James P. Padilioni, Jr.

"To Ask Infinity Some Questions: San Martín de Porres and the Black Hagiographic Mysteries of Florida" centers the figure of San Martín de Porres, O.P. (1579-1639), a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Afro-Peruvian mystic friar canonized in 1962 by the Vatican as the patron saint of social justice. This work explores various ritual and performative portrayals of Martín de Porres as observed among Florida’s African-American, Cuban, Bahamian, Haitian, Dominican, and Puerto Rican communities of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Through these case studies, Padilioni elaborates the ways in which these Black Diasporic communities invoke the sacred memory and sensuous presence of Martín de Porres in their everyday endeavors "to ask infinity some questions" about the mysterious and sublime nature of everyday life in the African Diaspora.