Defiant Presences: The Inspired Seascapes of Afrolatine Divinities, Saints, and Ancestors

Abstract The sea serves as an epistemological orientation for understanding Afro-Cuban religious traditions that access divinities and the dead to reinforce group solidarity and produce healing. This article explores how spirit mediums and entities create historical, cultural, and ritual intersections that elucidate an ongoing worlding that carries potent political strategies for sustenance through an enactment of the waters, especially the ocean. In particular, this work looks at synergies between bodily acts like the singing of the song “Mamá Francisca,” the drawing of Palo signatures for kalunga (the sea of the dead), and altar creation in honor of Yemayá. The result is a complex and fluid understanding of spiritual practices and relationships that resist flattening and slip through taxonomic rendering. Further, by continually accessing afterlives that are porous and action-oriented, Afrolatine spiritual communities create spatial and temporal conduits between the living and the dead that are full of a radical social purpose.