Caribbean Diaspora in the USA: Diversity of Caribbean Religions in New York City

Caribbean Religions in New York City 35
ethnic and immigrant groups were doing together religiously in the United States,
and what manners of religious institutions they were developing of, by, and for
themselves’ (1998: 9). In consequence, I will not limit my observation by presenting
only the history and phenomena of the religious traditions; I will describe the life
of the religions by including short descriptions of some of the events I observed
and look at the meaning of the religions for the practitioners. The focus will be on
specific religious communities and their meetings. There will probably be hundreds
of examples that contradict the information I gathered from these communities.
A case study can never have representative character. Nevertheless, it shows a way
(out of many) of how migrants deal with their situation in a new environment: New
York City. In order to show different strategies I will present three religious ways in
this chapter, each connected to the three major languages in the Caribbean: Santería
(la regla de ocha and la regla de ifá) for the Spanish-speaking communities, Vodou for
the French- and Kreyòl-speaking communities, and Orisha Baptist (Shango) for the
English-speaking communities. 1 My focus is on migrants and the next generations,
hence on ‘ethnic’ religions (Greschat 1996) though I will include practitioners
with other ethnic backgrounds and their relationship to the migrants. Migration
marks an exceptional moment in the biography of a person. Religious identity
abroad is often more important than at home where belonging to a religion is often
regarded as normal, without the need to reflect upon it. Living abroad creates new
demands which sometimes cannot be satisfied by institutionalized religions. Hence,
non-institutionalized religious practices that deal in particular with the wishes and
needs of the migrants and that can easily adapt to their wishes start to grow. 2 These
new customs do not represent a total change of cultural patterns for the migrants but a
reinterpretation of established religious practices in a way that matches the demands
and experiences of the migrants. 3 Even established religions can change as Elizabeth
McAlister (1998) for a Haitian community and Ana María Díaz-Stevens (1993) for a
Puerto Rican community in New York City have shown. Both communities succeeded
in expressing conflict with society by presenting their perspective during a religious
procession for a Catholic saint on the streets of New York City. The believers voiced
in a performative way their own individual opposition to the dominant will of the
Roman Catholic Church. 4 Given the discrepancy between the religious institutions
1 Unfortunately, this limitation implies the exclusion of the Dutch-speaking communities
which are also present in New York City but not yet in large numbers.
2 For information about the connection between biography and religion, see Wohlrab-
Sahr who distinguishes between two main functions of religion with reference to biography: a
biographical-structural function and a reflexive function (1995: 9–13). I will focus on the latter,
the individual-biographical, which is particularly important for conversion but also for migration.
According to Wohlrab-Sahr, conversion includes individual processes of metamorphosis, either
the radical metamorphosis of a person or of her or his cognitive pattern.
3 This process is similar to the one during the conquest of America, in particular to the
experiences of the people in Latin America where the dominant religion, Catholicism, was
also reinterpreted according to the local experiences of the people.
4 Leo Frobenius recognizes while observing children playing the original source of
creativity and culture in the games of children. He concludes that in a game one gets access
to another ‘reality’ by becoming overwhelmed by a phenomenon outside its natural context