George Brandon, Santeria from Africa to the New World: The Dead Sell Memories

George Brandon, an anthropologist, wrote this history of Santeria's formation from its Yoruba origins through Cuba into the United States as a peer-reviewed academic monograph published in Indiana University Press's Blacks in the Diaspora series, and it remains a standard scholarly account of how specific orisha came to be identified with specific Catholic saints under colonial-era conditions. Use it for the documented mechanism and history of Yoruba-Catholic syncretism in Cuba; a claim about contemporary Santeria practice should be checked against more recent ethnography alongside it.