BELISO DE JESUS, Aisha M Electric Santería_ Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion (2015, Columbia University Press)

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Electric Santería
R A C I A L A N D S E X U A L A S S E M B L A G E S
O F T R A N S N A T I O N A L R E L I G I O N
Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús
 
 
 
 Electric Santería 
 G E N D E R , T H E O R Y , A N D R E L I G I O N 
 G E N D E R , T H E O R Y , A N D R E L I G I O N 
 Amy Hollywood, Editor 
 The Gender, Theory, and Religion series provides a forum for interdisciplinary 
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 Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making , 
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 When Heroes Love: The Ambiguity of Eros in the Stories of Gilgamesh and David , 
Susan Ackerman 
 Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity , 
Jennifer Wright Knust 
 Bodily Citations: Religion and Judith Butler , 
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 Between a Man and a Woman? Why Conservatives Oppose Same-Sex Marriage , 
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 Christ Without Adam: Subjectivity and Diff erence in the Philosophers’ Paul , 
Benjamin H. Dunning 
 Electric Santería 
 R A C I A L A N D S E X U A L A S S E M B L A G E S 
O F T R A N S N A T I O N A L R E L I G I O N 
 Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús 
 Columbia University Press 
 New York 
 Columbia University Press 
 Publishers Since 1893 
 New York Chichester, West Sussex 
 cup.columbia.edu 
 Copyright © 2015 Columbia University Press 
 All rights reserved 
 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 
 
 Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. 
 This book is printed on paper with recycled content. 
 Printed in the United States of America 
 c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 
 p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 
 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 ix 
 preface Despedidas xi 
 acknowledgments xv 
 I N T R O D U C T I O N Transnational Santería Assemblages 1 
 C H A P T E R O N E Electric Oricha 40 
 C H A P T E R T W O Transnational Caminos 79 
 C H A P T E R T H R E E Pacts with Darkness 114 
 C H A P T E R F O U R Scent of Empire 147 
 C H A P T E R F I V E Contaminating Femininities 183 
 E P I LO G U E A Death at Dawn 212 
 glossary 223 
 notes 229 
 references 247 
 index 271 
ix
 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 ori-
cha , is a Cuban-creole form of Spanish, Yoruba, and Congo languages from 
colonial times. This book refl ects this use of Lukumí-creole Cuban or-
thography. For ethnographic interlocutors I have used some actual names 
of practitioners who wished to appear in this book and have their contri-
butions noted publicly. However, for most American-based santeros trav-
eling illegally between Cuba and the United States, and for Cuban nation-
als who engaged in sometimes compromising relationships with foreigners 
in Cuba, I have changed details to ensure ethnographic anonymity. 
xi
 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 o l ú batá , owner of the sacred batá drums; t ata m ayombero , 
a p alo- c ongo elder; iy amba , a leader in an a bakuá men’s religious society; 
 o bá o riaté , 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 
diff erent 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 fi ve years off ” when he registered him-
self. 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 
xii
P R E F A C E : D E S P E D I D A S
( cumpleaños de santo ) celebration. Unfortunately, I, like several of his god-
children 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 in-
stead 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 fi eld research on Santería in Cuba in 2002, I have 
spent most of my time in Alfredo’s “house of saints.” Alfredo was god-
father to many Cubans and foreigners, most of whom addressed him as 
“padrino.” It is diffi cult 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 ( libre-
tas ) 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 infl uence 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 diff erent 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 ( otá n ) he had given them, also travel and live 
with them in Mexico, Canada, Spain, England, Brazil, and the United 
xiii
P R E F A C E : D E S P E D I D A S
States. Several CDs and DVDs document Alfredo’s spiritual power and 
religious expertise. 4 Like other religious elders, Alfredo’s presence contin-
ues to aff ect both through new media technologies and through his trans-
national connections. His godchildren play his DVDs and CDs, conjur-
ing 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. Dur-
ing 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 on-
line. 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 diff erent educational or cultural backgrounds” 
(Pollack-Eltz 2001, 121). Rather than attempt to understand Cuban iden-
tity or nationalisms through Santería, this book examines the multilateral 
construction and circulation of transnational religious assemblages. Reli-
gion, I suggest, becomes a key tool for intervening in transnational fram-
ings of Santería and is especially useful for exploring larger questions of 
how Cuban nationals and American-based religious travelers are produc-
ing religious cosmopolitanisms (Beliso-De Jesús 2013a). Combinations 
of diverse national, racial, sexual, gender, and socioeconomic positionali-
ties 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 transna-
tional 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 diff erent historical moments, and how practitioners 
xiv
P R E F A C E : D E S P E D I D A S
must negotiate the politics of race, gender, sexuality, imperialism, and reli-
gious travel that are implicated in these feelings. I argue fi rst that diff er-
ent 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 anal-
ysis to one of assemblages, I suggest we can hold in tension how concep-
tions of being complicate the politics of race, gender, and sexuality in 
transnational religions. The prose of the text refl ects the complexity of the 
various copresences that electrify transnational Santería. I deploy diff erent 
writing styles to highlight the academic, spiritual, and political projects 
that compete and collide in this religious practice. Writing through copres-
ences allows me to disrupt the fi xity of any singular ethnographic present 
or historical moment. This book takes us on a tour of the sensual experi-
ence and transnational practice of this moving religion. 
xv
 Acknowledgments 
 My father, Peter De Jesús (Obindé Omó Yesá), a Santería consecrator, 
master drummer, and priest of Ochún, fi rst brought our family to Matan-
zas 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 diffi cult times. My Cuban 
family also provided care, inspiration, and guidance. Milagros de la Cari-
dad 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 grate-
ful to the many copresences who led me through this ethnographic 
 camino : Ma Monserrate, Ma Fermina, Elpidio Alfonso, Cristobal Puer-
tas, Roberto Clemente, Diane Mc Elhiney, Manuel Amador, Martin 
Bonney, María De Jesús, and the other loved ones who rest at the feet of 
Olofí. 
xvi
A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
 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 
Offi ce for Faculty Development and Diversity, the Department of An-
thropology at Stanford University, the Center for African Studies at Stan-
ford, the Offi ce of Graduate Diversity at Stanford, and the California State 
University Doctoral Incentive Program. The Weatherhead Center for In-
ternational Aff airs 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 Anthro-
pology 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 as-
tute interlocutor. 
 Many read, gave feedback, and helped fi ne-tune this book. Students 
ofthe Religious Tourisms course at HDS and teaching fellows David Am-
ponsah and Kate DeConinck read early selections and provided valuable 
insight. Amanda Ginsberg worked diligently as a research assistant. Soli-
mar Otero read multiple versions of the text, always giving crucial feed-
back and making me smile. David Ikard and Kristina Wirtz also gave in-
valuable suggestions and have been amazing colleagues. Practitioners who 
provided early feedback include Tina Gallagher, Stephan Goldstone, Nu-
rudafi na Abena, Nelson Rodriguez, and Scott Hoag, modupué . The edi-
torial 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 Borfi l, 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 
xvii
A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
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 men-
tor, 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 doc-
toral 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 Da-
vid Hempton and Bill Graham provided important resources to enable re-
search 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 Higginbo-
tham, Merilee Grindle, Lorena Barbería, Vince Brown, and Ajantha Subra-
manian. 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 facili-
tated 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 Shakh-
sari, 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 Cassel-
berry, Barnor Hesse, Christen Smith, James Noel, Frank Guridy, Devyn 
Spence Benson, Andrés Rodríguez Reyes, Michael Ralph, and Ramón 
Grosfoguel. Belkis Quesada Guerra and Josefi na Pérez Oceguera, from the 
xviii
A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
Instituto de Historía de Cuba, were invaluable for completing archival re-
search, 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. Lau-
rence 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! 
 Electric Santería 
 
 
 
 
1
 In 2006, while Obá Bi, a priest living in New York City, and I were watch-
ing 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 fi lmed 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 fi lms of the ritual butchering of sacrifi cial animals, 
ceremonial protocols, religious songs, and possessed practitioners. He de-
scribed 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 “me-
dium” in the Santería sense of being possessed, he still felt the saints 
( oricha 1 ) and dead spirits ( egun ) in, on, and around his body and, increas-
ingly, through the screen. “Be careful what you watch!” he told me, “spir-
its like screens.” 
 
 I N T R O D U C T I O N 
 Transnational Santería Assemblages 
2
I N T R O D U C T I O N : T R A N S N A T I O N A L S A N T E R Í A A S S E M B L A G E S
 Like other priests I worked with, Obá Bi understood his oricha or san-
tos , 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 ) ceremo-
nies where oricha are physically and spiritually placed on the new initiates’ 
heads (Beliso-De Jesús 2014). The oricha are housed in sacred stones ( otá n ) 
and shells ( dilogún ) and are considered to be reborn through the ritual pro-
cess. 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 connec-
tion 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 theirenergy 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 cur-
rents ( 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-imag-
ined, 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 through-
out 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 help-
ful in thinking about the various ethnic articulations that are brought 
3
I N T R O D U C T I O N : T R A N S N A T I O N A L S A N T E R Í A A S S E M B L A G E S
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 in-
spirations 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 prac-
tices, similarly hails ethnic designations linked to notions of colonial Af-
ricanness and diff erent 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 under-
stood as distinct from practitioners’ perceptions of the purity, transna-
tionality, and consistency of their traditions across time, as Kamari Clarke 
(2004) has shown with Yoruba revivalists in the United States, and J. Lo-
rand Matory (2005) with c andomblé practices in Brazil. For inspirations 
to be seen as legitimate by practitioners of Santería, then, they are not un-
derstood as fresh innovations but rather as extensions of authentic tradi-
tion. These ontological inspirations bring racial formations into the every-
day 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 de-
bates 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 infi ltrate “age-old” African traditions in Cuba. 
Inspirations are thus deeply wedded to perceptions, sensations, and feel-
ings of historical consistency. In past-present moments such as in bodily 
possessions of black African spirits who fought enslavement during colo-
nialism and continue to fi ght oppression through spiritual warfare on be-
half of contemporary practitioners, these inspirations are crucial temporal 
deployments of tradition—deployments that hail particular logics of orig-
inality 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 reli-
gious and familial descendants. Similarly, his great-great-grandmother, Ma 
4
I N T R O D U C T I O N : T R A N S N A T I O N A L S A N T E R Í A A S S E M B L A G E S
Monserrate Gonzalez, an Égba priestess born in Africa who arrived to 
Cuba in the 1840s or 1850s, was the founder of the Matanzas-based egg-
uadó 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 par-
ents 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 grand-
daughter 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 ra-
cial designation, are remade through complex rituals of making santo 
(priesthood) that hail blackened epistemologies (Beliso-De Jesús 2014). 
Practitioners, regardless of racial identifi cation, 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-identifi ed 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 cer-
tain 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 epis-
temologies 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 con-
texts and in diverse ethnic, multicultural, multinational, and translocal 
spaces. It is a practice that, while long stigmatized, is nevertheless becom-
ing hegemonic in particular African diaspora circuits. In the United States 
5
I N T R O D U C T I O N : T R A N S N A T I O N A L S A N T E R Í A A S S E M B L A G E S
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 sacrifi ce 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 su-
periority over black Cuban subjects who purportedly practiced what has 
been (and often still is) disparaged as “witchcraft.” Publicly demonized, 
Santería was used as a justifi cation for racial dominance in the transition 
from Spanish colonial governance to a republican nation in the early twen-
tieth 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 re-
ligions or seen as a form of spiritual contagion. However, the fantasticalmythos 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 transna-
tional religion, and, as I will show, media technologies are central to con-
temporary 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 diff erent but interconnected translo-
cal religious communities (Beliso-De Jesús 2013a). However, most stud-
ies of Santería have examined these practices in a more bounded na-
tional 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 use-
ful 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 Greg-
ory 1999; Pérez 2010; Schmidt 2001; Vidal-Ortiz 2006) as well as pro-
cesses of Africanizing and Cubanizing these religions in the United States. 6 
It has been used to track emerging and confl icting questions of race, 
6
I N T R O D U C T I O N : T R A N S N A T I O N A L S A N T E R Í A A S S E M B L A G E S
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 emerg-
ing global experiences of Santería has yet to be explored ethnographi-
cally. 7 Religion is key to trace a less binaristic transnationalism between 
Cubans on and off the island (Mahler and Hansing 2005b), and transna-
tionalism 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, transna-
tionalism and media are felt on and in diff erent bodies as a form of sen-
sual travel and electrifying mobility. 10 
 In regla ocha, oricha and other spirits are said to travel through various 
bodies—and more recently even through fi lmed 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 kines-
thetic; in Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s (1999, xxii) terms, they are “attenu-
ated” 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 kines-
thetic sensations in spiritual currents are movements of embodied percep-
tion and awareness (Noland 2009, 10). Electrifying currents actually shift 
practitioners’ experiences with media and transnational travel. How diff er-
ent 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 aff ect not only the internal dynamics of Santería reli-
gious 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 de-
scribed as “felt” ( se siente ) on the body, and understood as “presences” 
( las presencias ) within electrifying circuits and spiritual networks. I use 
7
I N T R O D U C T I O N : T R A N S N A T I O N A L S A N T E R Í A A S S E M B L A G E S
the term copresences to reference the complex multiplicity of racial spiri-
tual embodied aff ectivity that the term las presencias indicates. Copresences 
are sensed through chills, shivers, tingles, premonitions, and possessions 
in and through diff erent transnational Santería bodies and spaces. They 
are active spiritual and religious subjectivities intimately tied to practitio-
ners’ forms of movement, travel, and sensual bodily registers. Dead African 
slaves, Yoruba diaspora oricha, and other racialized entities form part in a 
reconfi guration of practitioners’ body-worlds. They bring the “existential 
striving” of racial formations, together with ontological assertions of pres-
ence (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 slav-
ery, colonialism, tourism, and media, and circulate in transnational reli-
gious movement. 
 Conceptualizing transnational Santería through electrifying spiritual 
currents is thus key to not localizing these experiences solely within iden-
tity 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; Cliff ord 1994; Gopinath 2005; Brown 
2005). However, diaspora is not synonymous with unity (Brown 2005). 
Focusing on more unifying aspects of diaspora centered on identity inad-
vertently 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 diff erent 
diasporas collide. Race, sexuality, and nationalisms are also sites were the 
formations of diaspora become problem atic for diff erent practitioners. 
The idea that “white” “homosexual” Cuban Americans are weakening 
Afro-Cuban traditions (chapter 4), or that black Americans have less ac-
cess to Santería than Cubans, Puerto Ricans, or other Latin Americans of 
any race (chapter 2), for example, highlight such tensions. Gilles Deleuze 
8
I N T R O D U C T I O N : T R A N S N A T I O N A L S A N T E R Í A A S S E M B L A G E S
and Félix Guittari’s concept of assemblages allows us to focus on the ten-
sions of distinction, fl uidity, intensity, dispersal, and temporal-spatial im-
permanence of categorizations that are mobilized in surprising and often 
confl icting ways (Puar 2007, 212–18). Like Paul Christopher Johnson’s 
(2007, 7) useful notion of diasporic horizons, which does not foreclose 
creative change and pays attention to tensions that arise through various 
identifi cations, diasporic assemblages places emphasis on a wider range of 
entities, materials, and aff ects without presuming preexisting relata. How-
ever, rather than a representational analysis, as diasporic horizons utilizes, 
assemblages focus on the connections and disruptions that erupt as intensi-
ties or feelings of spatial-temporalities. I suggest a critical rethinkingof 
diasporas as assemblages, or the “microintensities and various territories” 
(Clough’s term [2000, 135]) that emerge through alliances and disputes 
over transnational religious power. 
 Electric Santería situates copresences in the everyday practice of trans-
national practitioners. It explores how copresences are felt or sensed in 
transnational places and historical moments of feeling diaspora (Guridy 
2009). It takes these oricha diaspora sensings—the electrifying layerings 
of religious tours, spirits, videos, traveling divinities, and practitioners—
as models for thinking through the daily interactions that practitioners en-
gage in with spiritual-religious beings. This book thus explores both the 
connections and the tensions that arise around feeling and movement. It 
is my argument that copresences transform the experiences of transnation-
alism and globalization in competing diasporic assemblages. 
 Travel and movement construct place (de Certeau 1984). Travelers to 
Cuba often reference sensual distinctions of time and place: the 1950s 
Chevy’s aura of petrol; the neck-jerking, untamed pavement on stop-and-
go roads; the heat of postcoloniality in the rotational electricity of air-con-
ditioned spaces; the gaseous eff ects of mojo -infused pork, smashed plan-
tains, pounded garlic, and black beans; the slick, moist, bodily reactions to 
the lack of consumer products; or interactions with titillating strangers on 
musky, starry, rum-soaked nights. Travelers feel the sensations of place. Elec-
tric Santería is therefore an ethnography of interaction between Santería 
practitioners in Cuba and the United States, their ontological mappings, 
and their transnational assemblages. In this formulation, copresences such 
as the oricha, spirits, priests, and, in the more intimate case, the recently 
9
I N T R O D U C T I O N : T R A N S N A T I O N A L S A N T E R Í A A S S E M B L A G E S
deceased Padrino Alfredo are also active spiritual agents in these assem-
blages. In contextualizing the multiple formations of movement within 
Santería spirit-ontologies, Electric Santería is an ethnography of sensual 
experience and transnational religious practice. 
 Feeling Copresence Across Time and Space 
 Copresences are Santería ontologies—they are the sensing of a multiplicity 
of being (and beings joined together) that are felt on the body, engaged 
with spiritually, experienced through television screens and divination, 
and expressed in diasporic assemblages. 12 The various oricha, dead spirits 
(egun), energies of good (iré) or bad ( osogbo ) that infl uence practitioners’ 
lives are copresences that haunt transnational Santería interactions, similar 
to what Avery Gordon (1997, 8) calls a “seething presence” where ghosts 
and hauntings act on and meddle with the evidence that they existed previ-
ously. Kristina Wirtz (2007b, 89) describes these sensations of copresences 
as “ ‘little pinches’: [where] the saint chooses the person, then infl icts 
problems on the person until she gets the point that she must initiate.” By 
blurring taken-for-granted realities, copresences create conceptual open-
ings, meddling with the evidence of their previous existence (Holbraad 
2008). Copresences are not simply dead or missing persons but rather are 
social fi gures of a past still present, proof that hauntings have taken place. 
They occupy the space of what we know to be true but cannot see (Stoler 
2006, 9). Copresences demonstrate how embodied religious ontologies 
may be crucial nodes in transnational “intra-actions” between practitio-
ners, dead and alive, mobile and immobile. 13 This move unsettles readings 
of African diaspora as a condition or symptom of movement (see Brown 
2005; Patterson and Kelly 2000) and instead emphasizes how the mobili-
zation of particular allegiances as diasporic produces certain sensings or 
feelings of self with copresences. 
 Scholars have noted that spaces like Santería can be useful research 
sites to understand divergent notions of presence (see Clarke 2004; Ma-
tory 2005, 2009; Palmié 2002; Wirtz 2007b). This is because Santería 
forces scholars and practitioners to situate various, multilateral, histori-
cal hauntings. Afro-Cuban religions draw on multiple religious sites and 
10
I N T R O D U C T I O N : T R A N S N A T I O N A L S A N T E R Í A A S S E M B L A G E S
diff erent religious ontologies in the construction of their spiritual places 
and senses of being: French Kardecian spiritisms; Yoruba-Atlantic cos-
mologies; wild colonial “Africans” and “indians” in inhabitable Cuban 
forests; Catholic saintly avatars and holy water; spiritual videologics; and 
Islamic salutations, “¡Nsala Malekuns!” (see Palmié 2010). Copresences 
are comfortable with irreconcilability. These complicated spaces of sen-
sual presence embrace diff erent frames of relationality. 14 
 What is particularly useful in both the everyday pragmatics of ritual 
negotiations and scholarship on African-inspired religions is how Santería 
links multiple places with electric copresences. In An Anthropology of 
 Absence , Mikkel Bille et al. (2010, 4) demonstrate how that which is ab-
sent invariably leaves a presence. Absence as presence thus fi ltrates through 
and in spaces (see also Engelke 2007). It is only in the recognition and 
experience of existence where presence is activated and absence felt : “This 
means that the presence or the absence of phenomena—be it persons, 
things, events or places—does not necessarily depend either on absolute, 
positive occurrences or the absolute lack of such, but may just as well re-
side in the way the experience of phenomena diff ers from the expectations 
and preconceptions” (Bille, Hastrup, and Sorenson 2010, 5). 
 Padrino Alfredo’s dead spirit might choose to make himself known 
just as Teodoro Calvo and Federico Calvo, his great-uncle and grandfather, 
respectively, did when they possessed his body yearly during the palo cel-
ebration of their prenda (magical cauldron), which he had inherited from 
them. This is similar to how Jean-Paul Sartre describes how absence af-
fects place—how, for example, Sartre’s friend Pierre, missing from a café 
where they were to meet, infected the entire sense of place: “Pierre’s ab-
sence means that the café and its tables, chairs, mirrors, lights and people 
disappear. . . . In fact Pierre is absent from the whole café ; his absence fi xes 
the café in its evanescence” (Bille, Hastrup, and Sorenson 2010, 34, 5; em-
phasis original). However, feeling the presence of copresences is diff erent 
from the presence of absence described by Sartre. Unlike Pierre’s absence 
from the cafe, Santeriá copresences are about “intra-activity” (Barad 2007). 
Padrino Alfredo is not simply a dead ghost who might haunt with his pres-
ence in absence; rather, as a copresence, he speaks back and is fed, attended 
to, and active—he might even decide to momentarily be embodied through 
possessions or hailed through tingling sensations. Copresences are present 
11
I N T R O D U C T I O N : T R A N S N A T I O N A L S A N T E R Í A A S S E M B L A G E S
in the everyday lives of transnational practitioners; they are sensed diaspori-
cally in transnational moments. 
 Disorientation is an important site of orientation, where emotions and 
bodies come together (Ahmed 2006, 4, 10). For instance, diasporic spaces 
are about unsettling arrivals, which conjure orientations toward “home” 
(Ahmed 2006, 9–10). Nausea, giddiness, and dizziness are all intensifi ca-
tions of bodily awareness of and in space (Ahmed 2006, 4). These aff ective 
economies are sites of mobilization “that defi ne the contours of the mul-
tiple worlds that are inhabited by diff erent subjects” (Ahmed 2006, 10). 
In this way practitioners from diverse socioeconomic positions feel Afri-
canness and Cubanness through travel, videos, and spiritual movement 
(Palmié 1995). 15 They are situated within complex diasporicnetworks of 
transnational religious hierarchy, authority, authenticity, and copresence. 16 
Given that bodies and subjects cannot be dislocated from the layered his-
tories out of which they emerge (Shaw 2002), I suggest we situate copres-
ences as frames of reference to understand the expanding relationships that 
practitioners have with media, other technologies, travel, tourism, and the 
landscapes constructed through these dynamics. 17 
 Santería travelers to Cuba are voluntary but reluctant tourists. While 
they resist this interpellation (chapter 2), they continue to enter Cuba with 
tourist visas and are identifi ed by Cubans in Cuba as tourists. The rejection 
of tourist subjectivity draws on this category’s despised locationality—a 
modernist disenchantment with the world—where tourists are seen to 
superfi cially capture or apprehend “exotic” locales but never fully penetrate 
local experience (MacCannell 1976).Whether through “the gaze” of the 
tourist (Urry 2002), the lens of the camera, the spectacle of the Other, or 
the consumption of the audience (Bremer 2006), a visual focus impover-
ishes bodily engagements with travel and media (see Dann and Jacobsen 
2002). These perceptions do not accurately express the touristic travel 
experiences of transnational Santería, which are guided by intra-actions 
with copresences. Transnational religious travel and tourism thus form part 
in larger global relationships of movement, power, and relationality. 
 In one of the more important anthropological moves to understand 
global processes, Arjun Appadurai’s (1996) notion of “scapes” saw the 
coming together of globalization, media, heritage, information, practices, 
and diasporas as producing a series of imagined worlds: ethnoscapes, 
12
I N T R O D U C T I O N : T R A N S N A T I O N A L S A N T E R Í A A S S E M B L A G E S
mediascapes, fi nancescapes, technoscapes, ideoscapes, and so on. Drawing 
on Benedict Anderson’s (1992) notion of imagined communities, Appa-
durai saw these “imagined worlds” in constant struggle over identity and 
territoriality while not necessarily threatening traditional forms of com-
munity making or nationality. 18 The scapes model has allowed scholars to 
bracket emerging relationships in complex global fl ows of power. Thomas 
Tweed (2006, 61–62), for instance, explores the traces left by media and 
Pentecostal migration through the “sacroscape,” which attends to how 
religious fl ows leave imprints that transform peoples, places, and natural 
terrains. The notions of sensorial scapes, as Charles Hirschkind (2006) 
has applied to sound or Lili Berko (1992) to video (see also Appadurai 
1996; Di Giovine 2008), have disrupted the tendency toward visual or 
text-based hierarchy. 19 Palmié (2013, 168) has called the global circulation 
of Santería and other Yoruba traditional religions online “orichascapes,” 
and he suggests there has been a “conceptual uncoupling of ‘Africanity’ 
and ‘blackness’ in North American regimes of ‘racial knowledge’ and dis-
criminatory praxis.” Whether one agrees with the assertion that blackness 
is truly uncoupled from Africanity in transnational oricha circuits, it is 
helpful to pause for a moment on the type of model the scapes metaphor 
leans on. While extremely useful to connect transnational and global 
fl ows, the scapes model nevertheless relies on Andersonian notions of 
imagined communities, which construct fi xed assertions of identity and 
nation that produce cohesive representational models. Indeed, scapes tend 
to envision “the nation as an artifact of cultural processes whose exis-
tence is preceded rather than followed by the creation of a sense of nation-
ality” (Maronitis 2007, 388). 
 Electric Santería calls for a shift from representationalism, which 
assumes separation as foundational, to models that highlight “practices, 
doings, and actions” (Barad 2007, 135, 137). By following copresences 
(not necessarily human actors) transnationally, we can explore their “wild 
innovations” (Latour 2005, 11–12). Feminist physicist Karen Barad’s 
method of diff raction is particularly useful when thinking about follow-
ing the wild innovations of copresences. Referring to the ways that light 
and sound waves bend, interfere, overlap, and blend, diff raction allows us 
to see how phenomena move through each other. Rather than a refl ective 
method, diff raction is a complicated relationality where, for instance, 
light waves might display shadows in light regions and bright spots in 
13
I N T R O D U C T I O N : T R A N S N A T I O N A L S A N T E R Í A A S S E M B L A G E S
dark areas (Barad 2007, 135). Diff raction is also a way to read academic 
scholarship. Instead of the need to always critique, we might read scholars 
through each other (Barad 2007), and, I might add, see them as copres-
ences. 20 Reading diff ractively, I situate theories of globalization and trans-
nationalism through African diaspora notions of presence. Scapes are 
therefore shifted into aff ectivities and intensities (instead of only represen-
tations of imagined communities). Scapes can be understood as assem-
blages, that is, aff ective territorialities that do not remain fi xed (Maronitis 
2007, 388). 
 Assemblages are rhizomatic; they are winding and twisting vine-like 
connections of transnational and diasporic networks and dispersal. Coined 
by Deleuze and Guittari (1987, 7) this formulation models itself after prin-
ciples of “connection and heterogeneity” instead of a tree or root meta-
phor. Indeed, the botanical concept of rhizome has a long scholarly his-
tory of being applied to the Caribbean and African diasporas (see Gates 
2010; Gilroy 1993; Maronitis 2007; Matory 2005, 2012). The Antilles 
“are not ‘lands,’ . . . but complex archipelagos that require another kind 
of discourse.  .  .  . Archipelagos themselves, it should be emphasized are 
the image of the rhizome—fractured, reaching outward” (Mitsch 1997, 
56). Paul Gilroy (1993, 4, 28) uses the rhizomorphic as central to his con-
struction of “Black Atlantic.” This webbed international network of black 
intellectual unity anchored in a critique of modernity, he suggests, stems 
from continued proximity to the terrors of the slave experience and was 
nurtured by a deep sense of complicity with racial terror (Gilroy 1993, 
73). However, Matory (2012, 107) cautions that the rhizome might lend 
an apparent clarity by hailing a “pristine nature.” Like Kevin Yelvington, 
Matory (2012, 109) off ers the “black Atlantic dialogue” as a metaphor 
that places traditions into larger transoceanic contexts. Reading diff rac-
tively through these scholars, I draw on assemblages (landscapes, dias-
poras, racial, sexual, and national scapes) to explore the intensities and 
aff ective economies of religious feeling through copresences. I am less in-
terested in tracing identitarian formations of Santería, an undoubtedly 
useful project, but instead focus on the microintensities that emerge af-
fectively through various linkages and ontologies. This is diff erent from 
recent calls for an “ontological anthropology” that is concerned with 
philosophical debates about who is allowed to make truth-claims (Hol-
braad 2012). Instead, I draw on feminist reformulations that demonstrate 
14
I N T R O D U C T I O N : T R A N S N A T I O N A L S A N T E R Í A A S S E M B L A G E S
how ontologies are crucial to understanding the politics of aff ect and em-
bodiment in transnational relations of power (Barad 2007; Puar 2007; Po-
vinelli 2006). As Elizabeth Povinelli (2006, 38) argues, locally oriented 
geontologies such as those in Aboriginal Australia or, as in the example 
here, transnational Santería are not mimetic; rather, the ancestral past is 
treated as a “geological material of the present, the fl esh as it is now ar-
ranged.” Copresences are thus exploding sites of fl ight and rupture that 
can be mapped, embodied, and disarticulated at various points of coali-
tion.They are not always strategic or necessarily unifying. These dia-
sporic assemblages that reconfi gure the phenomenology of transnation-
alism through rhizomatic schemas, however, do not presuppose unity, 
cohesion, resistance, subversion, or pristine origins. Copresences trans-
form the experience of transnationalism, diaspora, and media because 
they are ontological. 
 Envisioning scapes and diasporas as assemblages rather than imagined 
worlds, then, allows for fl eeting moments in transnational fl ows of power 
to surface. Senses come to the forefront as culturally encoded mechanisms 
of distinction (Desjarlais 1992; Guerts 2003; Thomas and Ahmed 2004). 
These somatic modes encompass not only one’s way of attending to and 
experiencing self but also the “embodied presence of others” (Csordas 
1993, 138). Since sensory experience produces worlds, then each form 
of interarticulated bodily register is a form of kinesthetic assemblage. 21 
In this book I explore how specifi c elements of bodily animation are felt 
or experienced in transnational Santería (Sheets-Johnstone 1999, 136; 
Noland 2009, 10). Ethnographically, this helps me link how transna-
tional assemblages produce spaces and places through their pungent 
aromas and tingling memories. I have constructed these chapters as a se-
ries of layerings of tangible and intangible spaces, tours through and of 
religious sensation, meaning, and power. They off er alternative sensorial 
renderings to draw the reader into an experience of transnational 
Santería: the relationship between ritual videos and copresences (chapter 
1), the roads practitioners travel (chapter 2), racial religious landscapes of 
authenticity (chapter 3), the smells of religious modernities (chapter 4), and 
contaminating femininities and perverse spiritual sexualities (chapter 5). 
They intentionally map the partial and evanescent glimpses into transna-
tional relations and diasporic sensings. 
15
I N T R O D U C T I O N : T R A N S N A T I O N A L S A N T E R Í A A S S E M B L A G E S
 Cuba Travel 
 Many transnational Santería practitioners reconceptualize religious com-
munity in the everyday negotiations between distance, proximity, and prac-
tice. Although Santería has a long history in Cuba (fi rst as a “supersti-
tion,” then a colonial counterhegemonic practice, then a popular tradition 
and national Afro-Cuban religion) and a more recent history in the United 
States (as a stigmatized immigrant practice, an alternative “cult” spiritu-
ality, and more recently as a religion), the opening up of tourism in Cuba, 
loosening of U.S. travel policies, and the uses of new media have drastically 
altered its previous positioning in both countries. 22 Until the early 1990s 
Santería practitioners in the United States and Cuba had been relatively 
isolated from each other. 23 
 The Special Period of economic hardship, which followed the fall of 
the Soviet Union, marked a shift wherein Cuba was transformed into a 
viable religious-economic “alternative site” for rituals for American prac-
titioners. 24 Beginning in the mid-1990s the Clinton administration’s loos-
ening of travel restrictions allowed new transnational Santería networks 
to form between Cuba and the United States. Clinton was caught between 
powerful Cuban American exile lobbyists on the one hand and anti-
embargo businesses, religious groups, and educational groups that wanted 
to open up relations on the other hand. The Clinton administration thus 
strengthened the economic embargo while simultaneously easing travel re-
strictions (Erisman 2000; Pérez [1990] 2011, 268–69). 25 Between 1994 
and 2003 new categories such as “person-to-person travel” enabled reli-
gious groups and academics to engage in cultural exchange through spe-
cial licenses. 26 For the fi rst time since the 1970s Cuban Americans, many 
of whom practiced Santería, could now travel back to Cuba more freely. 
 The fi rst Santería practitioners to return to Cuba for rituals consisted 
mostly of Cuban “Marielitos” (those who had left during the 1980 Mariel 
boatlift) in the United States. 27 Having been mostly raised under the Rev-
olutionary government, they maintained the closest ties to Cuba and had 
been waiting to return for over ten years. Racially stigmatized in both Cuba 
and the United States, Marielito Cubans were depicted as social degener-
ates, criminals, homosexuals, and practitioners of Santería (Beliso-De Jesús 
2013b; see also Palmié 2013, 134, 154). Lacking many of the resources 
provided to previous generations of Cuban émigrés, some Marielitos openly 
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commercialized Santería, spurring an economy of ritual services and stores, 
 botánicas . Angering the mostly white, elite, pre-Mariel Cuban American 
communities who had kept these practices tightly guarded and clandes-
tine, “Santería” exploded in the 1980s post-Mariel in the United States. 
Remade and packaged for a New Age American consumer, the popular 
term “Santería,” which formerly stigmatized these disparate cluster of prac-
tices of regla ocha, was now hailed as a catch-all prototype uniting under 
the umbrella of Cuban mysticism and neoliberal cult-like shamanism. 
Sparking a fi erce battle between Yoruba reversionists, who wished to cleanse 
the religion of its Spanish colonial infl uences, post-Mariel Santería was 
seen as “having ‘Cubanized,’ ‘Americanized,’ ‘whitened,’ or otherwise 
adulterated the ‘true’ ‘African’ practices and tradition” (Palmié 2013, 134). 
In the mid-1990s Marielitos began to take their American godchildren 
and botánica clients to Cuba for rituals. 28 Soon after, American-based trav-
elers and Santería practitioners also took advantage of shifting policies, 
producing a transnational religious tourism market that hailed Cuba as the 
center of oricha diaspora, in the throes of a global market under which 
the Cuban communist regime was all but collapsing. Santería fl ourished 
in Cuba during a time when extreme hardship led the previously rigid Cu-
ban government to slacken policies toward foreigners and religious prac-
tices. Transnational Santería is thus crucial to racial-ethnic politics and 
commercialism in U.S.-based diaspora communities, and to the reinvigo-
ration of the Cuban economy through tourism since the 1990s. 
 Traveling to Cuba for Santería rituals sparked fi erce religious divides 
in the United States. Early Cuban exile communities in the United States 
perceived any travel to Cuba as supporting the Castro government and 
communism. American practitioners who underwent initiations in Cuba 
were stigmatized as “religious tourists” who had no ties to local Santería 
communities. In some extreme cases, priests initiated in Cuba were not 
accepted within certain factions of Cuban American Santería. Santería 
practices are based on religious family relationships, leaving anyone with-
out a community or set of working priestly relationships at a religious defi -
cit. “It is not rituals in themselves that generate moral community, but 
rather rituals together with the discourses they provoke that embody and 
thus bring into tangible being a moral community of Santería” (Wirtz 
2007b, 5). Indeed, the stigma of travel to Cuba in American Santería com-
munities eventually lessened by the early 2000s. An infl ux of younger 
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practitioners from Cuba who came to the United States as “rafters” ( bal-
seros ) in 1994, by marrying American travelers, through Cuban American 
“lottery” programs ( el bombo ), or by defecting during cultural and musi-
cal exchange tours aided in this shifting religious ethos (see Hagedorn 
2001). Cuba travel off ered religious and economic benefi ts to transnational 
Santería practitioners. 
 In an increasingly attractive market for heritage, cultural, and religious 
tourism, Cuba-as-Santería-homelandopened up a new space for spiritual 
experience. Santurismo was part of an emerging trend of diaspora religious 
tourisms that became popular in the 1990s, similarly drawing American 
practitioners to undergo initiations of candomblé in Brazil or ifá rituals in 
Nigeria (Murphy and Sanford 2001; Olupona 2011; Olupona and Rey 
2008). Cuba travel is more economical and is a lively (neoliberal) experi-
ence with the added authenticity of Cuban practitioners for American-
based priests. “OchaTur” packages in the late 1990s and early 2000s 
off ered by tourist companies and external groups, often sponsored by the 
Cuban state, sold Santería initiation tours to foreigners; these included visa, 
airfare, and all ritual costs for roughly US$7,000 (Hagedorn 2001, 11, 23). 
Santurismo fl ourished on the island in new translocal touristic trends of 
rituals and videos (Knauer 2009b). 
 The American-based santeros that I worked with, however, do not fi t 
into typical prescriptions of touristic consumption (MacCannell 1976). 
While the commodifi cation and export of Santería rituals, practices, and 
imagery by the Cuban state can be seen at many diff erent sectors of the 
economy, the travelers that I worked with tended not to be interested in 
these commercial packages (cf. Delgado 2009). They preferred what they 
perceived as a more grassroots and “authentic” experience of Santería, 
which often relied upon translocal connections between Santería commu-
nities in the United States and fi nding their direct Cuban lineages. 29 Most 
American practitioners abhorred being identifi ed as tourists, wanting in-
stead to be seen as serious religious travelers (see MacCannell 1976). 30 
 Rather than being interested in hotels, nightclubs, or staged represen-
tations of Santería, they desired a deeper and more intimate engagement 
with rituals. Like others have noted, rather than just consuming the exotic, 
certain types of heritage tourisms fall into a consumption of “the same”; 
that is, tourists desire more of what they already do on an everyday basis 
(Nijman 1999; Richards 2007; Smith 2009). Those who work at museums, 
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for example, tend to visit museums when they travel (de Botton 2002; 
Richards 2007). Similarly, Santería practitioners who live in and navi-
gate multiple realms, actively seeking religious knowledge and pathways 
through life in ritual moments, travel to Cuba for more of this religious 
experience. Santeros want more ocha in their life. Cuba rituals are thus 
extensions and expansions of practitioners’ ritualized pathways and jour-
neys through life. 31 
 Religious travel and tourism within Yoruba-inspired diasporas have 
historically produced transnational relations and nationalist contentions. 
Myths of Yoruba ancientness have formed strategic elements in the emer-
gence of Nigerian nationalisms and African American diasporas (Matory 
2005). Notions of traditionality, a relatively recent phenomenon of various 
African modernities, have participated in the consolidation of globally 
imagined oricha (also orìsàs ) practices (Sarracino 1988; Palmié 2002, 
162–63; Matory 2005, 65–67). These transnational connectivities mod-
eled after Internet connections, as discussed by Inderpal Grewal (2005, 24), 
are alter native ways to think about “the global” as linked to networks of 
colonialism and modernity. They perform unique entries into race, nation, 
space, and place (chapter 2). 32 
 In paying attention to both connection and disruption within trans-
national communities, then, we can highlight new problematic relation-
ships that might include peoples and practices that have historically been 
conceived of as “marginal” or “counterhegemonic.” Heteropatriarchy in 
the Caribbean is an operative association in the production of new tour-
istic desires and neoimperial modalities (Alexander 2005, 212, 233). For 
instance, debates around female initiations to ifá in Cuba in 2004 began 
with the initiation of a female tourist, a Santería traveler who wanted to 
be initiated to ifá in Cuba rather than in Nigeria. Even though two Cuban 
women had been quietly initiated to ifá in 2000, the initiation of a female 
tourist sparked a national contention. As I explore in chapter 5, iyanifá were 
seen in Cuba as imperialist feminisms trying to colonize Afro-Cuban tradi-
tions. Race, gender, sexuality, and nationalisms are thus key to emerging 
relations of power. 
 Transnational feminist approaches assert that to map transnational 
fl ows of power (hooks 1992; Grewal and Kaplan 1994, 2001; Moraga and 
Anzaldúa 1983), we must both disrupt essentialist paradigms (Kaplan, 
Alarcón, and Moallem 1999; Mohanty, Russo, and Torres 1991; Spivak 
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I N T R O D U C T I O N : T R A N S N A T I O N A L S A N T E R Í A A S S E M B L A G E S
1988) while also complicating universalizing agendas. 33 For instance, Cu-
ban priests spoke of the wastefulness embodied by foreign practitioners 
during rituals. They described watching in disgust how relatively new 
clothing would be torn off American bodies during cleansings or what they 
saw as the excessive uses of honey ( oñi ), palm oil ( epó ), cocoa butter ( or í ), 
or cloth ( achó ) as indicative of national distinctions. Racial, sexual, and 
nationalist contentions also arose around scent (chapter 4). Foreigners and 
blacks were described during fi eld research as emitting foul bodily odors. 
On the other hand, white foreign women were described of as having a 
pleasant aroma due to their access to quality products not available on the 
island. I was told how particular goods and ritual items were imbued with 
the essence of Americaness, while Cuban women were celebrated nation-
ally as being sweet like strawberries and chocolate, referencing the foreign 
consumption of racialized and sexualized bodies within global tourist mar-
kets (Allen 2011; Gregory 2007; Roland 2011, 2013). As I discuss else-
where (Beliso-De Jesús 2013b), American versions of Santería have been 
read as faggotized ( mariconerías ) or “whitened” by Cuban santeros (see 
chapter 4). The geopolitics of race and sexuality cannot be dislocated from 
various technologies of modernity and tradition (Clarke and Thomas 2006). 
By disrupting African diaspora as an entity, condition, or identity (see 
Patterson and Kelley 2001) to instead envision these relationalities as dia-
sporic assemblages, we can examine how religious tourist markets and 
travel are also complicit with problematic relations of power. In turn, I 
show how affi nity, disruption, and intensity are crucial nodes of trans-
national religious relationships with copresences. 34 
 My Arrival Story: A Family of “Chinos” 
 I fi rst went to Cuba in 1994 with a national U.S. youth brigade as a politi-
cal tourist who fundraised for supplies for Cuban grade schools and then 
delivered those supplies in protest of the U.S. embargo, described by the 
Cuban state as el bloqueo , “the blockade.” Our large group of young, op-
timistic Americans from all over the country went to Cuba through Miami. 
This was my fi rst encounter with civil disobedience. Tension was in the 
air as (mostly) Cuban American protestors called us “communists” and 
yelled anti-Castro slogans as we entered the airport. The line to board was 
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I N T R O D U C T I O N : T R A N S N A T I O N A L S A N T E R Í A A S S E M B L A G E S
out of an international comedy; passengers visibly smuggled items on their 
body, making for a dramatic spectacle. I stared unabashedly at a round, 
tall, white Cuban woman in front of me, donning a long beige trench coat 
fi lled with contraband, what queer performance artist Carmelita Tropicana 
has called a “walking Cuban department store,” or tienda ambulante . 35 
As she wobbled toward the gate to board the plane, bleached-blonde curls 
peeked out from the large-brimmed Riviera that was unsteadily perched 
on her head.The hat was packed full of miscellaneous trinkets: small toys, 
hair barrettes, and other knickknacks precariously tied to the headpiece. 
Like her hat, you could see the outline of items stuff ed in the lining of her 
trench coat. In thick Cuban Spanish, she told the man in front of her how 
she could not wait to see her grandchildren. 
 The trip between Miami and Havana was surprisingly short. By the 
time I was accustomed to the altitude, we had already begun the descent. 
At four months pregnant, I appreciated the brevity. The bumpy fl ight of 
the Gavilán , the small Cubana Airlines plane, had made me nauseous, and 
the curious sanitizing white mist that seeped through the fl oorboard with 
no explanation gave me a panic attack. Had someone tampered with the 
plane? I remember thinking. “Laties and Yentlemen, Sankyú for fl ying 
AeroCubana!” The thick accented Cuban English rang through the loud 
speaker as the plane touched down. Cries and claps resounded through 
the confi ned space. Over the years, I learned to appreciate the unique ex-
perience of Cuban airlines: the scramble for unassigned seats; the comple-
mentary Havana Club rum and cola (¡Cuba Libre!); the ability to purchase 
perfume and cigarettes on the fl ight as the mysterious sanitizing mist seeps 
up; and caramelos , small hard candies, neatly spread on a tray. On this fi rst 
trip, however, it had been an exercise in unfamiliarity and panic. 
 Making contact with Cuban soil was for many a political and tempo-
ral disjoint, an ecstatic experience of diasporic longings (van de Port 2011a). 
One man knelt down and kissed the hot Cuban tarmac. Our American 
guide explained how, for many on the fl ight, this had been the fi rst time 
Cubans living in the United States (like the lady in the trench coat) had 
been able to return to the island in over ten years. We were part of a com-
plex political hodgepodge in a newly burgeoning Cuban tourist economy 
at the height of extreme shortage. This was a time when balseros were lit-
erally fl inging themselves with inner tubes and makeshift boats into the 
ocean to try to reach American waters. Our group of American humani-
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tarians—tourists against imperialism—was quickly shuttled through cus-
toms and onto a large bus. I did not know then that this would be my 
easiest trip ever through Cuban customs. It was a moment of startling 
contradictions. 
 Our hostel was an expropriated or “recovered” mansion in the elite 
Havana neighborhood of Mira Mar. During our fourteen-day stay, we were 
taken on celebrationist tours of the Revolution in the face of empire. As 
the “good versions” of the “bad guys” from the North, we visited lively 
schools, exceptional hospitals, the Revolutionary museum, the state capitol, 
a basketball game, a Cuban hospice for children recovering from Cherno-
byl, and we were even taken to the fi elds to pick yuca (cassava) while being 
shown the new fertilization techniques Cuba had developed with its 
scarce resources. It was the year of soy products, cleverly titled ¡ Soy 
 Cubano! (I am Cuban!). Unfortunately, our bus broke down on our way 
to Varadero Beach, the tourist city just outside of Matanzas, so we never 
made it. I later found out that these Revolutionary tours were extremely 
popular during the Special Period; they were mediations of the Cuban 
state’s ambivalence with a touristic economy and stimulations designed to 
reinvigorate Revolutionary enthusiasm. Surprisingly absent from the nar-
rative of that offi cial journey was any reference to Afro-Cuban religions. As 
someone born and raised in a Puerto Rican American, Cuban Santería 
household in the United States, this absence left an odd sensation of pres-
ence. A story not being told, yet still making itself known: beaded bracelets, 
seemingly unnoticed by others, marked the server, the doctor, and the 
farmer as religious elders, Santería priests; stepping over small objects—of-
ferings and cleansings left at crossroads in Habana Vieja; the folkloric 
troupe’s perfected choreography of the oricha in splendid regalia, an adieu 
to the rich popular culture. I ran into one of my father’s friends, who stole 
me away for an evening, taking me to a tambor , a drum ritual in Old 
 Havana. My offi cial tour had been detoured. The exploration of how and 
why Santería had been so conspicuously left out of that offi cial touristic 
narrative would haunt me through my dissertation and into this book. 
 Interestingly enough (and unbeknownst to me), my father—Piri 
Ochún, as he is called—was also in Cuba in 1994 at the same time as my 
humanitarian tourism, but for his own religious purposes. A Puerto Rican 
American Santería priest initiated in California in 1980, he had traveled 
to Matanzas to meet his religious family. His white Cuban godfather, 
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Elpidio Alfonso, Obafún ( ibae ), had moved to California in the late 1970s; 
he was originally from Matanzas, where he had been initiated before he 
emigrated. When Santería priests began going to Cuba in 1994, my father 
was one of the fi rst to go to Cuba to receive the sacred fundamento 
drums, añá , and have my brother initiated to ifá, where he became a b a-
bala w o (ifá priest). 
 Piri told me that he had never met Alfredo Calvo Cano before he 
walked through the old red metal gate on Compostela Street in Matanzas. 
He had heard Alfredo “was the best.” So in 1994 he traveled there, arriv-
ing unannounced with four of my siblings, including my newborn sister. 
He later told me he was directed by his egun, oricha, and friends from the 
famed music group Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, whom he had met a 
year earlier when one of their musical tours landed them in the San Fran-
cisco Bay Area. When Piri walked through the door, Alfredo greeted 
him. He had been expecting their arrival. Padrino Alfredo’s dead grand-
mother, a spirit who often told them of important things to come, had 
alerted the entire household that a “family of chinos ” would be coming 
from abroad. (In Cuban Spanish, “chino” refers to people with light com-
plexions and straight hair.) “The chinos,” Padrino Alfredo’s deceased 
grandmother had said, “would bring great blessings.” So my family had 
been expected. In a similar fashion, Padrino Alfredo’s oricha, Aganyú, dur-
ing one of his possessions, predicted that this book would also be “in the 
road” to come. 
 Rituals in Cuba 
 While transnational Santería simultaneously fulfi lls local economic, social, 
and political needs as well as a key role in the Cuba’s booming tourism 
market (Routon 2010; Wood and Jayawardena 2003), these aspects do not 
undermine the main religious-economic function of these translocal spir-
itual relationships. Santería religious travelers go to Cuba primarily 
for pragmatic reasons; rituals and initiation ceremonies are signifi cantly 
more aff ordable than they would be in the United States or other countries. 
The price of a typical priesthood initiation ceremony in the United States 
is at least ten, if not twenty, times the cost of an initiation in Cuba (ap-
proximately US$2,000), which can reportedly reach as high as US$20,000 
23
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in the United States. 36 Most American-based santeros I spoke with agreed 
that even with the high cost of travel—a round-trip ticket, during the 
time of my fi eld research, was roughly US$800, going through third 
countries—it is signifi cantly cheaper to undergo rituals in Cuba (Hage-
dorn 2001, 9). There, new foreign players and stakeholders in the 1990s 
shifted the cultural, social, economic, and religious modes and practical 
forms of expression in everyday life at all levels, where “being Cuban no 
longer meant, necessarily, being revolutionary . . . it meant