“I Worship Black Gods”:
Formation of an African American Lucumi Religious Subjectivity

A dissertation presented
by
Lisanne C. Norman
to
The Department of African and African American Studies
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
in the subject of African American Studies
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
April 2015
https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/17467218/NORMAN-DISSERTATION-2015.pdf?sequence=6&isAllowed=y

Abstract

In 1959, Christopher Oliana and Walter “Serge” King took a historic journey to
pre-revolutionary Cuba that would change the religious trajectory of numerous African
Americans, particularly in New York City. They became the first African American
initiates into the Afro-Cuban Lucumi orisha tradition opening the way for generations of
African Americans who would comprehensively transform their way of life. This
dissertation examines the inter-diasporic exchanges between African Americans and their
Cuban teachers to highlight issues of African diasporic dissonance and differing notions
of “blackness” and “African.” I argue that these African Americans create a particular
African American Lucumi religious subjectivity within the geographical space of an
urban cosmopolitan city as they carve out space and place in the midst of religious
intolerance and hostility. The intimate study of these devotees’ lives contributes new
understandings about the challenges of religious diversity within contemporary urban
settings. These African Americans cultivated a new religious subjectivity formed through
dialogical mediation with spiritual entities made present through material religious
technologies, such as divination, spiritual masses, and possession. Through the lens of
lived religion, I examine the experiences of African American Lucumi devotees to better
understand how their everyday lives reflect the mediation between a private religious life,
defined and structured by spiritual entities, and their public lives in the contemporary
sociocultural, economic and political context of urban American society. Based on more
than 8 years of intense participant observation and semi-structured interviews and
discussions, I analyze how religious subjectivities and religious bodies are cultivated as
these African Americans leave their mark on this religious tradition, their geographical
surroundings, and African American religious history

SPEAKING WITH THE ORISHAS: DIVINATION AND PROPITIATION IN THE LUCUMI RELIGION
by
KRISTI MARRERO
B.A. University of Central Florida, 2008
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of Master of Arts
in the Department of Anthropology
in the College of Sciences
at the University of Central Florida
Orlando, Florida
 Fall Term
 2014 
https://sciences.ucf.edu/anthropology/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/2014/07/Marrero_K.pdf

ABSTRACT

 The Lucumí religion was born in Cuba from African and European religious systems.
The enslaved Yoruba were brought to the New World through the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.

They were taken from their homes, family, language, and religion and brought to countries like Cuba to provide free labor to growing agricultural markets that benefited European colonizers of the Americas. The Yoruba would hold on to their religion, but in order to keep it alive, they would have to make it into a new religion. This new religion would become the religion known as Lucumí.

In Cuba, Lucumí practitioners would hide their religion beneath the façade of Catholicism. The orishas were associated with Catholic saints with similar attributes. The orisha
Changó, who governs war and presides over lightning, became associated with Saint Barbara who is the patron saint of artillerymen and is linked to lightning. The Yoruba could be seen praying to a saint but were actually praying to an orisha. This practice became ingrained as a part of Lucumí tradition.

Divination and propitiation are at the center of the Lucumí religion. Divination
determines the course of a practitioner’s life and can reveal whether practitioners are in a good or bad position in their lives. Propitiation will ensure that good fortune will remain or that bad omens will disappear.