voodoo

Although Catholicism, Evangelical Christianity, and even Jehovah’s Witnesses are widely accepted in Latin households, Lucumí is too often reduced to “witchcraft” or “voodoo,” simply because it exists outside the bounds of whiteness — and, more importantly, in resistance to white supremacy.

She falls hard for New Orleans, seeking traces of voodoo, “something more than just a souvenir doll or a little bag of gris-gris or a pink love potion, or a guide who will repeat his stories for twenty bucks,” she writes.

“I have no way to get to the Louisiana swamps where, it’s said, you can still find voodoo priestesses living in trailers. I don’t have a car. And having no car in the United States is like not having a pulse.”

While we wouldn’t rule out the possibility he has a huge collection of Labubus or Malibu Stacy dolls, he seems more like the type to use voodoo dolls.

He pauses: “It was ancestral spirits, whatever you want to call it,” adding with a mischievous cackle, “But not voodoo!”