By Nick Street
September 22, 2009
In the wake of a religious freedom victory, scholar Salvador Vidal-Ortiz
discusses the concepts of "newborns," "wives," and the role of gays and
lesbians in Santería.
A recent federal court ruling cast an unusually sympathetic gaze on
Santería, a family of Afro-Caribbean cultural and religious practices
that most Americans learn about (or imagine they learn about) through
its depiction in unsettling plotlines on crime shows like Law & Order
and CSI: Miami.
But in José Merced v. City of Euless, the Court of Appeals for the Fifth
Circuit ruled that Merced, a Santería priest in the Dallas-Fort Worth
area, was acting within his Constitutional rights when he sacrificed
goats and other animals as part of the ritual home-practice that
accompanied him from Puerto Rico.
In fact, the court suggested that such Constitutional protections are
especially important for "non-traditional" religions like Merced's.
"There are more than 250,000 practitioners of Santería in the world,"
the ruling states, "but only two Santeria temples, neither of which is
in the continental United States. Thus, home sacrifice is not only the
norm, but a crucial aspect of Santería, without which Santería would
effectively cease to exist."
What else should we understand about Santería? An interview with
Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, a sociologist at American University who has
studied the roles of gender and sexuality in Santería practices, reveals
a tradition "deeply interwoven with discourses of freedom and liberation."
When did you become interested in studying Santería?
The first drumming event I attended was in 2000. Since then, I've
attended events where practitioners were being initiated, and annual
celebrations of religious birthdays for longtime members. These events
have generally taken place in private homes in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and
Manhattan; usually in basements prepared as religious sites for ceremony.
What attracted you to the tradition? Did you consider following the
practices back to their Caribbean or African roots?
My research focus was here, in the U.S.—not elsewhere—because learning
how these practices traveled was as important to me as the practice
itself. Unlike Santería practice in other regions of the Western
Hemisphere, practice in the U.S. includes people from many ethnic and
racial groups. In fact, there are groups here, like Puerto Ricans, who
take up forms of the practice more often associated with other groups,
like Cubans.
Over the course of my work, I've redefined Santería as a
religious-cultural practice, and not simply a religion, because of the
links between diasporic aspects of African culture (Yoruba traditions in
the case of Cuba, and overlapping or altogether different influences in
the case of Brazil and other Latin American countries) as well as its
syncretism with Catholic influences. I'm also interested in where and
why the practice is either hidden or open. For example, even though it
was ostracized at its inception when it was practiced by slaves
centuries ago, Santería practice is not hidden in contemporary Cuba.
Have you chosen to engage in the practice yourself?
I am quite honest about the scope of my work in terms of "how far I
would go" within Santería. I chose not to engage in ritual because I am
not a Santero (a practitioner—most people use Santero [m.] or Santera
[f.] to refer to initiated practitioners), but there is much more to the
practice than its rituals.
What aspect of the practice beyond its rituals has most sustained your
interest?
While most people might choose to study a movement like Santería because
of their desire to learn about religious practice, I was initially
intrigued by the space that I noticed was given to gay and lesbian
practitioners. Even though Santería might be perceived as a haven for
gays and lesbians in cultures that often provide few other spaces for
them—and there are a large number of gay and lesbian practitioners in
Santería—the practice itself is deeply interwoven with discourses of
freedom and liberation, and power and oppression. This is why the main
focus of my work now includes gays and lesbians and women of all sexual
orientations.
So what have you learned over the course of your research?
I've interviewed women of all sexual orientations and gay and bisexual
men who practice Santería. Some are initiated, some are not initiated,
and they are from most walks of life. Some people had explored many
religions, while others had always been Santería practitioners.
While Santería has opened up a space for gays and lesbians to
participate, it has opened up a very different space for gay men than
for lesbian women. Gay men are allowed to serve in some roles that are
exclusive to men. I agree with Mary Ann Clark (author of Where Men Are
Wives and Mothers Rule: Santería Ritual Practices and Their Gender
Implications) that this gendered configuration of roles need not be seen
as a hierarchy, and instead provokes new ways of thinking by redefining
ritual power.
Although only men can become Babalawos (the highest Santería priest
position, usually limited to men who are perceived or presumed to be
heterosexual), all practitioners become "wives" when they are initiated.
As "newborns," these initiates become the wife of the deity or Orisha
that "claimed their head." This deity will become the focus of the
initiate's worship, and the "wifely" relationship to the deity is the
same for all practitioners, regardless of gender.
Can you say more about how the wife-dynamic empowers women and
non-heterosexual men?
Ritual possession allows practitioners to experience deity-presence, and
everyone benefits when others are possessed, because the possessing
Orisha speaks to everyone present at the ritual. Members of a given
religious house feel proud whenever there is a lot of deity-presence at
one of their events. In possession, a practitioner is "mounted" by the
deity—an expression that has obvious gendered and sexual implications,
which are generally recognized by practitioners. And, to speak to your
question, non-heterosexual men and women of all sexual orientations tend
to be possessed more often than their straight counterparts. So their
presence is highly valued.
Finally, and more broadly, what do you make of popular notions about
Santería in the United States? And what's your take on recent court
decisions that recognize and protect the religiosity of the practice?
Generally speaking, when we are talking about racial and ethnic
minorities, the United States' racial (and racist) system tends to find
much of what is non-white "suspicious." That's why Santería continues to
be categorized as a cult by some, and why the media usually frame
practitioners as somehow "criminal" in the coverage we see in the news.
That tendency is mirrored in entertainment media. For at least the past
two decades, portrayals of Santería practitioners in movies and
television shows have resisted the opportunity to represent them as
religious people and focused instead on Santería as a hypersexual space,
recalling earlier representations of Africans as savages.
That does seem to be changing, at least incrementally. The recent Texas
lawsuit acknowledged the religiosity of the practice: José Merced, a
Puerto Rican Santería priest, retained the right of animal sacrifice
because the court saw the link to religious freedom. Regardless of how
one might feel about animal sacrifice (for consumption or under
regulations that maintain public health standards in the handling of
food), this religious-cultural practice has ritual elements that one
ought to respect, in the very same way most of us respect
Judeo-Christian religious practice.
Salvador Vidal-Ortiz is Assistant Professor of Sociology at American
University in Washington, DC. Among his recent work is the co-edited
special issue of the journal Sexualities: Studies in Culture and Society
on the topic of "Retheorizing Homophobias" (with Karl Bryant) and a
co-edited book, The Sexuality of Migration: Border Crossings and Mexican
Immigrant Men (with Nancy Naples and based on the work by late Lionel
Cantú), published by NYU Press.
Tags: african religion, animal sacrifice, court cases, interview, new
religious movements, religious freedom, santeria, syncretism
Animal Sacrifice and Sexuality in Santería | International |
ReligionDispatches (22 September 2009)
http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/international/1848/animal_sacrifice_and_sexuality_in_santer%C3%ADa_
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