CUBAN CABILDOS, CULTURAL POLITICS, AND CULTIVATING A TRANSNATIONAL YORUBA CITIZENRY

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CUBAN CABILDOS, CULTURAL POLITICS, AND CULTIVATING A TRANSNATIONAL YORUBA CITIZENRY AMANDA D. CONCHA-HOLMES University of Florida

Osvaldo Cardenas Villamil, a man in his mid-70s, set down the white root he was grating to light a cigarette. The sunlight from the side window reflected upon the silhouetted figure sitting in his customary spot in the wooden, typically Cuban rocking chair. He lit yet another rolled Cuban cigarette and puffed. The sun’s rays reflected off of the smoke. From his vantage point, he could observe the rest of the room, which consisted of an altar for Osain [oricha or deity of sacred herbs and healing], a Christian calendar with an image of Jesus, and a double bed. He could also see down the long hall into his altar-filled salon, where his numerous ahijados and ahijadas (godchildren) wait to receive council with their padrino (godfather or spiritual adviser). As a chicken peeked its head around the corner, Osvaldo clarified to me the need to know the appropriate rhythms and words to the sacred songs to be able to communicate with the oricha “so that what you ask for they will give.” He was talking from his many years of experience as the ob´a-oriat´e (king or master of ceremonies) and also the akpw´on (lead singer) for the Cabildo Santa Teresa, one of three cabildos (mutual aid societies) that has existed in Matanzas since the 1800s. He then started to sing in his aged, throaty voice, offering an oraci´on or prayer to Elegua (the trickster oricha of the crossroads). It is through the words, the rhythms and the movements of these sacred songs that the orichas (Yoruba spirits who connect humans, ancestors, nature and God) were able to travel from Africa to Cuba, live and connect practitioners in cabildos de naci´on, and continue to travel and offer support for Yoruba initiates in C 2013 by CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 28, Issue 3, pp. 490–503. ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360.  the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/cuan.12016

CUBAN CABILDOS, CULTURAL POLITICS, AND CULTIVATING A TRANSNATIONAL YORUBA CITIZENRY

transnational locales. It is through these “divine utterances,” as Hagedorn (2001) calls them, that practitioners are initiated into embodied knowledge systems and gain the abilities to use music and movement to communicate across physical and spiritual borders, as well as enact social and political change across ethnic, religious, and national boundaries. Despite regional variants, specific rhythms and signature body movements remain recognizable across the black Atlantic (Daniel 2005, 2011; Drewal 1998), and it is this embodied knowledge that I reference as integral to the cultural politics of a transnational cultural citizenry (cf. Ong 2004[1999]). CULTURAL POLITICS AND TRANSNATIONAL CITIZENRY DEFINED The cultural politics of African-derived religious organizations are critical to highlight as they offer counter-hegemonic narratives to offset the structural racism intrinsic to social categories and legal procedures that have historically marked people of African descent. This overt and often state-sanctioned discrimination against those who practice African-derived religions creates situations of “unequal and unjust distribution of wealth, power, and prestige” (Harrison 2005:9). Yet, the act of redefining power and influence at cultural and political levels, which is the crux of cultural politics, challenges the state as sole arbiter of economic, social, and political models and benefits. Through the religious-based institutional structures, identity politics, and overlapping roles of religion, music and the state, cabildos (mutual aid societies) have offered a central hub of constructing, negotiating, contesting, and redefining “relations of dominance and subordination,” which is precisely what Jackson signals as the key aspect of cultural politics (1991:200). These elements of collective identity formation, economic and social support, alternative values, and institutions of apprenticeship of embodied knowledge are key to understanding why the cabildos as nexus of Afro-Cuban religious knowledge and sociopolitical formation should be understood in terms of cultural politics. It is through cabildos that Afro-Cubans gained the institutional structures and spiritual power to transform physical, psychological, and political conditions. Though cabildos were originally ethnically and linguistically based, they have historically transformed in relationship to popular social needs, organizational and religious goals, and to political contexts. They have also expanded past the Cuban borders to include a wide-ranging, heterogeneous network of practitioners around the globe. This network of cultural citizens who share a bodily awareness of Yoruba rhythms and movement that they learn, embody, mimic, and employ to speak to

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the gods, to resolve problems, and enact social and political transformation are the practitioners to whom I refer as a transnational Yoruba citizenry. This cultural citizenship is not based solely on autonomous, rational selves. Instead, it embraces a notion of self that, through the initiation and apprenticeship linked to cabildos, become vessels of embodied knowledge. As Stoller suggests for the Songhay sorcerers and griots of West Africa, they do not “master sorcery, history or knowledge; rather, it is sorcery, history, and knowledge that master us” (1997:252). Cabildos index embodied systems of knowledge that their cultural citizens interpret locally, transmit diachronically, and sustain transnationally. The meanings and practices of citizenship, then, include not only belonging to a singular nation-state such as Cuba, but also affirm Aihwa Ong’s notion of “flexible citizenship,” referring to the flexibility that David Harvey identifies in The Condition of Postmoderntity, as the modus operandi of late capitalism. In place of a local-global comparison, then, Ong suggests the term “transnationality” to express the horizontal and relational nature of the contemporary economic, social, and cultural processes that stream across spaces [as well as] their embeddedness in differently configured regimes of power” (2004[1999]:3–4). She, along with Rosaldo (2003), suggests the concept of cultural citizenship, which gestures toward notions of nation and belonging through negotiations with and beyond the state. The key forces of identity formation, cultural belonging and transnational citizenship stress individual and collective agency more than dominant societal structures. By emphasizing cultural politics and transnational citizenry together, I highlight a multitude of social actors, a range of struggles, and a plurality of visions (cf. Escobar and Alvarez 1992:3) that work to craft cultural identities and collective actions within and across national, ethnic, and religious borders. As Matory acknowledges, the term “Yoruba” encompasses a heterogeneous transnational network of global practitioners, as it becomes “the metalanguage” or the “lingua franca” of African diaspora religion and religious practitioners (1994:226).

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CABILDOS IN CUBA The institutions of the state and of the cabildos have co-evolved in Cuba. The first cabildos de naci´on were ethnically segregated mutual aid societies formed by Spanish colonial policy and mirrored African religio-political institutions. The cabildos included among others Lucum´ı, Congo, and Carabal´ı as amalgamations of African nations. Later, these cabildos became societies (sociedades de color) and now have transformed into house-temples (casa-templos) in accord with a particular leader’s lineage, branch (rama), and transnational religious family. These cabildos

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had their own governing body, regulations of conduct, and place to meet where old residents and new arrivals provided assistance for members in such vital matters as burial expenses, health care, and religious ceremonies. They served as social centers that were instrumental in providing a rich space to maintain a cultural memory associated with their distinct African homelands as well as construct a cultural identity that supported the inversion of positions of subordination and dominance creating social, economic, and political outcomes that benefited African descendants (Howard 1998). A critical aspect to note in characterizing cabildos in Cuba is the Spanish policy of coartaci´on, where people of color could buy themselves out of slavery. In 1842, Article 34 stated, “no owner could refuse to coartar his slave, provided he is offered no less than fifty pesos toward the price of purchase” (Howard 1998:6). Thus, by the mid-19th century, free people of color formed one-sixth of the population (Murphy 1993 in Busse 2000) while enslaved Africans comprised another 40 percent. As Brown emphasizes, “The free African and Afro-Cuban creole population in Cuba was one of the largest historically anywhere in the colonial period” (2003:31). These free Cubans of color formed “house-cabildos” that resemble contemporary Cuban casa-templos or il´e-ocha, where ethnically heterogeneous households based on initiated family kinship and a single religiously venerated elder shape the practices of daily life and ritual for the religiously defined family (Brown 2003). Cabildos offered an institution that brought enslaved people of color together with free people of color, musicians together with shopkeepers, religious leaders together with political leaders, and organized militia soldiers together with organized workers. The defined institutional organization coupled with the economic viability of these cabildos allowed them to commit their efforts to buying freedom for other enslaved Africans: for the Cabildo Carabal´ı Iziegue, for instance, whose matrona Mar´ıa Soledad D´ıaz liberated 50 enslaved Africans in the 1800s (Bremer 1853:381 in Brown 2003:63). By the 1850s, the sociedades de color comprised mostly free members of Cuba’s urban working class and primarily second- and third-generation Afro-Cubans (Howard 1998). Through referencing cabildos, I embrace the historical transformations these Cuban organizations have undergone demographically and institutionally. Moreover, while I acknowledge the variations among organizations due to different relationships with the state along with distinct rules, political structures, ritual rhythms, and dance movements, I depict the commonalities of constructing a space for invoking African spirits through embodied knowledge. Such knowledge 493

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cultivates a cultural politics of counter-hegemonic narratives about African and Afro-Cuban identity, which dramatically influences political possibilities and subverts socioeconomic status. SOCIOECONOMIC SUBVERSION AND OVERLAPPING ROLES Membership in cabildos allowed for a negotiation of individual and collective rights through participating in decision making that influenced the group and the larger community. Thus, members could become leaders in the community and attain prestige despite state-sanctioned racism and discrimination. Cabildos brought people together who shared overlapping religious, political, and economic roles. A formidable case of this overlapping of roles in Cuba is attributed to the Cuban hero Jos´e Antonio Aponte, the early-19th-century free creole of color who led a major revolt known as the Escala Conspiracy to liberate enslaved Africans in Cuba in 1812. He is emblematic of this class of free Afro-Cubans who signal the types of social and political directions members of this group could embrace. A first corporal in the Militia Battalion of Mixed Mulattos and Blacks, Aponte was, like other skilled members of his class, a wood sculptor, painter, and master carpenter (Franco 1977:119). Aponte was also a respected leader of the Cabildo Chang´o (Shango Tedum) as well as a member of the Ogboni, a Yoruba secret society (Hall 2005). Another inspiring example is that of Don Remigo Herrera, known as Adechina. Born in Yorubaland in 1810, Adechina was enslaved and forcibly brought to Cuba in the 1820s, yet he ended his life as a wealthy property owner in Regla, respected by both white and Afro-Cuban society (Brown 2003). From 1868 to 1878, people of color organized to fight in the First War of Independence to free Cuba from the Spanish (Howard 1998). After the official abolition of slavery in 1886, these society members used their networks and the newspapers to improve conditions of social equality and communicate strategies to gain full civil rights, including access to all public places, transportation, and education, even promoting the acquisition and acceptance of Spanish culture (Howard 1998:xv). Despite the racist policies that limited social, economic, and geographic mobility for many African descendants in Cuba, the exclusively male Sociedad Secreta Abaku´a provided members with tenured employment through securing dock jobs like porters and foremen, which allowed for the accumulation of wealth (Howard 1998:34). Acquiring this socioeconomic importance in the community improved the likelihood that these men would be selected as captains or presidents (capatazes) 494

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of cabildos, particularly when they also held positions in the militia. For example, the captains, Marcelino Gamarra and Agust´ın Ceballos were both dock foremen and respectively a lieutenant and a sergeant of the black battalions (i.e., of morenos and prados) (34). Thus, cabildos helped accrue economic resources, social status, and freedom among urban people of color. As Bastide notes: “In the end, the ultimate purpose of these fraternities became an earthly one rather than a heavenly one. They became a means through which slaves could gain their freedom. . . . [The Catholic religion] which was being used as a means of controlling [the black body] and integrating him into a society that persecuted him [was transformed] into an instrument of ethnic solidarity and social justice” (1978[1960]:115). Moreover, researchers of the Cuban Departamento de Estudios Socioreligiosos del Academia de Ciencias maintain that cabildos were not merely associated with marginal sectors of society, but had “considerable weight in the field of the struggle of ideas” as their tremendous growth and diversity in ethnicity, class, professional membership and transnational activity indicate (Arg¨uelles Mederos and Hodge Limonta 1991 in Ayorinde 2008:145). MUSIC, MOVEMENT, FOLKLORE, AND CULTURAL POLITICS It is precisely these overlapping roles occurring in the cabildos that blurred the boundaries of religion, economy, society, folklore, and politics, destabilizing subordinate and dominant social positions. In Cuba, this overlapping of racial categories, identities, and musical institutions is noted at the turn of the century when an American writer, Irene Wright, was escorted to El Cerro cabildo by “a mulatto, the leader of an orchestra well-known in Havana,” and she was surprised to see a young woman “who could pass for white” prostrate to this man (Wright 1910:147 in Brown 2003). Then, she understood that he must also be a senior priest of the cabildo. Apter similarly acknowledges the relevance of these overlapping roles of state-supported musicians with membership in Yoruba associations of embodied knowledge. He refers specifically to the major collaborators of Samuel Johnson’s History of Yoruba: the bards, drummers and cymbalists of the court (Apter 1992:14). As Apter illustrates for Yoruba practitioners in Yorubaland, West Africa, praises, songs, iconography, and specific rhythms of talking drum texts demonstrate the practical role of oricha cults in shaping major political events and transformations (9). In Cuba, these overlapping roles, ideologies, and practices are cause for friction. As the music historian Robin Moore suggests, “The tension between an elite 495

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bias against African-influenced expression and a simultaneous attraction to it as a symbol of nationhood have defined the parameters of controversy surrounding popular music to the present day” (1997:26). Morality, class, and gender are implicated in the expressions that rely on drums, music and dance; and state-sanctioned discrimination was replete in policy and practice. For instance, in 1922, the administration of Alfred Zayas (1920–1924) passed laws that prohibited Afro-Cuban gatherings that involved drumming and dance because of immoral values and associations with “theft, abductions, or murder of [children] of the white race,” (in R. Moore 1997:246). Rumba, Santer´ıa, Abaku´a, and other African-influenced “symbols of barbarity” were outlawed. Rogelio Mart´ınez Fur´e, artistic director of the Conjunto Folklorico Nacional de Cuba, said that ordinances against drumming persisted in Cuba police records through the 1970s (R. Moore 1997:246). Regardless, these African-derived rhythms and dances are featured on stage when subsumed under the realm of folklore. They are offered to a national and international public for consumption on a seemingly secular and innocuous platter, even upholding them as symbolic of Cuban nationality. This “folklorization” can and often does appropriate African-derived knowledge and practices for commercial consumption, focused on secularizing, whitening, and commodifying African-derived systems of knowing for dominant society (see R. Moore 1997; Hagedorn 1995; Mart´ınez Fur´e 1993; C. Moore 1964). Contributing nuance to the notion of folklorization, this article follows the insight of Hagedorn (2001) in probing the benefits that some practitioners who are both part of folkloric troupes and members of cabildos enjoy from this dual affiliation. Importantly, this article highlights how these interstitial spaces get used for cultural politics that work to subvert the hegemonic dominant-subordinate paradigm and reposition marginalized folks through making visible their identity politics, institutional structures, and overlapping roles of heterogeneous religious practitioners, musicians, dance performers, and cultural ambassadors. CABILDO SANTA TERESA: PRACTITIONERS AND PERFORMERS In Matanzas, Cuba, the cultural politics of the Cabildo Santa Teresa are captivating because of how this group’s members and practitioners integrate different religions and ideologies into everyday practice seamlessly, while maintaining firmly separate distinctions depending on the ritual. Catholic iconography lives alongside Yoruba imagery, rituals, rhythms, and dance moves. Like Osvaldo Villamil Cardenas (the Yoruba practitioner who opened this essay with his song to Elegua), 496

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the cabildo’s members integrate aspects of Kardecian Spiritism along with Palo Monte roles and institutions. Also, many of its male members including Villamil are initiated into the secret Abaku´a society. This incorporation of multiple religions is thought to enhance rather than displace their potency. The overlapping functions of music, movement, heterogeneous religious practice, and ritual leadership are significant. The primary origin story of the Cabildo Santa Teresa (one of the three cabildos that has been in Matanzas since the 1800s) ˜ Blas (or Nobla) Cardenas, an initiated Omo names the two family founders as No Oggun and musician from Oyo (the old imperial capital of Yorubaland), and Mauricio Piloto, another musician from Oyo (Brown 2003; AfroCubaWeb). They were kidnapped and brought over to Matanzas in the 1880s, bringing with them a musical legacy that is still significant today. The daughter of Cardenas, Tomasa Cardenas, married the son of Piloto, Juan Villamil, and had at least five children. One of these was the notable Tomasa Villamil, born in 1901 and initiated October 30, 1944 as an Oya Priestess (Brown 2003:143). Up until she died in the late 1990s, she was the head of the Cabildo Santa Teresa (Villamil, personal communication, 2004); she was also the aunt of Osvaldo Villamil Cardenas. In contrast to Havana, where babalawos (male priests initiated into the secrets of If´a) are the main personages of ritual authority, in Matanzas, the houses of iyalochas (female priests of orichas) often maintain a position of influence inside the cabildos. Thus, Matanzas’ ritual field (cf. Apter) is ocha-centric rather than babalawo-centric, and Osvaldo identifies as a santero rather than a babalawo (Brown 2003:148–149; Villamil, personal communication, 2006). Villamil held the venerated position of ob´a- oriat´e (the king and master of the divination mat and ceremonies) of the Cabildo of Santa Teresa. He was also its principal akpw´on or solo singer up until the end of the 1990s (Rodriguez Reyes 2005:6). He remains today one of the religiously venerated elders who shape the contours of daily life and ritual for the Villamil family and the religious family network of the Cabildo Santa Teresa. He travels internationally, attending to his religious family, while numerous ahijados and ahijadas from around the globe visit him at his home in Matanzas for advice, healing and ritual. He is a well-respected religious leader in the community and known widely for his use of rhythms and song to communicate across the physical and spiritual divide. His ability to communicate with the ancestors and with the spirits of plants rests on his embodied knowledge of rhythmic communication techniques that have been passed to him and that he passes on through the music and movements of initiations and apprenticeships with the cabildo. 497

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This element of embodied knowledge including music and movement is central to the distinctions that exist within the Cabildo Santa Teresa, and is important to note when examining the cultural politics of the cabildo. The cabildo has its own consecrated sacred bemb´e drums, called Om´o Lay´e, that their members play. The drummers have always been Villamil family members and members of the Cabildo Santa Teresa. Thus, they do not need to hire herbalists, interpreters, drummers, or people to lead the initiation ceremonies; they have all of the ritual knowledge and skills within their family. Additionally, the Villamil family is among the most famous folkloric families in Cuba. In the words of Danilito P´erez Herrera, who as Omo Elegua and Tata Nganga (which represent both the Yoruba and the Congo side of the family) has been the director: “I was born to a family completely full of folkloric traditions and Afro-Cuban customs, the Villamil family, from which come the greater part of the rumbero singers, percussionists, and dancers in the province of Matanzas.” The Villamils are the primary members of Afrocuba de Matanzas, as well as other Matanzas-based and government sanctioned folklore troupes like Rumba y Son, Conjunto Folklorico Nacional, and Los Mu˜nequitos de Matanzas. These governmentally sanctioned folkloric groups support the Villamil family economically and thereby with upward socioeconomic mobility. Additionally, they have access to geographic mobility, and enjoy state-sponsored travel nationally and internationally. Due to both their roles in folklore and within their religion, they benefit from increased transnational networks. The family is able to travel as musicians and dancers as well as for religious obligations due to their global networks of cabildo-initiated family members. Other benefits are obvious as well. For instance, the Mu˜nequitos de Matanzas group has been nominated for two Grammy awards, and has performed several tours around the United States and Europe sharing Yoruba music, dances, and rhythms with practitioners and laypeople alike.

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TRANSNATIONAL YORUBA CITIZENRY: ENCULTURATING THE BODY AND IDENTITY POLITICS Overlapping roles of religious, economic, social, and political institutions coupled with embodied processes of knowledge production and transmission are central to exploring the cultural politics of identity formation, transnational networks, and political change for practitioners of African-derived religions. Through chanting, playing the bat´a drums, and dancing, Yoruba practitioners produce, modify and transfer religious knowledge, collective identity and community values (Concha-Holmes 2012). Music has been a vehicle for the transmission of cultural

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knowledge through helping the orichas travel from the African continent to the Caribbean island of Cuba, and continue to travel across transnational spaces of Yoruba citizenry. Clarke (2004:4) refers to these spaces as “deterritorialized” and highlights the web of connections in which Yoruba practitioners engage and cultivate coeval cultural knowledge in many geographic locations synchronistically and diachronically. These deterritorialized spaces are aided by high-speed travel, the internet, and an increased freedom of mobility, and they encourage a heterogeneous transnational citizenry of Yoruba practitioners. Not only live music and performances, but also recorded music and dance traditions (both audio and video) have introduced these belief systems to Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Finland, and across the United States (Daniel 2011). Moreover, Daniel (2005) reveals how specific rhythms, codified gestures, movement sequences, and motifs illustrate identifiable patterns that are recognizable across the heterogeneous Yoruba transnational citizenry. Og´un’s dance, for example, exemplifies common patterns, since his dance has “explicitly, literal meanings and implied, abstracted meanings that are common in all three ritual communities” (Daniel 2005). Aggressive warrior stances, kicking through tough terrain, and sharply using some sort of metal-like machete to cut through the thicket or through an opponent are predominant movement themes that demonstrate the warrior nature of this spirit. Thus “ritual dance performance was a repository of remembered movements and musical components but also a repository of complementary legends, beliefs, and attitudes, with contrasting and alternative resolutions for temporal problems” (64). Daniel calls these movements “dancing wisdom” and she affirms that “[d]ance, as a mode of bodily discipline is a particular way of enculturating the body.” Through institutional roles and regulations including capatazes, reglamentos, akpw´ones, and obas along with specific techniques of music and dance, the cabildos enact apprenticeships of a cultural knowledge that is embodied. These apprenticeships, though, involve not merely learning physical skills; rather, they are fundamentally about personhood. As Rebecca Bryant points out, “Sensorial knowledge is a deliberate process of self-making that entails becoming a person embedded in a hierarchy of values” (Bryant 2005:234 in Weidman 2012). This is important to social and class identity. Weidman explains, “Through visceral and proprioceptive modes of learning, musical and dance movements cultivate a more than linguistic articulation of self and society. The aesthetic sensibility offers a power through modeling and absorbing that generates embodied feelings of worth, connection and vitality (all of which are deeply embedded in social hierarchies

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and power relations)” (Weidman 2012). It is critical, then, to explore not just how musicians’ bodies produce music, but how music is a means for producing subjects who are implicated in hierarchies of power. These embodied techniques allow individuals to surpass the bounded conditions of colonization (whether it is precolonial, colonial, postcolonial, or neocolonial) and arrest its characteristic stigmatization of black bodies. TRANSNATIONAL YORUBA CITIZENRY AND AN ENCOUNTER ˜ WITH MUNEQUITOS DE MATANZAS

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Examples of this merging and emerging transnational Yoruba citizenry through music and movement occurred when the Mu˜nequitos de Matanzas group toured the United States in 2011, stopping in Gainesville, Florida. The following vignette describes this cross-cultural encounter with Yoruba practitioners in Gainesville and Yoruba performers of the Matanzas-based Mu˜nequitos de Matanzas musical group, illustrating the significance of embodied music and movement to a transnational Yoruba citizenry and black cultural citizenship. The day after their large stage-performance, the Mu˜nequitos de Matanzas group held an intimate one-room presentation. The music they played moved one member of the audience to stand and speak. An older Gainesville resident from West Africa arose to tell his story. He recounted that once he had been at the World Festival in Dakar, Senegal and the Mu˜nequitos de Matanzas group arrived, “playing ancient, obscure rhythms addressing the God of thunder and lighting.” He continued, “Most of the Yoruba in the audience did not remember those rhythms, only about 10 or 15 great- great-grandmothers who must have been in their 90s remembered. And when they heard them, they began to dance doing the same dance as the Cubans. . . . Yoruba religion is being worshipped all around the hemisphere.” When he finished speaking, the drummers began to play again and a middle-aged African-American woman dressed all in white was moved to dance. Almost immediately, another middle-aged Afro-Cuban woman began to dance alongside her. In unison, their arms glided toward the ceiling and returned on the same beat toward the floor, their shoulders mimicked each other’s rounded thrusting movements and their hips mirrored each other’s way of commanding the dance floor. Their legs and feet did not miss a step or a beat; the four of which were in sync with each other and with the drums. Their bodies communicated with each other across linguistic, geographic, and cultural differences, demonstrating the potency of their membership in a Yoruba citizenry of enculturated bodies.

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CONCLUSION African-derived religions are political systems based on creative expression as well as individual and collective agencies that promote a transnational cultural citizenship. Practitioners of oricha religion can be considered transnational Yoruba citizens because of their shared cultural politics and enculturated bodies. Thus, in examining how cultural politics and cabildos work to cultivate a transnational Yoruba citizenry principally through music and movement, I have emphasized the interconnections of institutions of state power, capitalism, and transnational networks along with cultural innovation, resistance, and creativity. In sum, African-derived religious knowledge should be understood not only in terms of folklore, but also in terms of cultural politics recognizing the interplay of cultural identity formation, creative expression, and collective agency as key components of social reproduction that mobilize popular support and heterogeneous transnational connections. The multiple roles and identities that individuals embody and perform should not be ignored. Yet to destabilize enduring social and economic inequality issues where race is entangled in matrices of power and often coded in an ideology of cultural deficit by dominant political forces, one must recognize the varied political terrain of identity politics that is inherent to self-making through music and movement and that cultivates heterogeneous memberships of cultural citizens in transnational Yoruba families.

ABSTRACT This article aims to increase the visibility of Afro-Cuban cabildos as political mobilizations. Black cultural and religious expressions are often depoliticized through demoting and relegating them to a realm of “folklore,” and thereby isolating them in those sections of national mythology that deal solely with performance culture. Yet, this crafting of religious models and social customs that affect personal and collective identities as well as cultural and political systems deserves to be highlighted within a larger theoretical framework of cultural politics, and thereby show their relevance for citizenship and belonging. After delineating some of the historical conditions of cabildos as agents of religious and political formation, I focus specifically on the overlapping roles that practitioners hold and the mobilizing force of music and dance that cultivate subjects capable of socio-political transformations. I further explore the manifestations of this socioeconomic spiritual terrain through the case of the Cabildo of Santa Teresa, which is one of three cabildos in Cuba that has existed since the 1800s. Its primary family, Villamil, maintains fame and reputation that are internationally renowned in terms of religious practitioners, musicians, dancers, and cultural ambassadors. 501

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CUBAN CABILDOS, CULTURAL POLITICS, AND CULTIVATING A TRANSNATIONAL YORUBA CITIZENRY

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