Thirteen essays gathered by Bellegarde-Smith treat the African-derived faiths of the Americas as more than matters of belief. They are read here as a means by which people under European domination held their ground, and kept on holding it.

The writers assembled for the volume—among them Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, Ina Johanna Fandrich and Miguel "Willie" Ramos, and others—work in different academic fields, come from several countries, and stand largely apart from the scholarly lineage of the West. Their methods differ just as widely, ranging from archival study and fieldwork to interviews and, in some cases, reflection on their own spiritual lives.

What binds the essays is a shared claim about continuity. Ancestral practice, on this account, neither survived intact nor disappeared; it crossed the ocean in pieces, and those pieces were rewoven into creolized ritual, into systems of symbol, and into the sense a community has of who it is.