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Race, Music, and Mysticism in When the Spirits Dance Mambo and Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina

November 12 @ 4:30 pm - 5:30 pm

In his award-winning book, The Afro-Latino Memoir: Race, Ethnicity, and Literary Interculturalism, Trent Masiki examines understudied African American influences in Afro-Latino life writing published after the advent of the Black Arts Movement. In this talk, Masiki discusses how Dr. Marta Moreno Vega and Raquel Cepeda center African American cultural icons and new religious movements, respectively, in their memoirs. In When the Spirits Dance Mambo: Growing Up Nuyorican in El Barrio (2004), Vega represents Afro-Latino and African American interculturalism through her fusion of Katherine Dunham with La Dominadora. Dunham, the famous African American choreographer, was one of the many African American celebrities whom Vega, as a young person, idolized from a distance. La Dominadora, in contrast, was one of the many spirit guides represented close at hand, on Vega’s grandmother’s Santerismo altar. Like Vega, Raquel Cepeda was also fascinated by elements of African American culture in her youth. Cepeda was aligned in spirit, if not in practice, with the cultural separatist pole of Black nationalism. In her memoir Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina (2013), Cepeda describes her attraction to the theosophy of the Five Percent Nation (FPN), a splinter sect of the Nation of Islam. In addition to FPN mysticism, Cepeda evinces a generic belief in kismet, gilgul neshamot, and the gods and spirit guides of Afro-Hispanic Caribbean religious practices. Cepeda’s conviction in the supernatural is equally matched by her faith in the scientific. Cepeda’s promotion of genetic profiling in general and of a specific genetic profiling company, in particular, entices scholars to interrogate the privacy ramifications of a cross-promotional marketing strategy that genetically targets communities of Afroethnic descent. Masiki argues that the representation of Katherine Dunham in Vega’s memoir and the FPN in Cepeda’s reveals the significance of the African American presence in Afro-Latina identity formation and highlights the commensurability between Latino, Afro-Latino, and African American studies.

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