The United States: Cuban Transmission, Oyotunji, and the Law

Òrìṣà religion in the United States is not a survival. Mainland North America received roughly 4 to 5 percent of the Atlantic trade, most of it before the nineteenth-century Yoruba surge and all of it legally ended in 1808, so there was no institutional Yoruba tradition to inherit. What exists in the US today arrived in the twentieth century through two channels that remain distinguishable: Cuban migration, which brought the institution, and African American religious nationalism, which claimed it and then set about changing it 1.

The tension between those two channels has produced the most consequential legal case in the field and the most contested authenticity disputes in the Atlantic world, and both are described below.

The Cuban transmission

Cuban practitioners were in the United States before the Revolution. Individual babalawos arrived in New York from the 1940s, the first being remembered as Pancho Mora, who arrived between roughly 1946 and 1950 2.

The 1959 Revolution began the first substantial exile, though that cohort was largely middle-class and more Catholic in orientation. The decisive event was the Mariel boatlift of 1980, in which roughly 125,000 people left Cuba for south Florida over about six months 3. That population was different: poorer, Blacker, and containing a large number of santeros, babalawos and ritual drummers who established houses in Miami, New York and New Jersey 2. Named batá drummers arriving in that wave, including Orlando "Puntilla" Ríos, Juan "el Negro" Raymat and Ezequiel Torres, reshaped ritual drumming in the US and trained the next generation 2.

Puerto Rican and Nuyorican practitioners are the second major stream, both initiating into Cuban lineages and developing santerismo, the working combination of oricha practice with Puerto Rican espiritismo, which is a substantial New York tradition in its own right.

The result is that the dominant form of òrìṣà religion in the United States is Cuban Lucumí, in Spanish and Lucumí, with Cuban lineage, Cuban ritual protocol and Cuban authority structures.

Oyotunji and African American reclamation

The other channel begins with one person.

Walter Eugene King was born in Detroit in 1928 to parents who were followers of Marcus Garvey 4. He came to African religion through the Black nationalist and Pan-Africanist currents of the 1950s, through dance and through study rather than through family inheritance. In 1959 he travelled to Matanzas, Cuba, where he was initiated into the priesthood of Obatalá, becoming the first African American initiated in that lineage 4. He took the name Oseijeman Adefunmi.

He founded the Shango Temple in Harlem in 1959 and the Yoruba Temple in 1960 4. In 1970 he founded Oyotunji African Village near Sheldon in Beaufort County, South Carolina, the first Black nationalist settlement built by African American òrìṣà worshippers 45. The name means Ọ̀yọ́ rises again. The initial population of five, Adefunmi, his wife Majile and three children, grew to an estimated 250 residents within the decade, and in 1972 supporters crowned him oba, king 4. He travelled to Nigeria and in 1981 was installed by Yoruba authorities in a recognition of his kingship. He died in 2005 and was succeeded by his son, Oba Adejuyigbe Adefunmi II.

Adefunmi's project was explicitly a reconstruction, not a continuation of the Cuban lineage he entered. He and other African Americans of that period renamed themselves Yoruba and set about transforming Cuban Santería into a religious expression that answered their racial and nationalist commitments 4. Concretely that meant stripping the Catholic saints, which they read as the slaveholder's imposition; going to Nigeria rather than Cuba for authority; adopting Yoruba dress, names, language study and titles; reconstructing an Ọ̀yọ́-style court with an oba and chiefs; and building a physical African village on American soil as a territorial claim.

Tracey Hucks' Yoruba Traditions and African American Religious Nationalism is the standard history, placing Oyotunji inside a longer arc of African American reinterpretations of Africa and of Black cultural nationalism 1. Kamari Clarke's Mapping Yorùbá Networks is the standard ethnography, based on ten years of fieldwork at Oyotunji and on pilgrimages to Nigeria, and its central finding is about authenticity: Oyotunji heritage travellers often returned from Nigeria convinced that they, more than the Nigerian Yoruba, were the true claimants to the ancestral history of the Ọ̀yọ́ empire 5.

That claim reads as presumptuous, and it is worth understanding why it is made rather than only that it is made. The Oyotunji position holds that Nigerian Yoruba practice has been compromised by Christianity, Islam and colonialism, that Nigerians are frequently embarrassed by traditional religion, and that African Americans who chose òrìṣà religion at cost, against the whole grain of American society, are the ones actually carrying it. Whether or not that is persuasive, it is a coherent argument and it is not made in ignorance of Nigeria. It is made after visiting.

The Oyotunji population has declined sharply from its peak and now numbers in the dozens, but its influence far exceeds its size. It trained priests who founded houses across the United States, it established the ideological vocabulary of the African American òrìṣà movement, and it made the break from Cuban authority thinkable.

The wider African American reclamation has since become far larger than Oyotunji and less unified. Its distinctive politics remain: a reading of òrìṣà religion as ancestral repossession and as resistance to Christianity understood as a religion of enslavement; a preference for Nigerian over Cuban authority; a rejection of the Catholic layer; a strong interest in Yoruba language; and a documented friction with Cuban and Cuban-American practitioners over lineage validity, ritual correctness and who is entitled to speak for the tradition. Brown's account of Cuban Ocha explicitly includes Oyotunji as a case study of the same innovation dynamics visible in Cuba, and notes that these patterns resemble those found among rival Yoruba kingdoms in Nigeria 6. That framing is deflationary in the useful way: the American disputes are not a diaspora aberration but the normal operation of a Yoruba religious field.

Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah (1993)

This is the most important legal decision affecting African-derived religion in the United States and one of the most cited free exercise cases of the modern era.

The facts. Ernesto Pichardo founded the Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye in 1973 and in April 1987 leased property in Hialeah, Florida, intending to practise openly, including animal sacrifice 7. Sacrifice is not incidental to Lucumí practice; initiation and most major ceremonies require it, and the animals are typically eaten afterward.

The ordinances. Hialeah's city council held an emergency session on 9 June 1987, at which council members expressed open hostility to the religion, and then passed three ordinances criminalising animal killing in ritual or ceremonial contexts while exempting kosher slaughter, hunting, pest control, euthanasia and the ordinary slaughter of animals for food 7.

Procedural history. The district court upheld the ordinances after trial in 1989, and the Eleventh Circuit affirmed unanimously in 1991 7. The Supreme Court granted certiorari in 1992, with Douglas Laycock arguing for the church 7.

The decision. On 11 June 1993 the Supreme Court reversed unanimously, though the justices divided on reasoning 7. Justice Kennedy's majority opinion held that the ordinances violated the Free Exercise Clause. He identified a "religious gerrymander": laws drawn so that, despite facial neutrality, they applied in practice only to religiously motivated killing while exempting every comparable secular killing 7. A law that is not neutral and not generally applicable must serve a compelling government interest and be narrowly tailored, and Hialeah's ordinances failed that test, being simultaneously underinclusive, reaching only religious sacrifice, and overinclusive, imposing burdens unrelated to the stated objectives of public health and animal welfare 7. Kennedy wrote that religious beliefs "need not be acceptable, logical, consistent or comprehensible to others in order to merit First Amendment protection" 7

Concurrences. Scalia, joined by Rehnquist, defended the Employment Division v. Smith framework. Souter suggested Smith warranted reconsideration. Blackmun, joined by O'Connor, concurred in the judgment while stating that he considered Smith wrongly decided 7.

What it established. Smith (1990) had held that neutral, generally applicable laws do not violate free exercise even when they burden religious practice. Lukumi supplies the limit: a law that targets religious conduct, whether on its face or through a pattern of exemptions that leaves only religion covered, is neither neutral nor generally applicable, and receives strict scrutiny 7. The doctrine has since been used well beyond Afro-Caribbean religion, including in COVID-era worship restriction cases and in disputes over exemption schemes generally, and it is now one of the standard tools for challenging any law whose exemptions look selective.

The result for practitioners was concrete: sacrifice conducted as part of religious practice cannot be singled out for prohibition. Local harassment continued in various forms, but the constitutional question was settled.

The contemporary landscape

Òrìṣà religion in the United States today is genuinely plural and has no central authority, which is worth stating plainly because various bodies claim otherwise.

The Cuban and Cuban-American Lucumí houses, concentrated in Miami, New York, New Jersey and increasingly across the south and west, remain the largest and most institutionally continuous stream, operating in Spanish and Lucumí with Cuban lineage.

The African American traditionalist stream, descending from Oyotunji and from later direct-to-Nigeria initiations, operates in English and Yoruba, rejects the Catholic layer, and looks to Nigerian rather than Cuban authority.

A growing direct-Nigerian stream consists of Nigerian babaláwo and òrìṣà priests resident in the United States, and of Americans travelling to Nigeria for initiation, which has become a substantial traffic with its own economics.

Puerto Rican and Nuyorican santerismo continues as its own formation.

And there is a large periphery of people who consult, receive elekes, attend drummings and identify with òrìṣà religion without initiation, which is the majority of anyone's headcount.

Numbers are unreliable for the reasons given in the world religion file: no registers, private initiation, dual religious identification, and interested parties on all sides. Figures in the hundreds of thousands to low millions circulate for the United States and none of them has a defensible method behind it. What can be said is that the practising community is large enough to sustain a commercial infrastructure of botánicas, drummers, ritual suppliers and initiation travel, and that it is no longer predominantly Cuban.

Two frictions define the current period. The first is the authority dispute between Cuban lineage and Nigerian lineage, in which each side holds ceremonies performed by the other to be defective in specific ways, most visibly over Ifá initiation for women. The second is commercialisation, including paid initiations of uncertain provenance and the online initiation problem, both discussed in the final file of this section.