Emma Christopher for theatlanticDOTcom:
The amazing story of the traditional songs and dances, passed down over hundreds of years, that have tied a small Caribbean ethnic group to a remote African tribe
THEY ARE WE (Official Teaser) from Sergio Leyva Seiglie on Vimeo.
Can a family separated for 170 years by the transatlantic slave trade sing and dance its way back together again? THEY ARE WE tells a story of survival against the odds, and how determination and shared humanity can triumph over the bleakest of histories.
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But I, with my academic skepticism, doubted it could be true. I returned to Cuba and the archives and records, searching for written evidence of how this might have happened. The entire, exact story will likely never be recovered, but one determined woman and her descendants preserved a whole swath of songs and dances closely enough to be clearly identified.
What we do know is that there was a girl later called Josefa, stolen away from her homeland in the 1830s, who survived far longer than the seven years typical in Cuba's ingenios (sugar mills) in the mid-19th century. In fact, she lived into old age, long enough to experience freedom, and to teach her great-granddaughter Florinda her African heritage. Florinda in turn taught her grandson …
via Hey to Your Mama N'em
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