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Chapter 2 permits an analysis of the 1900 bi-laws belonging to Tiburcia Sotolongo’s cabildo, or religious society, and demonstrates that, in the early twentieth century, women were often held responsible for altar production and the public presentation of the Afro-Cuban religious movement. In spite of police persecution of the male leadership of these societies, close examination of the extant religious altars and artworks in Tiburcia’s home, including altars related to Espiritismo and Santería, demonstrates her ongoing work with Afro-Cuban religious arts. Moreover, examination of Tiburcia’s surviving religious art objects provide an important perspective on the “nested spaces” she relied upon in order to connect and separate these different ritual practices and engage the different interests of her audiences.

Chapter 3 examines the photographic documentation of temporary public altars by Hortensia Ferrer and Iluminada Sierra Ortiz, as well as their established patterns of discourse surrounding this material. In the 1940s and 1950s, Hortensia had a number of her family’s temporary Espiritismo altars photographed and kept these images in her home for her audiences to consult. These photographs capture a period in which Afro-Cuban religious arts became particularly dramatic and sumptuous. Through this exploration of altars, Hortensia, Iluminada, and their religious family plumbed the tensions that existed between the separate practices of Espiritismo and Santería as they sought to create a larger religious community. Analysis of how these women documented their religious community’s altar practices permits insight into the explosion of and anxiety surrounding Afro-Caribbean arts in Cuba and the United States.

During the late 1950s and the 1960s, Iluminada Sierra Ortiz and Carmen Oramas Caballery collaborated in their religious work with the intent to unify the larger Latin American community, particularly Caribbean women, then flooding into New York. The extant religious imagery from their homes and religious centers reveals critical reinterpretations of Caribbean women’s history. In these arts and altars for Espiritismo and Santería, historic, nineteenth-century Afro-Caribbean women figure as leaders and mediators between the past and the present. Examination of their altar designs illustrates important reconsiderations of Afro-Caribbean women’s histories relevant to the experiences of their multi-ethnic community struggling for survival in Spanish Harlem.

The importation of large numbers of Africans for slave labor plantations introduced numerous ethnic groups and their cultural heritages to the Caribbean. This chapter deals with creole religious traditions created by Africans, which have maintained many of their African elements despite being fused with elements encountered in the Caribbean. These include Santería, Palo Monte, Abakuá, and Vodou. Among Spanish colonists, the religio-philosophical system of Espiritismo became an alternative for Catholics who were becoming increasingly alienated from the institutional Catholic Church. The origins, beliefs, and rituals of each religion are discussed in turn. A fundamental aspect of the development of these religious traditions is their African roots, which are central for understanding their transformation into creole traditions in the Americas.

This essay proposes that Marta Moreno Vega’s 2004 memoir, When the Spirits Dance Mambo, is a Latina feminist narrative that foregrounds African diaspora worldviews, thought, forms, and practices as resources for cultivating a path toward decoloniality. In this memoir, Abuela’s spiritual leadership and her introduction of the young Cotito into the practice of Espiritismo become a central prism through which Cotito innovatively apprehends the links between sacred and secular realms in the burgeoning mambo and salsa music scene of New York. Even more importantly, her engagement with this diasporan worldview allows Cotito to critically apprehend prevailing gender norms and their limitations. This essay, therefore, argues that an Afro-Latina feminism emerges in this memoir from the practice of embodied spirituality that also has sonic, aesthetic, and social dimensions in everyday life.