This paper discusses fuerza (strength/force) as a Espiritismo Marialioncero technology for possession that redefines endurance to violence and (in)humanity through sonic engagements with more-than-human entities. Similarly to practitioners of other Caribbean religions, espiritistas marialionceros in Venezuela are labeled “agents of violence” (Barreto 2020, Ferrándiz 2004, Taussig 1997) because our spirit possession practices challenge legible notions of what humans can do and what humans are. Examining the role of fuerza in Espiritismo Marialioncero’s spirit possession rituals distances us from “modern liberal Western” (Crosson 2019) ideas of proper subjectivity to highlight espiritistas’ “becoming with” (Yusoff 2013) affective entanglements among subjects, spirits, objects and other forms of intensity. As such, I show how espiritistas also defy long-standing scholarly paradigms for the study of violence that rely on derivative ideals of personhood, individual autonomy (Scarry 1985), and agency. Methodologically, I rely on ethnographic encounters in spiritual sessions, songs and playlists shared in espiritista social media (primarily of Afro-Venezuelan tambor and salsa), as well as interviews to delve into the sonic aspect of fuerza. Ultimately, I argue that fuerza in spirit possession constitutes an “intermaterial vibrational” (Eidsheim 2015) sonic technology that nurtures spiritual endurance and our capacity to “inhabit a wounded everyday” (Das 2014).

This paper explores how Dominican bachata, through its defining feeling of amargue (romantic bitterness), operates as a form of velación (funeral rites of the 21 Divisions/Dominican voodoo), mirroring Black sociability from plantation ecologies. In Afro-Dominican confraternities, a velación is a musical and spiritual mourning ritual that honors deceased members, blending collective grief with resistance. Similarly, in the urban peripheries of Santo Domingo, where bachata’s amargue flourished, bachateros and their audiences gathered in circles or semi-circles to lament their exclusion from national discourses that erased poor and Black or dark-skinned citizens. These gatherings became spaces for mourning symbolic deaths imposed by narratives of modernity and progress.

Central to these rituals is amargue, an affective expression of sorrow, heartbreak, and disillusionment—an auditory archive of displacement, racial erasure, and economic hardship. In the social context, bachata functions as a velación, where marginalized voices transform personal and collective pain into sonic testimony by singing in unison, mimicking and gesturing loss through dance steps, and falling into a mourning trance inspired by bachata lyrics of heartbreak, displacement, and loss. Grounded in ethnographic research conducted in brothels on Santo Domingo’s outskirts and Bronx bodegas, this paper traces how bachata’s amargue shapes understandings of Blackness and racial belonging. Across these transnational spaces, bachata becomes a diasporic ritual, carrying the echoes of Afro-Dominican confraternities into new urban landscapes on and beyond the island, where communities confront racialized narratives of exclusion and displacement.

In the mid-to-late 1990s and early 2000s, Havana’s Afro-Cuban music became a platform for interpellating the nation amidst escalating economic hardship. A notable example is Los Van Van’s arrangement of Eloy Machado’s Soy Todo (1996), illustrating how Afrocentric expressions serve as cultural and political interventions during crises. Urban hip-hop artists like Papi El Grande similarly articulate profound human-divinity connections, asserting that “hip-hop was sacredly granted to Cuba by Olófi” (Habana Hiphop 2019), one of the aspects of the Supreme Divinity in Yorùbá cosmology. Such invocations align with Ivor Miller’s concept of Afro-Cuban rhythmic and vocal articulations as alliances with divinities against ideological oppression (2000, 30-55).

Utilizing the notion of sonic gestures (Herrera Veitia & Levine, Forthcoming), this study examines the public and private character of urban Afro-Cuban music as a historically situated spiritual, affective, and territorial emplacement (Vaughan 2012). By employing Òrìṣà/Ifá oracular divination figures as a theoretical framework (Abimbola 1976), I explore how artists draw from sacred traditions to enact territoriality and contest state ideology in a context marked by systemic racial exclusion (de la Fuente 2001). This presentation argues that by analyzing the connections between historical and contemporary sonic gestures, urban Afro-Cuban music actively shapes Cuba’s sociopolitical landscape, bridging past and present through shared experiences of joy and suffering within diverse musical publics.

First-generation African forced migrants in Cuba experienced dissociation of mind and body, with the mind remaining in Africa while the stolen body was trapped in plantation labor, as expressed in the Cuban Abakuá phrase: “My body is in Cuba but my mind is in Africa” (Miller 2009, 37). Nevertheless, as part of the cultural syncretism in the American colonies that Ortiz called trans-culturación, African words remained in fixed ritual phrases, while the African ‘mind’ was virally communicated in clave-driven musical patterns and nonverbal, scatted syllabic phrases in street processions and ballroom shows, composed and performed with African folkloric elements by, and for, Cuban and Boricua immigrants. While commercial interests mined these treasures as “Fania salsa,” a counter-movement of salsa consciente refocused dancers on historic oppressions and liberations (Espinoza 2021). Through this dialectic of mind and body, the social/cultural/political spark of afro-latinidad spread throughout the Americas in the form of popular music and associated community-building rites, through which “the historical memory of a bad colonial inheritance... embedded in the leisure-form... [was] continually exorcised” (Brennan 2008). Musical examples include Abakuá performances recorded in the USA, such as “Abasí” (Chano Pozo), concluding with segments of Okobio Enyenisón, a 2009 recording led by Abakuá musicians inspired by their encounter with African members of Ékpè, the main source of Abakuá heritage. In the Abakuá language, Okobio Enyenisón means “our brothers from Africa,” identifying these performances as a solution to the mind/body separation.