Noche de Candela - September 15, 2006

"Noches de Candela" poetic vigils are a series of literary events aimed at invoking the Oshun-Chango spirit to produce a major "Rumba in San Juan de Ulua" fortress in Veracruz, Mexico summer 2007 where humanists are to meet to pay homage to the African ancestors through their song and witnessing. San Juan de Ulua was the door of entry for hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans during the Spanish colonial period which lasted around three hundred years in that region of the continent now a part of Mexico. This foremost chapter of the history of the diverse African presence and permanence in Mexico has been kept silent. The souls of these ancestors are trapped in oblivion, official negation and the Eurocentric account of the facts that has dominated Mexican history. The common thread for these events will be "Marronage and Manumission in the Americas: an Alternate Vision of Planetary History."