Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn

A feminist ethnography and spiritual biography built around Alourdes (Mama Lola), a Haitian manbo working in Brooklyn, treating ritual, family history, migration, money, healing, possession, and women's authority as parts of one life. Brown's structure alternates between spirit-centered chapters organized around the major lwa who possess Alourdes and family-history chapters following the matrilineal line from rural Haiti through urban poverty to New York, making the book unusually useful for understanding kinship, diaspora, and the practical daily labor of Vodou. One of the strongest sources for seeing Vodou as lived care rather than exceptional spectacle, and for women's priesthood authority as practical, inherited, and relational.