Yoruba Americans (Yoruba: Àwọn ọmọ Yorùbá Amẹrika) are
Americans of
Yoruba descent. The Yoruba people are a
West African ethnic group that predominantly inhabits southwestern
Nigeria, with smaller indigenous communities in
Benin and
Togo.
The first Yoruba people who arrived to the United States were imported as
slaves from Nigeria and
Benin during the
Atlantic 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 the
Igbo. In addition, native slaves of current Benin hailed from peoples such as
Nago,[note 1]Ewe,
Fon, and
Gen. Many of the slaves imported to the modern United States from Benin were sold by the
King of Dahomey, in
Whydah.[4][6][note 2]
The slaves brought with them their cultural practices, languages, cuisine[8] and religious beliefs rooted in spirit and
ancestor worship.[9] So, the manners of the Yoruba, Fon, Gen and Ewe of Benin were key elements of
Louisiana 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 the
apartment of one of Padrino's followers on East 146th Street in the Bronx.[12]: 1150 The
American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) had complained about Santería's practices of animal sacrifice.[12]: 1150 Three
goats and eighteen
chickens were removed from the dwelling.[12]: 1150
The Yoruba, and some northern Nigerian ethnic groups, had
tribal facial identification marks. These could have assisted a returning slave in relocating his or her ethnic group, but few slaves escaped the colonies. 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, most
African Americans share ancestry with the
Yoruba people.[14][15]
After the
slavery 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. President
Lyndon B. Johnson signed the
Immigration 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 the
Nigerian-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 and
Ibibio origins.
Yoruba have often found American habits of
pet 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 the
Americas (from the U.S. to
Brazil). 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-Clotilde.
^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. Retrieved December 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. Retrieved April 13, 2015.