Caribbean Espiritismo altars: the Indian and the Congo

Accompanied by my colleague Mildred Riviera-Martinez, on Sunday, June 29, 1997, I drove along the new autopista leading out of San Juan, Puerto Rico, toward Guyama. As we traveled by old sugarcane fields, I smiled to myself; I knew we were in the right place. For the next three hours, we wandered from neighborhood to neighborhood, from square to square, and finally we came to the home of Don Miguel Flores. Flores invited us into an unadorned, simple, rectangular wood structure. As I walked into the room I was overwhelmed by the cacophony of images: statues, chromolithographs, assorted fabrics, crosses, and varied knickknacks decorated a long, horizontal altar. Among the figures I recognized Christ, the Virgin, and many saints. Surprisingly, I also encountered Buddhas and a camel, as well as a cluster of crouching all-black figures. At dead center was the statue of an American Indian. I knew that Flores was the leader of this Espiritismo center, but what was the context for this amazing melange of images?

Espiritismo in Context

One of the least researched visual aspects of African Diaspora and Caribbean culture is the altar complex associated with the religious practice known as Espiritismo or Spiritism. (1) Among the numerous publications dealing with the practice of the religion, its popularity, and its impact on community well-being, none mentions, let alone analyzes, the altar arts associated with Espiritismo. One reason for the dearth of scholarship and serious critical attention paid to these altar arts is, I believe, a deeply embedded art historical prejudice against what is thought of as kitsch. My conviction on this point is shared, and indeed shaped, by Celeste Olalquiaga, who has written extensively about Latino Catholic iconography and kitsch. (2) If, as Olalquiaga writes, "Kitsch steals motifs and materials at random, regardless of the original ascription of the sources," (3) then Espiritismo altars would certainly qualify as kitsch, and an analysis of Espiritismo altars may well promote a reconsideration of the class-based prejudices against kitsch and related genres of cultural production. Such prejudices constitute a basis for much art historical analysis of the twentieth century. (4) Olalquiaga's most important contribution is a valuation of vernacular urban culture.

For many scholars concerned with cultural production from Latin America (with Latin America understood as a wide cultural, rather than geographic, region) kitsch, as both a cultural phenomenon and a descriptive designation, is especially significant. The association of kitsch with class-based prejudices forces a (re) consideration of cultural production and social difference. As recently as the mid-1990s the influential Cuban critic and curator Gerardo Mosquera wrote:

  ... there is a new appreciation and even a utopian view of it [mass
  culture] and of kitsch, which has eliminated the Greenbergian distance
  typical of previous critics. However, the point is that the increasing
  international contact between "high" and "low" cultures--which had
  always been an important factor in Latin America--implies more of a
  mutual exchange of signifiers and resources between fields that
  nonetheless remain separate with regard to their signifieds and
  specific circuits. (5)

Mosquera's optimism may have been a bit premature. This debate has not been resolved. The separation that Mosquera alludes to continues to present intellectual barriers against a serious study of many forms of vernacular production. (6) As Nestor Garcia Canclini reminds us, class and ethnic issues invade any discussion of modernism and modernization, and thus an analysis of social difference must be included in any deliberation of the gap between the cultured, or high art, and the popular. Certainly, the altars fabricated for the various "noninstitutionalized" religions of the Americas are the products of the amazing creativity realized by practitioners of popular religions. (7)

Religious imagery and kitsch share an all-important attribute, the direct appeal to emotion. As Olalquiaga remarks, "as the domain of 'bad taste,' kitsch stands for artistic endeavor gone sour as well as for anything that is considered too obvious, dramatic, repetitive, artificial, or exaggerated." (8) This is an old debate, and, unfortunately, the antikitsch position remains basically unchallenged. While I do not intend to prolong this debate, I certainly maintain that such a debate elucidates the lack of available scholarship on these and related altar arts.

While the altars give testimony to the intriguing complexity of Caribbean religious arts, the historical tapestry that contributes to the visual language of Espiritismo as manifested in Cuba and Puerto Rico is my main interest. (9) Rather than analyzing all the elements connected to these altars, I focus on specific and recurring images, such as the representation of the American Indian (Native American). As in much of my previous research, I rely on stylistic analysis of formal attributes as primary signifiers (here concentrating on the feather headdress). These signifiers serve to contextualize the performance, costumes, and styles under consideration. Examining what type of cultural contact and communication may have caused the similarities in style, I suggest that the images of the Indian may derive in part from central Africa (Congo), filtered through the central African-based Cuban religion Palo Monte Mayombe. (10) Known as Palo Monte, this religious belief is centered on assistance from ancestors and a relation with the earth, with one's land, with one's home. Under the auspices of Nzambi Mpungu, the greatest power in the Palo Monte faith, practitioners (all those initiated in the religion) venerate spirits of their ancestors and spirits of natural forces. The Indian is one of the ancestral forces recognized in the religion; it signifies land and home in the Americas. Thus, elements from Congo, an African ancestral homeland, and the Americas are conflated in the figure of the Indian. But this is not an either/or issue. There may be multiple sources and reasons for the appropriation of the Indian figure. Although I stress one particular reading in this article, it is not necessarily the only one.