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

A Party for Lazarus is the story of a Cuban family, six generations removed from slavery, struggling to honor its ancestors amid changing fortunes and a crumbling state. This intimate intergenerational account centers on an annual feast celebrating ancestors and orisas-the life-changing spirits at the heart of Black Atlantic religious life. Based on twenty years of fieldwork, Todd Ramon Ochoa’s masterful ethnography shows how orisa praise and everyday life have changed in revolutionary Cuba over two decades of economic hardship.