Puerto Rico

The Taino of Boriken venerated the cemis, carved seats of ancestral and natural power, in ceremonies of song, dance and the cohoba trance, and their chiefs' plazas and petroglyphs still mark the island. Spain made the island one of Catholic America's oldest grounds: the diocese of San Juan was erected in 1511, among the first in the New World, and four centuries of Spanish rule built the cathedrals, the town patron feasts and the santos de palo, the carved wooden saints of household devotion that became the island's signature folk art.

The change of empire in 1898 brought the First Amendment and an organised Protestant arrival, the denominations formally dividing the island into comity zones, Presbyterians west, Baptists centre, Methodists east, a map whose traces persist. The twentieth century belonged to two movements: Pentecostalism, which grew from returned migrants and island revivals into the largest Protestant force, and espiritismo, the Kardecist spiritism that took root among the nineteenth century intelligentsia and blended at the popular level with Catholic and African inheritances into the Mesa Blanca tradition. Puerto Rican religion now moves with its diaspora, botanicas and parishes alike serving families that span San Juan and New York, and the January festival of the Three Kings, with its carved riders on horseback, remains the island's tenderest feast.

Two traditions, one carved and one channelled, give Puerto Rican religion its distinctive interior. The santos de palo are small wooden saints carved by santeros, artisan dynasties whose work fills island museums and family altars alike. The favourite subjects tell their own theology: the Three Kings, patrons of the island's beloved January feast, above all the black king Melchor; the Virgin of Monserrate with her dark face; the hand of God; and the Anima Sola, the lone soul in purgatory's flames. A household santo was a working member of the family, prayed to for rain, health and safe childbirth and sometimes turned to face the wall when a request went unanswered, and the promesa, the vow that repays a favour with pilgrimage, rosaries or a child's habit, remains a living institution. Espiritismo arrived in the 1850s and 1860s as the fashionable science of Allan Kardec's books, carried home by students from Europe, and the island's intellectuals founded centres that made it a genuine social movement.

At the popular level it fused with Catholic sacramentals and African inheritances into Mesa Blanca practice, the white table set with water, flowers and candles where mediums work causas, the spiritual causes of affliction, and the botanica, stocked with herbs, oils, statues and Kardec's texts, became its pharmacy. Clergy of every stripe have denounced the blend for a century and a half; it persists serenely, in San Juan and in the diaspora.