My father was a Santero. He practiced Santeria, an ancient African religion brought to the Caribbean by slaves hundreds of years ago. Santeria originated with the Yoruba people of West Africa.
Between the 16th and 19th centuries many West Africans were captured and brought to the Americas to be sold into slavery. These slaves succeeded in masking their West African religion by giving names of Catholic saints to their deities, called Orishas. This identity replacement permitted the slaves to pray in public without repudiation from the Spaniards by actually praying directly to Orishas as Catholic saints. The effective concealment of their religion was an effort to resist conversion to Catholicism under the Spanish Inquisition.Today Santeria is another innocuous belief on many Caribbean islands with a growing number of faiths outside the traditional Roman Catholicism. As a child in Puerto Rico I remember everyone I knew practicing Santeria, although no one admitted to it in public.
There has been a tradition of mysticism existing in our family for many generations. My grandfather was a spiritualist, my father was a Santero, my sister had the ability of seeing spirits, and my cousin is also a believer. I'm not sure if this whole mystical aspect of our family has skipped over me, but I have had a few experiences that, after recollecting as an adult, lead me to believe that perhaps I was not entirely left out of the family's spiritual scene. My father always said that everything we do with our special abilities must be done "all in the name of God." That assertion tells me these gifts or special abilities are a good thing for us, and for those around us.
The short stories you are about to read are about these experiences from my childhood in Puerto Rico.
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