Yoruba Americans (Yoruba:Àwọn ọmọ Yorùbá Amẹrika) areAmericans ofYoruba descent. TheYoruba people are aWest African ethnic group that predominantly inhabits southwesternNigeria, with smaller indigenous communities inBenin andTogo.
The first Yoruba people who arrived to the United States were imported asslaves from Nigeria andBenin during theAtlantic slave trade.[2][3] This ethnicity of the slaves was one of the main origins of present-day Nigerians who arrived to the United States, along with theIgbo. In addition, native slaves of current Benin hailed from peoples such asNago,[note 1]Ewe,Fon, andGen. Many of the slaves imported to the modern United States from Benin were sold by theKing of Dahomey, inWhydah.[4][6][note 2]
The slaves brought with them their cultural practices, languages, cuisine[8] and religious beliefs rooted in spirit andancestor worship.[9] So, the manners of the Yoruba, Fon, Gen and Ewe of Benin were key elements ofLouisiana Voodoo.[10] Also Haitians, who migrated to Louisiana in the late nineteenth century and also contributed to Voodoo of this state, have the Yoruba,[11] Fon, and Ewe among their main origins.
On May 23, 1980, the city's animal health authorities raided theapartment of one of Padrino's followers on East 146th Street in the Bronx.[12]: 1150 TheAmerican Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) had complained about Santería's practices of animal sacrifice.[12]: 1150 Threegoats and eighteenchickens were removed from the dwelling.[12]: 1150
In the colonies, masters tried to dissuade the practice of tribal customs. They also sometimes mixed people of different ethnic groups to make it more difficult for them to communicate and bond together in rebellion.[13] Today, manyAfrican Americans share ancestry with theYoruba people.[14][15]
After theslavery abolition in 1865, many modern Nigerian immigrants of Yoruba ancestry have come to the United States starting in the mid-twentieth century to pursue educational opportunities in undergraduate and post-graduate institutions. PresidentLyndon B. Johnson signed theImmigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which allowed for a significant number of Nigerians of Yoruba ancestry to immigrate to the United States. During the 1960s and 1970s, after theNigerian-Biafran War, Nigeria's government funded scholarships for Nigerian students, and many of them were admitted to American universities. While this was happening, there were several military coups and brief periods of civilian rule. All this caused many Nigerians to emigrate.[16] Most of these Nigerian immigrants are of Yoruba, Igbo andIbibio origins.
Yoruba have often found American habits ofpet keeping very strange, culturally unfamiliar.[17]: 18
^(Yoruba subgroup,[4]although exported mainly by Spanish,[5] when Louisiana was Spanish)
^Indeed, Dahomey was one of the main proslavery Kingdoms of West Africa during the colonial period of the Americas and the nineteenth century, arriving to his maximum economic splendor to late of the eighteenth century thanks to its slave trade with the European traders of many areas of theAmericas (from the U.S. toBrazil). The majority of his slaves were, from that time, to second half of the nineteenth century, of Yoruba origin.[7]
^"Question of the Month: Cudjo Lewis: Last African Slave in the U.S.?", by David Pilgrim, Curator, Jim Crow Museum, July 2005, webpage:Ferris-ClotildeArchived 2017-05-25 at theWayback Machine.
^Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo (1995).Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Louisiana State University Press. p. 58.
^"Shotgun Houses".National Park Service: African American Heritage & Ethnography. Archived fromthe original on August 30, 2010. RetrievedDecember 3, 2014.
^Fouad Zakharia; Analabha Basu; Devin Absher; Themistocles L. Assimes; Alan S. Go; Mark A. Hlatky; Carlos Iribarren; Joshua W. Knowles; Jun Li; Balasubramanian Narasimhan; Stephen Sydney; Audrey Southwick; Richard M. Myers; Thomas Quertermous; Neil Risch; Hua Tang (December 22, 2009)."Characterizing the admixed African ancestry of African Americans"(PDF).Genome Biology.10 (12). Stanford University School of Medicine and the University of California, San Francisco: R141.doi:10.1186/gb-2009-10-12-r141.PMC2812948.PMID20025784. RetrievedApril 13, 2015.
