The Mythical-Ancestral Crossroads in Changó, el gran putas, by Manuel Zapata Olivella

ABSTRACT The Afro-Colombian physician, anthropologist and writer Manuel Zapata Olivella (1920-2004) in his book Changó, el gran putas [Changó, the Great Whores] (1983) fictionally creates the epic of the arrival of Africans to the Americas and elaborates a detailed historical rescue of the struggles and demands of Afro-Latin Americans for more than four centuries. That said, in this article we will start from the concepts of Encruzilhada [Crossroads] (MARTINS, 2003; RUFINO, 2019), Pedagogia da Cimarronaje [Pedagogy of Cimarronaje] (MENDES, 2019) and Afrorealismo [Afrorealism] (DUNCAN, 2005) to understand, from paradigms centered on the black-African experience, Latin American Literature, specifically that of Afro-descendant authorship, as well as other representations regarding the subject and black epistemological contributions, commonly stereotyped and marginalized in literary and intellectual constructions.