El Monte

El Monte, Lydia Cabrera's 1954 study published by Ediciones C. R. in Havana, is the foundational ethnographic account of Afro-Cuban religious plant lore and ritual within Santeria and related traditions. Cabrera spent decades interviewing practitioners directly, and the book's authority rests on that firsthand fieldwork rather than on any academic institutional post; she worked as an independent scholar and writer. Its limit is that it records one generation's testimony in one place and time, so a claim about a different region's or era's practice needs its own source. Cite it as the founding text of the field; treat later ethnography as building on, not replacing, it.