Category: Black Diaspora
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River Mumma: Fluid Crossings and Mermaid Spirits in Revival Zion Religion
by KHYTIE K. BROWN THIS STORY BEGINS with a Jamaican folk tale about a mermaid spirit who inhabits the rivers, and sometimes the seas, of Jamaica. She’s a primordial and archetypal spirit affectionately, and even dreadfully, called River Mumma, River Maid, or The Maid: Legend says that River Mumma inhabits the rivers of Jamaica,…
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Selections from the LADI Repository
BY DAVID A. BLISS THE LATIN AMERICAN DIGITAL INITIATIVES (LADI) website holds archival collections from six of the Benson’s post-custodial archival partner organizations in Latin America. Beginning in 2014, Benson archivists worked with partner institutions to digitize and describe collections from partners’ repositories, in order to facilitate online access to the materials without physically relocating…
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The Quilombo Activists’ Archive: A Transcontinental Partnership
BY EDWARD SHORE CARLITOS DA SILVA was an activist and community leader from São Pedro, one of 88 settlements founded by descendants of escaped slaves known in Portuguese as quilombos, located in the Atlantic Forest of Brazil’s Ribeira Valley (Vale da Ribeira). During the early 1980s, amid an onslaught of government projects to develop the…
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Establishing History: The Black Diaspora Archive and the Texas Domestic Slave Trade Project
BY RACHEL E. WINSTON The vision for the Black Diaspora Archive at The University of Texas at Austin came into focus in 2013 as a collaborative project between Black Studies, LLILAS Benson, and the University of Texas Libraries. After years of continued successful collaboration, Black Studies approached LLILAS Benson with the idea of creating an…