UC Santa Cruz

Yemaya’s Children (YC) is a Black community-based education organization that facilitates international travel for low-income youth in Baltimore. The two Black women co-founders of YC were inspired to found the organization in 2014 after encountering Black students from Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean attending Escuela Latinoamericana de la Medicina (ELAM) outside of Havana, Cuba. In their words, the organization is grounded in “heal[ing] Black people.” For the co-founders, if Black youth are to survive and thrive in Baltimore, they need to heal. Drawing on qualitative data collected over four years in collaboration with YC, including participant observations during program events and international excursions, content analysis of program material, and interviews conducted with youth and adult leaders, I conceptualize YC’s curricular framework as emphasizing healing, unlearning, and extending. This curriculum re-orients focus on the future through imaginative exercises, demonstrating one of the ways that contemporary Black travel moves away from the past-oriented engagements that roots tourism allowed for and emphasizes collaborative future-building. Youth participants extend what they have learned beyond the organization such as by collaborating with city government to pass legislation that addresses the unique experiences of Baltimore youth. Yet working with organizations and institutions that are not focused on Black liberation can present unique challenges for youth. I find that they navigate these challenges by implementing lessons learned from the YC curriculum, especially those pertaining to healing. I conceptualize the ways in which one of YC’s central productions – a poster that Mayah and Ari commissioned to illustrate Carlota Lukumi – acts as a visual representation of the organization’s curricular framework. As a maternal archetype of fugitivity, Carlota emphasizes the role of fugitivity within the process of achieving Black liberation; circulates revolutionary ideals throught the diaspora; and attends to the maternal as a mode of feminist boundary-crossing to recognize the ways in which people and spaces contain the capacity for multiplicity. Carlota’s image signifies the YC curricular framework as constituted within Black feminist and decolonial praxes that generates fugitive imaginations for the future. Ultimately, this curricular framework, aided by the incorporation of international travel, presents ways for youth to understand themselves as capable of creating the future they need to thrive.