A Party for Lazarus: Six Generations of Ancestral Devotion in a Cuban Town

by Todd Ramón Ochoa

A Party for Lazarus is the story of a Cuban family, six generations removed from slavery, struggling to honor their ancestors amid changing fortunes and a crumbling state. It is an intimate portrait of an intergenerational family saga involving the future of an annual feast to celebrate ancestors and orisás—the life-changing spirits at the center of Black Atlantic religious life. Based on twenty years of fieldwork, Todd Ramón Ochoa’s masterful ethnography shows how orisá praise and everyday life have changed in revolutionary Cuba over two decades of economic hardship.

336 pages, Hardcover

Published May 19, 2020

About the author

Todd Ramón Ochoa is a cultural anthropologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of Society of the Dead: Quita Manaquita and Palo Praise in Cuba.

Reviews

[Morgan M. Page · Rating 5 out of 5]

Todd Ramón Ochoa's A Party for Lazarus: Six Generation of Ancestral Devotion in a Cuban Town is more than just an ethnography of rural Afro-Cuban religious practices. It is a sprawling family drama that takes place across twenty years as the ten offspring of healer Cucusa attempt to uphold her decades-long legacy of an annual bembé for the Orisá San Lázaro-Babalú Ayé following her death in 1997. It is also the story of a rapidly changing Cuba, that takes us through the revolution, drops us down at the tail end of the Special Period, and drags us scrambling across the ever-shifting sands of the past two decades' move toward a post-Soviet collapse tourist-based economy. This is not only a worthy sequel to Ochoa's previous Society of the Dead, it is certain to become as valuable and much loved as classics in the tradition of Karen McCarthy Brown's Mama Lola.

[Jessica Zu · Rating 5 out of 5]

so much fun to read. and to know how people survive, the aesthetics of existing.

[ekrobin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ochoa brings the reader right into the nuanced details of the family's interactions and drama in this ethnography. It's a narrative constructed through visceral, vivid descriptions of daily life that easily played out in my mind like a movie. As a whole, this book left me with much to think about as both a religion student and a reader.