Mesi Walton

“Afro-Venezuelan Culture in Motion” examines how Afro-Venezuelan communities sustain identity, spirituality, and belonging through ritual, music, dance, and song across generations and borders. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Venezuela and diaspora communities in the United States, Colombia, Argentina, and Spain, alongside historical research on religious traditions in the Atlantic world, the project traces the veneration of San Juan Bautista, an Afro-Catholic devotion rooted in Central West African cosmologies that continues to evolve as communities move and resettle. By situating contemporary ritual practice within a longer history of African diasporic religious adaptation, the study highlights how traditions are carried, reshaped, and reinterpreted across changing social and geographic contexts. Moving beyond crisis-centered narratives of Venezuelan migration, the project centers Afro-Venezuelan voices and cultural practices as sources of resilience, knowledge, and collective memory. In doing so, it contributes to scholarship on the African diaspora, migration, and religion by showing how ritual functions as a living archive through which communities maintain continuity and forge belonging amid displacement.