A Diaspora Office, Carried Abroad by Migration

The most famous historical example of a woman exercising this kind of religious authority in the Americas is Marie Laveau, the nineteenth century Voodoo Queen of New Orleans, though her practice belonged to Louisiana Voodoo, a distinct Afro-Catholic tradition shaped by different colonial and demographic conditions from Haitian Vodou proper, and the two are related but not identical, a distinction popular culture routinely erases when it treats all Voodoo, so spelled, as interchangeable with Haitian Vodou.

Large-scale Haitian emigration from the 1960s onward, driven first by the Duvalier dictatorships and later by continuing political and economic crisis, carried Vodou and its priesthood into diaspora communities in the United States, Canada and France, where mambos and houngans established sosyete, ceremonial houses, serving Haitian immigrant communities far from Haiti itself, in cities including New York, Miami and Montreal. These diaspora houses have kept the same decentralised structure the tradition has always had, each standing or falling on its own reputation with no governing body linking them, so that the office has spread geographically over the past half century without changing the basic terms on which a mambo's authority is recognised.