The Atlantic Crossroads of the Folk Traditions

These traditions did not develop in isolation. The port cities of the Atlantic world put Dahomean, Kongo, Yoruba, Spanish, French and English practices into the same streets, and the same households have long kept more than one of them: New Orleans is the clearest case, with Haitian refugees after 1804, Caribbean trade, and a Catholic santoral in common; so are the botánicas of New York and Miami, where a Lucumí santero, an espiritista and a palero may be the same person or the same family. The crossover was produced by slavery, migration and the need to survive a hostile state, not by curiosity.

The crossover is practical rather than doctrinal: a cleansing taken from one tradition, a psalm from another, a saint's image standing in for an orisha, a Spiritist misa held for an initiate's dead, a hoodoo hand carried by someone who is also crowned. The traditions' own authorities police the boundaries - what may be mixed, what may not be carried from one house into another, and who may do the carrying - and their answers differ from lineage to lineage and from family to family.

This entry is a map, not a licence. Each tradition it names has its own closed core, and 'the crossroads' is not an invitation to combine them: the mixing that happened historically happened inside families, lineages and nations, under pressure, and it is not available as an elective for outsiders. An outsider who gathers a psalm, a Lucumí cleansing, a Vodou song and a conjure hand into a personal system has not joined the crossroads; they have taken four things that were not offered. Where a tradition is initiatory, only its own authorities may say who is taught.