A Miami Misterio: Sighting San Martín de Porres at the Crossroads of Catholicism and Dominican Vodú

Abstract

Abstract:The supernaturalism associated with San Martín de Porres places him at the crossroads of institutional Catholicism and the Vodú of the Dominican Republic and its Miami, Florida migrant community. Despite Martín's official May 6, 1962 canonization as an emblem for the Second Vatican Council's updated sensibilities on racial and social justice, Martín's racial heritage and his mystic associations positioned Martín as an emergent folk saint (misterio) for practitioners of Vodú in the 1960s. This uptick of San Martín de Porres "sightings" within Dominican folk religion reveals the dialogic reformations of Dominicanidad (Dominican national-religious identity) in consequence of the momentous changes wrought by the 1960s. The assassination of dictator Rafael Trujillo (1961), the ensuing Dominican Civil War and U.S. occupation (1962–1965), and the abolishment of the U.S.'s national-origins quota system (1965) each worked in tandem to create a mass-exodus of Dominicans to the United States. Within the Church, the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), the Medellín Conference (1968), and their approach to popular religion and liberation theology further transformed Dominican identity and experience. This study is situated in the Archdiocese of Miami, Florida, a geographic and cultural hub for the Afro-Catholic diaspora. There Dominican Vodú spiritism is a practice that illustrates the sacred and transnational dimensions of Hispaniolan historical experience as worked out between devotees and the agentive personalities of their misterios.