In this intimate ethnography, Raquel Romberg seeks to illuminate the performative significance of healing rituals and magic works, their embodied nature, and their effectiveness in transforming the states of participants by focusing on the visible, albeit mostly obscure, ways in which healing and magic rituals proceed. The questions posed by Romberg emerge directly from the particular pragmatics of Puerto Rican brujería (witch-healing), shaped by the eclecticism of its rituals, the heterogeneous character of its participants, and the heterodoxy of its moral economy.

What, if any, is the role of belief in magic and healing rituals? How do past discourses on possession enter into the performative experience of ritual in the here and now? Where does belief stop, and where do memories of the flesh begin? While these are questions that philosophers and anthropologists of religion ponder, they acquire a different meaning when asked from an ethnographic perspective.

Written in an evocative, empathetic style, with theoretical ruminations about performance, the senses, and imagination woven into stories that highlight the drama and humanity of consultations, this book is an important contribution to the cross-cultural understanding of our capacity to experience the transcendental in corporeal ways.

In Making Space for Empire, Joaquín Villanueva documents how white elites in Puerto Rico and the United States collaborated to produce the physical and ideological landscapes of the archipelago in the modern day. Throughout the mid-twentieth century, the Puerto Rico Planning Board worked to transform a tropical climate into an industrial one to attract US investors. This modernization produced a colonial economy fully dependent on US knowledge, capital, and interests for its survival. Drawing on the Puerto Rico Planning Board archives, Black geographies, and the work of Frantz Fanon, Villanueva shows how dominant conceptions of space, whiteness, and the tropics came together under a midcentury planning ideology that embraced dependent development models, defining Puerto Rico’s future through debt. He offers new insights into both the past and future of the archipelago, showing how seemingly simple acts like letter writing, strategic friendships, and the racialization of nature and space have sustained colonialism on the archipelago. Mapping how planning and imperialism shapes lands and ideologies alike, Making Space for Empire shows that Puerto Rico is not bound to its history. It can, and must, determine its own future.

Persecuted as evil during colonial times, considered charlatans during the nation-building era, Puerto Rican brujos (witch-healers) today have become spiritual entrepreneurs who advise their clients not only in consultation with the spirits but also in compliance with state laws and new economic opportunities. Combining trance, dance, magic, and healing practices with expertise in the workings of the modern welfare state, they help lawyers win custody suits, sick employees resolve labor disability claims, single mothers apply for government housing, or corporation managers maximize their commercial skills.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork among practicing brujos, this book presents a masterful history and ethnography of Puerto Rican brujería (witch-healing). Raquel Romberg explores how brujería emerged from a blending of popular Catholicism, Afro-Latin religions, French Spiritism, and folk Protestantism and also looks at how it has adapted to changes in state policies and responded to global flows of ideas and commodities. She demonstrates that, far from being an exotic or marginal practice in the modern world, brujería has become an invisible yet active partner of consumerism and welfare capitalism.