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"I was in Puerto Rico for a month and a half and came back for a little while and went to Ecuador," said Dr. Marta Moreno Vega recently in an exclusive telephone interview with The Amsterdam News. Questioned further, she explained, "In Puerto Rico, we did an international African Spirituality Conference, and I was working on my research project on African religion [there] for a documentary on African religion in RR. In Ecuador, it was a meeting with a network of Afro-Latina women from throughout Latin America, the Caribbean, Belize, Haiti, planning a meeting of Afrodescendent women in Panama at the end of April."
For over three decades, the tireless founder and president of the highly respected Franklin H. Williams Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI) in Manhattan has led the charge in cementing communities of peoples of African descent from, literally, around the world, and educating people of color about their common African roots and how they can help themselves politically and otherwise through understanding similar pasts.
When the center premiered officially in 1976, Dr. Vega said the first exhibit was one of photographs culled from private collections and the Library of Congress. She reminisced, "I wanted us to realize that we [African descendente] looked the same wherever we went and wherever we were taken [during enslavement]." A theme later adopted by CCCADI was "to make the invisible visible."
She pointed out to an inquisitive reporter that, no, her...