodied affectivity that the term las presencias indicates. Copresences are sensed through chills, shivers, tingles, premonitions, and possessions in and through different transnational Santería bodies and spaces. They are active spiritual and religious subjectivities intimately tied to practitioners’ forms of movement, travel, and sensual bodily registers. Dead African slaves, Yoruba diaspora oricha, and other racialized entities form part in a reconfiguration of practitioners’ body-worlds. They bring the existential striving of racial formations, together with ontological assertions of presence (Visweswaran 1998, 78).¹¹ They form part of a spiritual habitus that emerges through a racial-historical matrix of blackened ontologies (Beliso-De Jesús 2014). Racialized ontologies, or racial conceptualizations of being, I assert, draw from historical and contemporary blackening processes of slavery, colonialism, tourism, and media, and circulate in transnational religious movement.

Conceptualizing transnational Santería through electrifying spiritual currents is thus key to not localizing these experiences solely within identity formations, or representational models. Diaspora has been a useful theoretical formulation to decenter particular nationalist lenses, allowing for multilocational and multivocal analyses that have usefully challenged traditional renderings of race, gender, and sexuality alongside movement, space, and place (see Butler 2001; Clifford 1994; Gopinath 2005; Brown 2005). However, diaspora is not synonymous with unity (Brown 2005). Focusing on more unifying aspects of diaspora centered on identity inadvertently forecloses notions of subversion, opposition, and agency. In Santería religious economies, contentions arise that highlight multilateral relations of power between practitioners. American Santería travelers and the Cuban practitioners who work with them, for instance, often have disputes over goods, services, the costs of rituals or religious protocols. Gender disputes, as in the debates surrounding female initiations to ifá in Cuba (chapter 5), are areas in which the distinctions between different diasporas collide. Race, sexuality, and nationalisms are also sites were the