This volume has examined how the Yoruba in Cuba and the Cuban-Yoruba in Nigeria constructed communities across the Atlantic. This particular flow of people and culture was fueled by a social imagination that understood the other shores of the Atlantic as a sort of homeland. One homeland did not rule out the other, however. The Lagosians in nineteenth-century Cuba and the Aguda in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Lagos understood their identities as diasporic, as fluid, and as belonging to the processes of journey and relocation. The longing that made these communities articulate a sense of difference in their new environments was a way of understanding who they were in new contexts, of creating a sense of identity. Whether in Havana or Lagos, family history played a large role in how people came to understand why they moved from Nigeria, to Cuba, and back. In a sense, Cuba and Nigeria were situated as extensions of each other in terms of culture and belonging for the Lagosians in Havana and the Aguda of Lagos.

What occurred when these populations moved between Havana and Lagos, for example, was that the same families and communities coinhabited different borderlands and boundaries. They conceptually linked themselves with several different categories of people: Lagosian, Cuban, Lucumí, Yoruba, African. They made their connections to each other known primarily through the performance of folklore and other kinds of aesthetic production.