The Altar America Project and Ethnogenesis
Last weekend, I went down to Richmond, Virginia for the latest installment of the Altar America Project, and I’d like to take a moment to tell all of you about this project and its long journey and evolution over the past years.
The seed for this project began in 2015, when I attended my first Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) party. Earlier that year, Andrea and I had started dating and through our relationship I started learning more and more about her Latino culture. At this party, I think I might have been the only non-Latino person, and at first, I did not understand the celebration. Growing up in the South, I was never exposed to a practice of annually remembering your ancestors, so everything at this party seemed foreign apart from the fact that I was among friends.
For most of the party, I simply lurked in the background and observed everyone else in the hopes that eventually Día de los Muertos would make sense to me, and thankfully that eureka moment arrived.
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In 2015, the Black Lives Matter Movement was still going strong, and at this party, I remembered the altars that my community created following the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown. The altars for Día de los Muertos were similar to these altars, but the impetus for the celebrations were vastly different. In my community, we made altars in response to a tragic death and remembering their lives helped launch a movement. In the Latino community, they proactively made altars every year, and appeared less reliant on a tragedy for remembering and celebrating someone’s life. In this moment, I became convinced that the Black community, and other communities in America could benefit from this practice.
The proactive celebration of remembering those who have passed away creates an opportunity for transcending trauma and celebrating life.
I knew that this practice could benefit many people, but at the time, I did not know how to cultivate it. Usually, when non-Latinos celebrate Día de los Muertos they decide to decorate their homes as if they were Mexican, and I knew this template would not work for a cross-cultural celebration. Mexican decorations should not be essential for non-Mexicans to remember their ancestors.
I began thinking about this idea in 2015, but nothing came to fruition until 2018.
Ethnogenesis and Ethnocide
During the 2016 presidential election, I began writing opinion pieces for The Daily Beast, and the nature of my work led me to coin the word “ethnocide” to describe the normalized cultural destruction within the United States. Having the word “ethnocide” felt empowering because I could finally describe the world around me, but when I shared the word with other people they often did not feel empowered. Instead people would become very sad because they could not see how we could escape or transcend our ethnocidal society.
The sadness of others made me realize that my work could never consist of solely raising awareness of and combating ethnocide, but that it also had to focus on developing the opposite of ethnocide. Everyone acknowledged that ethnocide was bad, but they also understood that stopping something bad would not be enough. Being anti-bad and responding to ethnocide would not be enough, so I needed to think about how we could be proactively good. And I needed to create the words for this proactive goodness.
Since ethnocide is the killing of culture while keeping the people, I felt that creating culture would be the proper response. I then coined the terms “ethnogenesis” and “cultural naissance.” Both terms mean “cultural birth” or “creating culture,” but I believe that it is essential that we have both terms because “cultural naissance” reminds us that we are not having a “renaissance.” The United States exists as a “re-birth” of Europe outside of Europe, so our goal cannot be to recreate the past or another continent, but to create something new without erasing the past.
During 2016, the chaos of the presidential election occupied most of my time, and I ended up focusing more on examining the impact of ethnocide in American life than developing concepts and practices related to ethnogenesis. In 2017, I had more time to think about ethnogenesis, and this process brought me back to Día de los Muertos.
I understood the transformational impact a cross-cultural ancestor remembrance celebration could have in America, but I came to this realization before I started thinking about ethnocide and ethnogenesis. I did not initially think about this practice using my new words, but eventually, it became clear to me that a cross-cultural Día de los Muertos could be an expression of ethnogenesis. It would proactively do something good by encouraging people to remember their loved ones and celebrate their culture, while also countering the cultural erasure of ethnocide. Additionally, ethnocide thrives on normalizing division, and this cross-cultural celebration would bring people together. This profound coming together could forge a new American culture.
This project equated to philosophy-in-action. I had a philosophy of proactively creating good and combating ethnocide, the language for expressing these ideas, and now I had a method for constructively expressing this belief. Now I just needed to create it.
Creating Culture Takes Time
In 2017, I had no clear vision for how to expand this practice, and when I would describe my idea to other people I was more often than not met with skepticism. Many people believed that a Black man could not create a cross-cultural Día de los Muertos without appropriating Mexican culture, and other people believed it would be better if I embraced an African tradition instead. Many other people also got creeped out by talking about the dead, and felt that it challenged their religious beliefs. It took a while just to learn how to articulate this idea without triggering negative responses.
However, I wanted to have more than just productive conversations. I wanted to create an annual celebration.
By 2018, the plan turned into producing a documentary that could explain this project, and through the success of the film it would be easier to grow the practice across America. In the first part of the year I pursued funding for the project, and when that failed I decided to use crowdfunding to get the project off the ground.
Since I had no budget, I used my own money to shoot and produce a trailer video for the crowdfunding, and in October of 2018, I launched the crowdfunding campaign. Thanks to the support of my friends, family, and people online, the campaign was successful and now I had the seed funding necessary to produce a little more of my film so that I could attract investors and pursue the next batch of money I would need to finally make the film.
By this time, I had started using the name “Altars” to describe this project because I believe that altars could help alter America for the better.
In 2019, I used the seed money from the crowdfunding to get a small workspace at the Eaton Workshop in DC, and by March of that year, I had found a producer to help me create my documentary about creating this celebration. The producer had investors in mind for the project, and we spent most of the summer developing proposals, presentations, and budgets for this film. In August, the plan was to contact our network of investors to get the funding that we needed, but unfortunately, the producer decided to back out of the project that same month. These things can happen, but now the Altars project was basically back to square one and my work for the past year had amounted to nothing. On top of that, I felt very sad about letting my supporters down.
The only silver lining of this time was that I had started writing the book that would become The Crime Without a Name: Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture while working at Eaton, and I had made a lot of friends who believed in my work. Later that year, with their encouragement, I created The Sustainable Culture Lab, and I decided to refocus on the Altars project in 2020. I refused to give up on my vision.
In 2020, COVID-19 brought the world to a halt and also any chances of getting funding for a documentary film that was supposed to take me to Africa, Mexico, and across America. In 2020, the film project had to pause, but in its place the Altars Festival was born.
The 2020 Altars Festival was all online due to COVID-19, and the new idea focused on enlisting artists of diverse backgrounds to make altars representing their culture and lived experiences. Ideally, the artists would inspire others to make altars and the practice could grow and flourish.
In 2021, we were able to have the festival at the STABLE Arts gallery in Washington, DC, and now people could physically see and experience both the altars and the new culture that bringing the altars together creates. Every altar told a unique story, but having the altars share space together also creates a new story and a new culture. The Altars Festival had become an act of ethnogenesis, and now the plan was to expand the practice to more cities.
This year, the Altars Festival is in Richmond, Virginia at Art Works, and it has been a big success. We are already talking about having Altars in Richmond in 2023, and the plan is to also take it to even more cities in 2023.
Also, the main reason Altars is in Richmond is because I have started collaborating with Craig Martin, the producer and co-host of the PBS show The Good Road, and he lives in Richmond. Craig and I are currently pursuing funding for a series of film projects pertaining to Altars and the work of SCL.
As the Altars Festival grows and I continue to pursue film opportunities, we’ve decided to rebrand this growing project to the “Altar America Project.”
To accomplish our goals in 2023 regarding the Altar America Project and other SCL initiatives, including growing this newsletter, we need to cultivate a community of donors, so we need your support. SCL is a 501(c)3 non-profit so all of your donations are tax deductible, and you can submit donations through our PayPal account or the QRcode below.
Also, please let me know if you are interested in partnering with SCL to bring the Altar America Project to your city in 2023.
I have been developing this project for seven years, yet we have only just begun. I truly appreciate each and everyone of you, and it means a lot to me that you appreciate my work.
Have a great Monday, and please make sure that you vote in this vital midterm election.
My book THE CRIME WITHOUT A NAME was released on October 12, 2021 and NPR has picked it as one of the top books of the year!
You can order the book—including the audiobook—and watch recordings of my book tour discussions at Eaton and the New York Public Library at thecrimewithoutaname.com
