Solimar Otero’s timely work unites an array of Afrolatinx religious perspectives with fresh ethnographic and folkloristic interventions. Archives of Conjure confidently and sensitively furthers our understanding of enmeshed interactions of spirits, deities, and persons – and reconceptualizes the types of work that help unite rather than separate the realms of the living and the dead. Otero counters previously dominant sexist, racist, and colonialist discourses and histories by focusing on Afrolatinx practitioners, to “describe the racial, cultural, and gendered fluidity present in transnational expressions of vernacular religious practices like Espiritismo, Palo, and Santería,” not in an effort to retroactively disassemble past problematic ritual subjectivities but rather to “include such [Afrolatinx] subjects and experiences in the present ritual history-making practices” (4) of the communities she collaborates with in this study. Otero’s project is importantly collaborative. The author writes about her personal religious experiences, specifically undergoing a misa de coronación (116), providing the reader a rare view of enactments in the otherwise private spiritist circle. Otero connects her reflexive ethnography with the recovered voices and actions of the dead – the spirits and other beings who are agents in these intersectional religious worldviews and thus acknowledges not only their presence but also their agency. Adding a further layer to the project and to the central premise of unbounded and emerging spiritual archival practice, Otero cogently builds upon the polymorphous work of two pioneering scholars of Afrolatinx religiosity – Dr. Ruth Landes and Lydia Cabrera – whose publications, personal papers, and artifacts Otero deftly weaves into the work, creating a symphony of spiritual practice, ethnographic and material practice, and record-keeping as told through multiple gendered and queered voices. Through the ethnographic and creative work of Cuban-born, Queer writer, artist, and self-taught ethnographer Lydia Cabrera, whose papers reside in the Cuban Heritage Collection at the University of Miami Libraries, and via Ruth Landes’s papers maintained at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Anthropological Archives, Otero’s project signals a landmark contribution to theorizing the spiritual and scholarly connections of African-derived religions in the Americas.

Otero rightly calls for an adjustment of methodological lenses so that our ethnographic tools can adequately detect the traces of communications between the living and the dead through various means. In Otero’s words, these spiritual and spirit-filled experiences are archivally available in what she usefully terms “residual transcriptions” that are collectively deemed an archive of conjure. These notes that record spirit-given prescriptions, warnings, and revelations jotted on scraps of paper during and after spiritual contact sessions should not be thought of as isolated or theoretically discarded; rather, Otero underscores the importance of such residual notetaking and affirms their importance in Afrolatinx spiritual work, stating that “the misa’s transcripts inspire future works of connectivity to an ephemeral yet sensory realm through creative works” (68). Such residual transcriptions are beneficial for “paying attention to the invention of sites, agents, and affects in conducting research following performances, interjections, and information exchange between the realms of the living and the dead.” Considering the fluid and intersecting boundaries of Afrolatinx religions and the multivalent approach practitioners take to them, one of Otero’s most significant contributions is estimably the dwelling and centering on Espiritismo or Spiritism. These are often relegated to an auxiliary or indeed anomalous practice or ignored altogether in discussions of religiosity of African descent in the Americas, but Otero works against such divisive representation. Espiritismo remains popular across and beyond the Americas among practitioners of Lucumí, Palo Monte, and Candomblé as well as independent of them, and scholars have tended to ignore these practices. Otero’s descriptive analysis and reflexive ethnography offer a snapshot of the intersecting and inclusive nature of such spaces. Advice and spiritual prescriptions received may stem from or involve any number of spirits, orishas, or nkisi, and thus reveal the subjective margins that seem to blur or shift gently and respectfully in these séance spaces. Thus, residual transcriptions are records of spiritual action, words, and pages that are important writing conventions and devices in spiritual work. In this sense, the act of writing, keeping, and enacting these residual transcripts inspired by the dead is for Otero located within the rich Afrolatinx pluriverse that engages all forms of material work linking devotion, creativity, and art. Practitioners and priests manually create their spirit work, where “scribbled notes, beaded necklaces, and dolls of the dead, the devotees of Afrolatinx religions and their spirits are made through each other” (68). Haptic and somatic workings in the forms of sewing, beading, and smithing have significance not only in terms of instruction but also in spiritual action and as a means of remembering, containing, and conveying the spirit in materially potent forms.

Archives of Conjure is organized through four substantive chapters and a conclusion, and moves from introducing the conceptualization and methodology associated with residual transcriptions, their importance in understanding the language and actions of the dead, the work of Cabrera and Landes, ethnography and archival practice and building on a wealth of scholarship including Édouard Glissant, LGBTQ+ writers, and Afrolatinx writers. What’s more, Otero draws on Caribbean and Latin American literatures and also affords ample space for deities and spirits through creative and ritualized representations. Otero masterfully weaves together metaphors of water, belonging, and the entities who dwell in the various realms of rivers and seas, namely the Lucumí riverine orichas Ochún, Erinle, and Yemayá (in chapter 4), the oricha of the deep sea, Olókùn, the Haitian Vodou lwa, Agwé as well as Palo Monte’s nkisi, Kalunga or Madre de Agua (120), to name some. By evoking the poetics and evocations of these aquatic realms and their inhabitants, Otero connects the spaces and energies of in-framing experiences of non-heteronormative practitioners of these religions. In her words, “undertow as metaphor creates a space for recognizing the significant role that women and LGBTQ+ communities have played in Afrolatinx religious histories and experiences. Like undertows and countercurrents, their stories and spiritual lives flow vitally away and against machista, homophobic, and colonial interpretations of practice” (17). In this way, the strength and action of the undertow as an active anti-force is often invisible, elusive, and hard to detect with the naked eye and without recalibration of our available ethnographic tools and methods. Otero’s work is a required reference to better understand the dynamics of sacred materiality, spirit-human interactions, and critical archival practices in Afrolatinx communities. Archives of Conjure advances ethnographic and folkloristic understandings and methods with which to access the logics and creative forces of contemporaneous experiences of the living and the dead.

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[Review length: 1076 words • Review posted on October 21, 2022]