Misconceptions about voodoo abound

Misconceptions abound about religion so unlike mainstream faiths, writes Mary Meehan for the Herald-Ledger of Lexington, Kentucky.

It’s common for people familiar with Haiti to joke that 90 percent of the country’s inhabitants are practicing Catholics, 10 percent practice a Protestant faith and 100 percent practice voodoo.

But the truth is that “voodoo is a very important part of Haitian life. Americans often just dismiss it as superstition or witchcraft,” said University of Kentucky history professor Jeremy Popkin, who teaches a class called “Haiti in the Modern World.” “It is a religion with deep roots in the African beliefs that were brought by slaves” to the Caribbean nation.

Popkin’s class, which includes a section on the religion, grew out of interest in the country that followed the devastating earthquake in January. Popkin, who wrote a book about the 13-year-long Haitian revolution, said his class was formed in response to a talk about the country held on campus after the earthquake.

“The response (to the talk) was so overwhelming we knew we needed to do something to respond,” he said.

Explaining the religion to Americans can be difficult because it is so unlike more mainstream faiths.

“It’s not an organized religion. It doesn’t have the kind of institutional structure” that Americans are used to, he said. “There are no bishops. There are no church councils. There is no book of voodoo.”

(Scholars prefer the spelling vodou, Popkin said, because it is closer to the Haitian Creole pronunciation and to distance it from pop-culture references.)

Voodoo also has a history of being veiled in secrecy. “It was a religion of the slaves at a time when they had to hide the practice without the masters catching on,” Popkin said.

There is a movement to create a centralized way to share information about voodoo. There is now a federation of voodoo practitioners in Haiti. But efforts to alter what for hundreds of years has been a religion passed down as an oral tradition have encountered resistance, said independent voodoo scholar Leslie Brice, who spoke at UK earlier this fall.

Some of the resistance is because people fear the religion will be mocked by those who don’t really understand it, Brice said. Voodoo is often portrayed in popular culture, especially movies, as a singularly dark force, said Brice, who is studying to be a voodoo priestess.

But, she said, it really is a religion centered on healing. When slaves were first brought to Haiti they came with “nothing except for what was in their minds and hearts,” she said. The religious traditions they brought with them were crucial to their survival, she said.

Because slaves came from all over Africa, voodoo doesn’t come from a single African tradition but several. Plus, over time, voodoo adopted some of the traditions of other religions, especially Catholicism. Slaves were forced to practice Catholicism by their masters, so some of those rituals and symbols became central to the practice of voodoo.

In fact, she said, the altars that are kept in the homes of many voodoo worshipers would “look very familiar to Catholics” and sometimes feature Catholic saints.

In addition to involving ancestor worship, the voodoo practitioner creates important relationships with spirits.

“Voodoo believes in one god,” she said, “but they believe that this god is too remote and too far away from human life.” So instead of seeking help from god directly, spirits, who act as intermediaries, are the key points of contact.

These spirits, known as lwa, have various characteristics, Brice said. Which lwa are right for a specific person would be revealed through ceremony.

“There is a lot of room for how people practice and communicate” with the lwa, Brice said. On an individual basis people might create personal altars and contact the spirits by making offerings, such as the pouring of libations or meditation.

There are no voodoo churches; worshipers congregate in “houses.”

Details of rituals and the service of spirits might vary from house to house, she said.

There are stronger spirits that believers invoke that are supposed to have great powers, Brice said. Some houses don’t work with the strong spirits, she said. But “it’s not a question of good and evil. It’s about energy and how it is used.”

Particular objects are also an important part of communicating with the lwa, said Brice, who is also an art historian. She was first drawn to the religion because of the vibrant nature of the religious objects used in ceremonies.

“Voodoo really makes artists out of the practitioner,” she said.

A particular kind of rattle, for example, might be used to summon a specific lwa. The objects, she said, are much like the relics associated with some Catholic saints. Each lwa is associated with a particular object.

To practice voodoo, people might seek out a priest or priestess for personal healing or help with a specific problem.

Groups, or houses, would gather together to celebrate special days dedicated to the lwa. In those gatherings, she said, everyone would wear white, and there would be drumming and singing.

“It is a matter of raising the energy,” she said. “When the energy reaches an appropriate point, the spirits come.”

The spirits can inhabit people, she said. For example, a male spirit might inhabit a priestess who would then speak in a deep male voice.

The music, she said, is crucial. “It provides an incredible sense of togetherness and celebration.”

In the end, she said, voodoo is a complex amalgamation of unique beliefs that has evolved over several hundred years. As the number of Haitian immigrants in the United States grows, she said, there are several cities, such as New York and Miami, that have large populations of voodoo practitioners.

But while Brice has found solace with the religion, she said Americans are not likely to flock to voodoo because it is so different from more mainstream religions.

“I don’t think we are going to have a mass convergence any time soon,” she said.

Illustrations: Graffiti at a cemetery in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, depicts images of the religious folk figures Baron Samedi and Grann Brigit, both related to the voodoo religion. “Voodoo is a very important part of Haitian life. Americans often just dismiss it as superstition or witchcraft,” said UK history professor Jeremy Popkin, who teaches a class about Haiti.
For the original report go to http://www.kentucky.com/2010/12/04/1552147/misconceptions-about-voodoo-abound.html#ixzz17A3MNli0

Peacekeepers 'brought cholera to Haiti'

United Nations reluctantly agrees to investigate convincing claims Nepalese troops imported disease

By Nina Lakhani

Sunday, 21 November 2010

Reuters

UN forces prepare to transport a baby. Haiti is reeling from the cholera epidemic

Allegations that UN peacekeepers are the source of Haiti's cholera epidemic are being formally investigated by the organisation.

Despite weeks of denials by the UN and the World Health Organisation (WHO), there seems little doubt now that the deadly bacterium, which has left thousands of people sick or dead, was brought into the country by infected troops from Nepal, where the disease has broken out several times this summer.

The UN's previous dismissals of the claims were a primary factor in riots that paralysed parts of Haiti last week. At least three people were killed and dozens injured as unrest spread from the north to the capital last Thursday amid growing anger at the UN's defiance.

Relief efforts stalled last week as supplies and workers were held up by barricaded roads and closed airports. Gunshots were heard in Port-au-Prince, and police fired tear gas at angry demonstrators throwing rocks at UN vehicles on Thursday. As a result, Oxfam stopped distributing soap, hygiene kits and rehydration salts in Cap-Haitien, where the fatality rate is the highest in the country. Dr Unni Krishnan from Plan International said: "All the aid agencies have been affected by the violence and protests. This [Saturday] morning we are just starting to freely move our people and supplies because things seem a little quieter."

The UN investigation into the source of the epidemic comes after rumours of a "foreign disease" triggered fear and then anger among Haitians. The first confirmed cases have been traced along the Artibonite River, not far from the UN base which houses nearly 500 Nepalese guards. Locals have long complained about the stinking sewage oozing from the base, contaminating the river that they rely on for drinking water. UN military police were spotted last week taking samples from a broken pipe next to the base's latrines and an overflowing septic tank. The UN has belatedly agreed to review all its sanitation systems across Haiti, officials told Associated Press.

The latest Nepalese deployment arrived in October after summer's cholera outbreaks in Nepal. The UN's insistence that none of the peacekeepers showed symptoms of the disease has caused frustration among experts as 75 per cent of people infected with cholera are without symptoms but remain contagious. These denials came as aid agencies struggled to convince people about the need for good hygiene and sanitation regardless of disease symptoms.

The whole region could be at risk from the cholera strain, which the US Centers for Disease Control has confirmed matches the strain found most prevalently in South Asia. The first cases were recorded in neighbouring Dominican Republic and in Florida last week.

In a country plagued by drug wars, political coups, poverty and natural disasters, and which relies on foreign governments, aid agencies and the UN for almost everything, the implications of the UN investigation are far-reaching. The current peacekeeping mission is the fifth since 1993, and rumours of a UN cover-up could even threaten the country's fragile stability, according to Brian Concannon, the director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. "The way to contribute to public anger is to lie," Mr Concannon said.

Amid the growing security threat, which is likely to intensify before next Sunday's planned elections, Médecins Sans Frontières pleaded yesterday for more nurses and doctors in Haiti as they prepare to treat twice as many new cases this week.

The disease is expected to peak between 26 and 29 November in the northern slum areas of Cité Soleil, where the disease entered the capital three weeks ago, according to MSF epidemiologists. This means the organisation's already overstretched health professionals are likely to see between 300 and 400 new patients from Cité Soleil every day this week – up from 220 a day last week.

The number of cases in Martissant, an equally unsanitary slum in a southern district of Port-au-Prince, has risen by nearly 40 per cent in the last few days. To stand any chance of coping, MSF, which is providing more than 80 per cent of all medical help for cholera patients, must increase the number of cholera beds from 1,900 to 3,000 over the next few days.

Stefano Zannini, the head of the MSF mission in Haiti, said: "By next weekend we will start to see the first peaks of cholera, which will continue nationally over the next few weeks. The next 10 days are critical and there are not enough health professionals to cope. We are taking drastic steps and appealing to any nurses, doctors and auxiliaries in Haiti who are not in employment to come and help us. We want the Health Ministry to make final-year medical students available as well. And we need doctors and nurses internationally to make themselves available for Haiti now."

The UN has received only $5m (£3m) in response to an appeal more than a week ago for $164m to tackle the epidemic. Agencies such as ActionAid are redirecting money meant for rebuilding and employment programmes, gathered after January's devastating earthquake, to health education campaigns. There are signs that these messages are starting to filter through, but millions of Haitians who are surviving on less than $2 a day still have no access to clean water, bleach and toilets, said Jane Moyo from ActionAid.

For the doctors on the cholera frontline, aid agencies have woken up too late. Mr Zannini said: "Haiti is full of humanitarian organisations. But if you are a humanitarian organisation how can it take you so long to respond to a crisis which started five weeks ago? That we cannot understand. We have been trying to fight a fire with a glass of water."

 

Louisiana oyster beds remain empty after BP disaster

 

It took Louisiana's oyster industry years to recover from Hurricane Katrina

By Paul Adams BBC News, Louisiana

Louisiana's oyster beds have not recovered from the US's worst environmental catastrophe, the Deepwater Horizon oil-rig disaster, and some fishermen fear they never will.

We were fishing at the end of the world- or at least a place that felt like it.

Grand Isle is one of the final precarious fragments of land where the myriad bayous of the Mississippi delta give way to the open water of the Gulf of Mexico.

Around us, hungry frigate birds watched as we headed for the oyster beds.

For the first time in my life, I had oysters for breakfast Special report: BP oil disaster

Pelicans swooped by in formation, low and effortless, and a pair of dolphins raced just ahead of the bow, daring each other to get closer and occasionally rolling sideways to check we were suitably impressed.

We were less than 100 miles (160 km) from the wreck of the Deepwater Horizon but everything looked pristine under a blazing sun.

And the oysters! As big as the palm of my hand, succulent and briny.

It was still early and so, for the first time in my life, I had oysters for breakfast. But the atmosphere aboard the boat was sombre.

The oysters were good but hardly plentiful. At this, the season of peak demand, far too many were simply dead.

Oyster supplies are down following measures taken to disperse the oil

Not, as you might think, coated in sticky oil or even poisoned by chemical dispersants but killed off, as luck would have it, by fresh water.

Millions of gallons from the Mississippi River were hurriedly diverted into the bays and marshes of the delta to keep the oil from rolling in, earlier in the year - but this upset the delicate balance of fresh and salty conditions the oysters need to survive.

Nick Collins is a fourth generation oyster-man, with a rich gumbo of an accent to match.

His business had only just recovered from the ravages of Hurricane Katrina, five years ago, and Nick was looking forward to a bumper year.

But if the first setback was an act of God, the second was an act of industry - an industry that is much bigger and more commercially important to Louisiana than Nick's delicious oysters, an industry that sits off this fragile, mysterious landscape of channels and marshes, and produces the stuff that Americans really cannot get enough off.

Microbe army

At nearby Port Fouchon beach, the shallow-water rigs, tens of them, sit as little as a mile offshore.

Clean-up teams are still scooping up tar from the beach

Oil arrived here in the weeks after the spill and BP's clean-up continues.

Armies of contract workers, mostly from Central America, make their steady, painstaking way along the sand.

Wave after wave of them, in bright yellow boots, stooping slightly over shovels and brushes, scooping up tiny tar balls, covered in sand.

They pause, scour the patch in front of them and then - to the sound of "Vamonos!" ("Let's go!") - move on a few paces.

Not all the oil is from the Macondo well. Studies show that some of it comes from elsewhere, perhaps from the rigs we can see, perhaps even from the natural seepage that goes on all the time in the oil-rich Gulf of Mexico - and which has, over the eons, created an army of microbes that like nothing more than to feast, like Pac-Men, on energy-rich hydrocarbons.

He was confident, as everyone was, that it was just a matter of time before the oysters reappeared and everyone was happy again

Organisms that just might clean up whatever muck lurks out of sight, all by themselves.

So the clean-up is not just about the Deepwater Horizon but about every company that has ever sought to make a fortune extracting the black stuff and bringing it ashore.

BP, it seems, is making amends for all of us.

Fading hopes

But back to the oysters and another family business struggling with the fallout.

On the edge of New Orleans' legendary French quarter, the P & J Oyster Company has been in business for more than 130 years.

Like Nick Collins, Al Sunseri wonders if he has what it takes to recover.

The ice which gushes noisily into his giant coolers every eight minutes has very little to cool and the high, whitewashed-stone shucking tables are deserted.

The Exxon Valdez ran aground off Alaska spilling 11m gallons of oil

He has laid off all but two temporary workers who keep a trickle of customers happy with oysters from nearby Texas.

Al also had to deal with Katrina, downsizing and waiting for the oyster beds to replenish themselves.

He was confident, as everyone was, that it was just a matter of time before the oysters reappeared and everyone was happy again.

But now he wonders about his son, who has experienced depression and has not been working for a couple of months.

He says he remembers his own anxiety as a young man, taking over a business with such a long tradition to uphold.

He thinks about Alaska and the herrings that disappeared from Prince William Sound three years after the Exxon Valdez spill, never to return.

More than seven months after the blowout on the Deepwater Horizon, the full ramifications of this disaster are still hard to gauge.

The uncertainty gnaws at everyone who depends on the sea. Is it possible, they wonder, that the worst days may still lie ahead?

 

 

Urban Africa

Africa has untold vital urban spaces and a rich legacy of a 2.000 years long history of urbanization. However, in the vast majority of flickr groups related to Africa, nature and wildlife photography are predominant. Africa appears as a rural and ‘exotic’ scenery where humans, animals and landscapes build a more ore less harmonious unity.Urban Africa is a popular Flickr group that showcases growing urban life in various African cities. There is a tendency to portray African landscape as bare and the focus is primarily on wildlife. This group is a much needed breath of fresh air, showcasing the African metropolis – highlighting modern African culture in urbanized centers. Enjoy.

This pool is for photography of African cities and towns. Architecture, parks, people, sculptures, streets, traffic – anything in the urban context.

Cairo, Egypt

Durban, South Africa

Johannesburg, South Africa

Bamako, Mali

Kinshasa, Congo
www.red-red.net, on Flickr">

www.red-red.net, on Flickr">

www.red-red.net, on Flickr">

www.red-red.net, on Flickr">

Lome, Togo

Fes, Morocco

Rabat, Morocco

Dakar, Senegal

Maputo, Mozambique

Marrakesh, Morocco

Luanda, Angola

 

Monrovia, Liberia

Gabrone, Botswana

Harare, Zimbabwe

Nairobi, Kenya

Cotonou, Benin

Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

Eldoret, Kenya

Maputo, Mozambique

Freetown, Sierra Leone

www.itsayshere.org, on Flickr">

Alexandria, Egypt

Abidjan, Cote D’Ivoire

Abuja, Nigeria

 

Tamale, Ghana

 

Accra, Ghana

Khartoum, Sudan

Kampala, Uganda

Algiers, Algeria

Dakar, Senegal

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Mombasa, Kenya

 

Contests

River Styx
2011 Schlafly Beer Micro-Fiction Contest

$1500 First Prize plus one case of micro-brewed Schlafly Beer

500 words maximum per story, up to three stories per entry.
$20 reading fee includes a one-year subscription
(3 issues).
Include name and address on cover letter only.
Entrants will be notified by S.A.S.E.
Winner published in Spring issue.
All stories will be considered for publication.

Postmark entries by December 31 to:

River Styx's Schlafly Beer Micro-Fiction Contest
3547 Olive Street, Suite 107
St. Louis MO 63103

River Styx
2011 International Poetry Contest

$1500 First Prize

Send up to three poems, not more than 14 pages.
All entrants will be notified by S.A.S.E.
$20 reading fee includes a one-year subscription (3 issues).
Include name and address on cover letter only.

2011 judge: B. H. Fairchild.
Winner published in Fall issue.
All poems will be considered for publication.

Postmark poems by May 31st to:

River Styx Poetry Contest
3547 Olive Street, Suite 107
St. Louis, MO 63103-1014

 

Student Essay Contest   Students,   Submit your essay today to compete in the NCBS Annual Student Essay Competition!  Winners will be recognized at the Student Luncheon.  Click here for more information on the High School Essay Essay Contest.  Click here to see how you can get free Student Luncheon and conference registration tickets.     UNDERGRADUATE WINNERS: 1st Place - $350.00 2nd Place - $250.00 3rd Place - $125.00 GRADUATE WINNERS: 1st Place - $450.00 2nd Place - $350.00 3rd Place - $225.00  ESSAY GUIDELINES: Essays should focus on any aspect of the Africana experience, i.e., art, education, history, literature, politics, psychology, social and policy issues. Must bet typed in MS Word, 12-18 pages in length, double-spaced with one-inch margins left-to-right and top-to-bottom. Students are asked to document sources using either MLA or APA style guide. Submissions must be mailed to the address below.  Faxed or electronic essays are not accepted! Please include the following information on your cover sheet only: Name Mailing address Telephone number Email Address Name of college or university Class status (Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, Senior, Graduate Student) Name of Faculty Advisor Do not include the above information on any subsequent pages of the essay other than on the cover sheet.  DEADLINE:  January 14, 2011 (must be received by this date)     Send all manuscripts to:   National Office, NCBS Department of African American Studies Georgia State University P.O. Box 4109 Atlanta, GA 30302-4109   Street/Overnight Address 1 Park Place South, #962 Atlanta, GA 30303   For more information:  info@ncbsonline.org

 

The Litchfield Review

New! Info on Litchfield Review Writer’s Conference

 

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First, visit our submission guidelines. Once you’ve correctly formatted your work, use the same page to determine the total payment for your submissions. Please send payment via PayPal using this link.

 

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New Winter Deadline!

We have rescheduled the next edition of The Litchfield Review for Winter 2010; we are still accepting submissions for that edition until December 31st. Send along your poetry and prose!

Before submitting, read what kind of work we publish. Then consult the guidelines for preparing your submission.

 

Donna Aza Weir-Soley

Heather Russell

Geoffrey Philp

<p style="font-size:11px; font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: #808080; margin-top: 5px; background: transparent; text-align: center; width: 512px;">Watch the full episode. See more Pulse.</p>

via video.wpbt2.org

 

Kathryn Joy McKnight, Leo Garofalo, eds. Afro-Latino Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550-1812. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2009. xxxvii + 377 pp. $19.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-87220-993-0; $57.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-87220-994-7.

 

Nancy Raquel Mirabal, Agustín Laó-Montes, eds. Technofuturos: Critical Interventions in Latina/o Studies. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007. ix + 420 pp. $150.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7391-0895-6; $39.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-7391-2578-6.

Reviewed by Tace M. Hedrick (University of Florida, English and Women’s Studies)
Published on H-LatAm (December, 2010)
Commissioned by Dennis R. Hidalgo

 

Memories of the Future: Across the Afro-Hispanic and U.S. Latino/a and Chicano/a Americas

Although a discussion of book covers does not usually constitute a part of a scholarly review, I find that in the case of the two collections reviewed here, each book’s most excellent cover art helps to illuminate the conceptual aims of their respective editors. On the cover of Afro-Latino Voices is Adrián Sánchez Galque’s 1599 painting of three maroons, or escaped slaves, titled Mulatos de Esmeraldas. Painted on the occasion of a treaty between the Spanish colonial authority and a maroon community or palenque known as Esmeraldas in what is now Ecuador, the portrait shows the representatives of this community as proud, important men, dressed in a combination of African, native, European, and even Chinese sixteenth-century finery. They flourish the broad hats of European gentlemen in their hands, and as José F. Buscaglia-Salgado notes in his Undoing Empire: Race and Nation in the Mulatto Caribbean, each of the three men “is wearing a buttoned shirt with gorgueras and puñetas, the ruff and sleeves that were fashionable adornments in the attire of Spanish gentlemen of the time.” They wear necklaces of seashells from the coast, but their shirts are covered with Andean highland ruanas or ponchos, and over these “they have rich and colorful cloaks of Chinese silk ... as references to trans-Pacific trade.”[1] Finally, these men sport huge, fabulous Amerindian gold earrings and nose rings piercing the tops as well as the lobes of their ears and their noses. All proudly carry spears. It is a glorious painting of what the editors of Technofuturos might call, in Cuban scholar Fernando Ortíz’s term, “transculturation”: those times where cultures forcibly conjoined bleed together.

Afro-Latino Voices is part of a fairly recent and much larger project that both conceptualizes and grants subjectivity to those whose lives have been under historical erasure. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, research on the transatlantic slave trade has been greatly enhanced by Cambridge University’s 1999 multisource database, which itself has over the last ten years been greatly expanded, and, in 2006, the whole collection was made available on an open-access Web site, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.[2] Much of what constitutes new data on this Web site shows that Latin American slaving expeditions were greatly underrepresented in the 1999 database. For the scholars who write in the two collections I review here, such work as has been done over the last ten to fifteen years has aided in opening up standard scholarly discourses of Latin American as well as U.S. Latino/a, Chicana/o, and I would even venture to say African American studies. Such openings result in sometimes messier but often more nuanced ways of thinking about the “Americas,” producing new synchronic and diachronic local, nation-state, and global histories.

Afro-Latino Voices is a compendium of the “voices” (primary sources) of African and Afro-Creole American men and women heard via official letters and legal documents, such as wills and petitions dictated (or more rarely self-written) to a third party, as well as records from Spanish American interrogations and inquisitions of African and Afro-Latin American subjects. Although the introductions to the sections and to the book overall are in English, the documents themselves are presented in Spanish and Portuguese and translated into English on facing pages. Thus we read/hear the wishes, protests, demands, and petitions from African royalty, such as Queen Njinga (spanning the early 1500s to around 1550 in what is now known as Angola); bozales (newly arrived African slaves in Spanish and Luso-America); cimarrones or “maroons” (escaped slaves and their families who set up independent palenques); and free Afro-Andalusians fighting for the Spanish Crown. We can read enslaved, freed, and freeborn Afro-Latin Americans’ wills, testaments, and bequests to their families and, often, to ethnic confraternities of other African and African-heritage peoples in the colonial New World. The documents point to their defenses of their rights as well as litigations against the church, local colonial authorities, and the Spanish Crown. The arrangement of the compilation is specifically meant not only for scholars but also for students; each set of documents is accompanied by a brief but thorough scholarly and historical background and, sometimes, interpretation of the events surrounding the documents. In their introduction, the editors suggest thematic ways in which the book could be organized for teaching, and provide a set of maps at the front, more resources for teaching at the end of the chapter bibliographies, and throughout the text a glossary of italicized words which might not be familiar to readers. Finally, the editors offer reading strategies to students and teachers alike.

The book’s organization begins with “Politics and Wars,” which moves from the above-mentioned Queen Njinga’s letters through Central African slave wars and to the early conflicts between maroons and colonial Spanish authorities, which I discuss briefly below. The second section, entitled “Families and Communities,” is intended to show the ways Africans and African-heritage peoples built and maintained mutual aid societies, and how they entered into the legalities of Spanish colonial inheritance laws. In this section, María Elena Díaz’s “To Live As a Pueblo: A Contentious Endeavor, El Cobre, Cuba, 1670s-1790s” shows how over the course of a century the slaves of the copper mines of Santiago del Prado were “deprivatized” when the mine, along with the slaves themselves, became the property of the Spanish Crown. Although still slaves, these people could, and did, take advantage of their new status as royal slaves to petition for various prerogatives, including, as the author notes, “the option to become a pueblo” (p. 127). This, among other things, allowed them to litigate as a community directly before the Crown for the right not to be sold away, removed, or “re-enslaved.” That the community survived such an attempt when the mine was reprivatized in the 1770s, and then again was given collective emancipation by the Crown in 1800, makes for fascinating reading.

The third section, “Religious Beliefs and Practices,” shows the diversity of ways that Afro-Latin Americans negotiated with the power of the Catholic Church; tried to protect the remains of their own African beliefs; and even, as in David Wheat’s “A Spanish Caribbean Captivity Narrative: African Sailors and Puritan Slavers, 1635,” coped with dealing with Puritan settlers. In Wheat’s chapter, two biafara, or West Coast Africans enslaved as sailors and based in Cartagena, relate the tale of their capture by Dutch pirates and resale to English Puritan colonists living on Providence Island, off the Caribbean coast of what is now Nicaragua. Escaping the island, four beafada (Western African language group) slaves and several Europeans, shipwrecked on the shore of Granada, Nicaragua, were brought to the governor of Portobelo. Two of the recaptured slaves, besides giving much valuable information about Providence and its inhabitants to the Spanish, claimed their experiences with the Puritans were so terrible (especially in terms of the heresies they witnessed) that they were eager to identify themselves as Catholic slaves. Although we cannot know, as Wheat points out, why they might have intended, if indeed they did, to escape “back” to slavery in Cartagena, it is hard not to see at least some aspects of their self-presentation in Portobelo as “performances” of what they thought the Spanish governor would want to hear.

The fourth and final section deals specifically with documents detailing legal trials, where Afro-Spanish and Luso-Americans are either accused of a crime or accuse their masters, or in some cases both. Ana Teresa Franchin’s “The Case of Javier; Esclavo, against His Master for Cruel Punishment, San Juan, Argentina, 1795” and Richard Gordon’s “Confessing Sodomy, Accusing a Master: The Lisbon Trial of Pernambuco’s Luiz da Costa, 1743” show how slaves could be accused and accusers at the same time. Franchin examines a case of a runaway slave who turned himself in so that his judges would understand the extent of the punishment which his master had (illegally, as it turns out) put him through. Gordon discusses a case of a slave sodomized by his master who was to face the Lisbon Inquisition as a “sodomite” and convince them that he was an unwilling victim.

These are salient texts in humanizing slaves, maroons, and former slaves as multifaceted actors. For example, both Kathryn Joy McKnight’s “Elder; Slave, and Soldier: Maroon Voices from the Palenque del Limón, 1634” and Charles Beatty-Medina’s “Maroon Chief Alonso de Illescas’ Letter to the Crown, 1586” show these men not just as escaped slaves negotiating the autonomy of their community, but also as people who, in their struggle with colonial authority over the entire area, mixed with as well as attacked and enslaved the local Amerindians.[3] As the editors point out, part of what makes a compilation like this valuable is that one can trace the ways, even in heavily mediated texts such as Inquisition documents, by which these men and women learned to use the language and values of the Creole, Portuguese, and Spanish Peninsular legal and religious systems to defend themselves and to assert whatever rights they could under such systems. Although this is true, one of the real joys of a text like this is discovering how people who arrived in the New World almost exclusively as slaves were not merely passive victims but negotiators with varying amounts of agency in terms of their lives, their beliefs, their property, and especially their state(s) of freedom. Some of these were slaves who were able to buy their freedom; rent themselves out and keep a small portion of the profits; or even, as in the case of the slave in Gordon’s “Confessing Sodomy,” get the colonial court to give them permission to “sell” themselves to fairer masters.

My only quibble with this collection is with the title using the term “Latino” rather than “Latin American” or even “South American.” Although this may seem a small thing, distinctions in terminology (even when the terms themselves sometimes seem overly totalizing) are necessary to get at continuities. To be clear: making distinctions between Hispanophone Latin American peoples and the Latino/a communities that have established themselves for generations in the United States helps to clarify the important histories of and continuities between, say, Mexicans and Mexican Americans. If, as many scholars urge, we must think in genuinely trans-American ways, Latin Americanists too would do well to think through such distinctions.

Afro-Latino Voices represents an invaluable resource for thinking not just about blackness in Latin America but also about historical differences between, for example, the experiences and racial politics of Afro-Latin Americans and those of African Americans and their translation into very different sets of racial politics. This is the segue I find most useful in thinking about these two collections together. Especially in the last fifteen years or so, the term “Latino” as it is used in the United States has often been (mis)used to mean one monolithic unity, suppressing the depth and variety of historical, racial, and political differences between, for example, Cuban Americans, Puerto Ricans, Nuyoricans, and Dominican Americans. Technofuturos, a big and ambitious collection of essays, aims to tease out some of those differences in order to present a more complex picture of Hispanophone and Hispanophone-descendent people living in the United States. Its cover presents a detail from a “digital mural project” by self-identified “social art practitioner” John Leaños; dated 2001, the mural is called “Last one to cross the Digital Divide is a rotten egg!” (John Jota Leaños Digital Mural Project). Leaños, chaccording to his Web site, belongs to a “mainly hybrid tribe of Mexitaliano Xicangringo Güeros called ‘Los Mixtupos’ (mixt-up-oz).” Leaños is a member of “Los Cybrids,” three Chicano/a artists who are part, as he puts it, of “La Raza tecno-crítica.” As they see it, these artists’ work is to demystify celebratory mythologies of technology that purport to put the “world” at our (white, privileged) fingertips. The detail on the book’s cover references the mapping of (brown) bodies onto circuit boards to one side of the mural, while on the other side a cholo stands behind a series of ghostly Chicano/a child images leaping playfully into the midst of the wreckage of unidentifiable but clearly industrial parts. Leaños glosses the mural by noting that poor people often fall between the (industrialized) cracks of the “Digital Divide.” The presumed openness of the digital world will not automatically offer poor people the social mobility we might imagine.[4]

Ramón de la Campa’s excellent essay “Latin, Latino, American” opens the first section, “Historical Futures.” Here he examines how the “Latino” has existed at least from the late 1800s at the crossroads of many different “American imaginaries,” from the classic essay “Our America” (1892) written by the hero of Cuban independence José Marti to queer, conservative Mexican American essayist Richard Rodríguez’s Brown: The Last Discovery of America (1998). Although La Campa insists on the essentially “opaque” nature of the U.S. term “Latino/a,” he aims to particularize its referents by, for example, focusing on America’s “split states,” those countries where up to half the population live in the (former) North but send remittances and often travel back and forth from the (former) South, creating a different kind of imagined nation even as actual state-controlled borders grow more rigid. In a thought-provoking move toward the end of the essay, the recognition of such old/new sites of investigation should, La Campa reasons, yield new ways of reading (and imagining) the Americas. This calls for new ways of reading traditional canons, an argument he makes against the “American” conservative insularism of writers as diverse as Rodríguez and pragmatic philosopher Richard Rorty.

This kind of work can confound, along the way, seemingly immutable dualities, such as “North” and “South,” as well as bring to the fore still relatively under-theorized areas, like the study of U.S. Afro-Latinos/as and Afro-Latin Americans. For example, although Technofuturos collects essays across Chicano/a and Latino/a experience and history in the United States, it is one of only a few collections to begin to pay attention to Afro-Latinos/as in the United States. Two such essays can be found in the first section. Agustín Laó-Montes’s “Afro-Latinidades: Bridging Blackness and Latinidad” postulates, in the spirit of the section’s title, a historical tracing of Afro-diasporic experience both to Latin America (here, Afro-Latino Voices could provide an important resource) as well as in the United States. Such attention to historical differences and similarities would, Laó-Montes suggests, trouble the U.S. black-white binary that continues to make invisible Afro-Latino/a experience in the United States. Jossiana Arroyo’s following essay “Technologies: Transculturations of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in Arturo A. Schomburg’s Masonic Writings” highlights the important Afro-Puerto Rican bibliophile’s negotiations of Caribbean and African American notions of race, manhood, and nationality via his activities in black and Afro-Latino Masonic lodges. Scholarly attention to Afro-Latin Americans has gotten underway only in the last fifteen years or so; add to this the fact that a unified study of U.S. Afro-Latinos/as still exists in something of an embryonic state, and the work in Technofuturos aids in reconceptualizing the “technologies” of race and gender at work across the Americas in this as-yet understudied area.

La Campa’s essay might well have served to open the next section, titled “Globality,” which contains essays that aim to situate “Latino/a” and “Chicana/o” as terms that must be understood in the context of a globalized and mobile Americas. The authors in this section examine just such split-state experiences as La Campa discusses. For example, Arturo Arias’s “Central American Diasporas: Transnational Gangs and the Transformation of Latino Identity in the United States” is a fascinating look at the ways Central American criminal activity was transformed and made more powerful by the deportation from the United States to Guatemala and El Salvador of, borrowing from poet Maya Chinchilla, “Central-American Americans,” young members of Los Angeles’s Mara Salvatrucha and 18th Street gangs. Arias reveals the deep-rooted histories that entangle Central America with the United States. (My only reservation here is that his description of these two countries as “a sort of Wild West” sounds a bit like fevered U.S. imaginings about the entirety of Mexican and Central American life, and is much too generalized to belong in an essay as detailed as this [p. 176].) Erika Marquez’s “Transmigrant Sexualities: The Closet and Other Tales by Colombian Gay Immigrants in New York City” adds to the growing body of work on queer Latin American/Latino/Chicano sexualities, tracing out the differences between Latin American/Latino and U.S. queerness. She examines how the framing concepts of “identity” and “the closet” do not fully theorize “sexile” (exiles because of their sexual orientation) Colombians who now negotiate their queerness in very different queer communities of New York.

The third and final section, “Writing Self,” I find to be the weakest of the book. In a gesture that seems almost automatic in many Latino/a and Chicano/a essay collections, this section includes mainly what have come to be thought of as “testimonial” pieces, some straightforward, others more literary. The weakness of the section issues not just from the sense that including such writing seems now almost obligatory rather than thoughtful, but also from many of the essays themselves, where either the writing itself or the concepts informing the “testimonial” sometimes seems murky or even self-indulgent. Of the more successful attempts is Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez’s “An AIDS Testimonial: It’s a Broken Record/Ese Disco Se Rayó.” It is a performance piece meant to be set to music (a fact the reader does not find out until the end of the piece), which although evocative, illustrates the difficulty in reading silently what is meant to be performed. Ramón Solórzano Jr.’s “Accent Generación: Technological Choice and the Spanish Option in Post-9/11 América” provides an interesting scholarly discussion of Spanish-language use in the United States, but seems strangely placed in a section devoted to personal meditations on the Latino/a self.

Although it is difficult to bring together a text meant for historical research in the early modern period of the Hispanophone and Lusophone Americas with a collection of critical work on the twenty-first century question of “whether Latinidad and Latino/a studies can operate within a larger transnationalist, global, and/or hemispheric context” (p. 3, Technofuturos), there are ways in which these two volumes can complement each other. As the editors of Technofuturos emphasize, such work necessitates thinking about the past(s), present(s), and the future(s) of constant flows and stoppages of bodies, ideas, commodities, and economies across the Americas not only from the U.S.-centric viewpoint of studies of recent immigration to the North, but also via deep and complex histories, always incomplete, of the Americas.

Notes

[1]. José F. Buscaglia-Salgado, Undoing Empire: Race and Nation in the Mulatto Caribbean (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 89.

[2]. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, Emory University,  www.slavevoyages.org (accessed September 30, 2010).

[3]. See also Charles Medina, “Caught between Rivals: The Spanish-African Maroon Competition for Captive Indian Labor in the Region of Esmeraldas during the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries,” The Americas 63, no. 1 (July 2006): 113-136. Medina examines marronage as a set of long-term strategies and activities reaching far beyond the act of escaping enslavement. Flight was only the first, if essential, step in a process with many possible outcomes. The maroons of Esmeraldas used numerous approaches--collaborative, competitive, and even predatory--in their effort to thrive under adversarial and hostile conditions (ibid., 115).

[4]. John Jota Leaños Digital Mural Project, http://www.leanos.net/projects/digital_mural/cybrids/index.html (accessed September 30, 2010).

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.

Citation: Tace M. Hedrick. Review of McKnight, Kathryn Joy; Garofalo, Leo, eds., Afro-Latino Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550-1812 and Mirabal, Nancy Raquel; Laó-Montes, Agustín, eds., Technofuturos: Critical Interventions in Latina/o Studies. H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews. December, 2010.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31145