Description
Afro-Cuban Diasporas within the Atlantic World explores how Yoruba and Afro-Cuban communities moved around the Atlantic between the Americas and Africa in successive waves within the nineteenth century. In Havana, Yoruba slaves from Lagos banded together to shop for their freedom and sail home to Nigeria. Once in Lagos, this Cuban repatriate community turned into referred to as the Aguda. This community built their very own neighborhood that celebrated their Afrolatino heritage. For these Yoruba and Afro-Cuban diasporic populations, nostalgic constructions of circle of relatives and community play the role of narrating and locating a longed-for home. By providing a link between the workings of nostalgia and the development of home, this volume re-theorizes cultural imaginaries as a source for diasporic community reinvention. Through ethnographic fieldwork and research in folkloristics, Otero reveals that the Aguda identify strongly with their Afro-Cuban roots in up to date times. Their fluid identity moves from Yoruba to Cuban, and back again, in a manner that illustrates the in point of fact cyclical nature of transnational Atlantic community affiliation.