BIO

Carrie Genesee Viarnés is a PhD student of Culture and Performance Studies in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests include critical ethnography; diaspora, race, and religion in the Black Atlantic; post-colonial and performance theories; and contemporary Caribbean literature. Her current research focuses on spiritism in Cuba and the cultural significance of this spiritual practice to issues of Afro-Cuban identity, religious creolization, cultural memory, and transatlantic histories of performance.

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Every September, thousands of Cubans gather to pay homage to the local Virgin of Regla, a black Virgin who also embodies the oricha Yemayá. I trace the transformation of this Spanish Virgin into an icon of Afro-Cuban religious identity in movement through transatlantic and colonial spaces. I argue that procession participants created (and still create) a Virgin of their own by “voting with their feet” and reclaiming the sacred spaces of the Church and its surroundings utilizing various forms of verbal and non-verbal performance. Through these inconspicuous modes of resistance to hegemonic culture, the Virgin became deeply imbued with double meanings that rendered her a multi-vocal symbol adored by practitioners of a variety of religions in Cuba.

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