Marta Moreno Vega

Marta Moreno Vega (born 1948) is an Afro‑Puerto Rican cultural activist, educator and institutional founder whose work over five decades has centered the histories, religious expressions and artistic practices of the African diaspora in urban North America. She founded the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI) in New York City in 1976 and has since been associated with a range of curatorial projects, educational programs and community initiatives that bring Afro‑Caribbean cultural and religious forms—among them orisha devotion and other African‑derived practices—into public institutional settings.

Moreno Vega’s emergence as a cultural organizer took place in the broader historical context of the 1960s and 1970s, when civil rights struggles, Black cultural movements and the growth of ethnic studies fostered new institutional experiments. In that milieu, advocates for Afro‑Caribbean and Afro‑Latinidad sought ways to preserve heritage, counter marginalization and build platforms for artistic and ritual expression. Moreno Vega’s founding of CCCADI and related programming aimed to address gaps in mainstream cultural institutions by creating site(s) where diasporic histories, music, dance and spiritual traditions could be documented, performed and taught.

While Moreno Vega is not generally described as a strict practitioner of Cuban Lukumí Santería, her work intersects with Afro‑Caribbean religious practices through collaborations with ritual practitioners, the presentation of Orisha‑derived music and dance in performance contexts, and the provision of forums for dialogue between practitioners and scholars. These interventions have foregrounded the religious and cultural contributions of African diasporic communities and given ritual communities institutional access they historically lacked. Scholars and community members frequently credit her initiatives with increasing public visibility and with opening spaces where liturgical arts and ritual forms are displayed alongside historical interpretation.

Key actions in Moreno Vega’s career include curating exhibitions that integrate ritual objects and performance, producing staged works that draw on orisha rhythms and choreography, and organizing educational series that introduce wider publics to diasporic cosmologies and histories. Her institutional work also involved advocacy—pressing museums, universities and cultural funders to recognize the significance of African‑derived religious traditions and to support community‑based knowledge production. At the same time, scholars note that translating ritual knowledge into museum and performance contexts raises contested issues about representation, authenticity and the risk of commodification; some practitioners and academics have debated how public presentation can change the meanings of sacred practices.

Moreno Vega’s legacy is that of an institutional interlocutor: a figure who has helped to shape how Santería‑related and other Afro‑diasporic traditions are preserved, performed and reframed beyond their places of origin. By creating programming that links ritual performance, historical education and community services, she has contributed to new relational contexts in which diasporic religious life is both protected and made legible to diverse audiences. Her work is often cited by practitioners and scholars as influential in the ongoing project of cultural recognition and community empowerment for Afro‑Caribbean religious and cultural expression.