“Liborio is not dead,” a popular décima insists. The line does not have to deny a date. Its truth belongs to another order: a person can die and continue to act inside a community.
The Jupías say something similar from a much older time. In the Taíno cosmology recorded—imperfectly and through a colonial lens—by Ramón Pané, the hupía or opía was the spirit of the dead person. It left the body without disappearing from the universe. It returned at night, assumed forms, and continued to brush against the world of the living.
Papá Liborio and the Jupías are not the same kind of figure. One belongs to the documented history of the twentieth century; the others to an Indigenous cosmology known through problematic sources. Their force comes from not confusing them: two different roads toward persistence.
Papá Liborio: from persecuted man to collective presence
Olivorio Mateo was born in 1876 in the San Juan region. The movement that took his name formed in 1908, after he said he had received a divine mission during a disappearance. He became a healer, preacher, and leader of a rural community, offering spiritual relief, attention, moral order, and cohesion in a territory with limited institutional presence.
Political power read that community differently. The Dominican National Archives explains that Liborio was treated as a threat and persecuted, especially during the United States military occupation. He died in combat in 1922.
Only 14 years separate 1908 from 1922—enough to generate a movement whose memory crossed the century. Contemporary studies insist that reducing Liborio to a “sorcerer” or folkloric curiosity erases history: the relations among Afro-Dominican spirituality, rural leadership, resistance, and sovereignty.
That tension defines his arcano. Papá Liborio can signify embodied faith, communal care, and resistance against authority unable to recognize popular legitimacy. His shadow requires vigilance: limitless charisma, obedience, weaponized martyrdom, or a leader mistaken for truth itself.
Papá Liborio asks: Is the community following a voice, or has that voice learned to listen to the community?
The Jupías: the soul that returns at night
The word appears in several forms: hupía, opía, and within this project, jupía. A recent publication from the University of Turin’s Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography describes it as the “spirit or soul of the dead.” After physical decomposition, the hupía traveled to Coaybay, the realm of the deceased, but could re-enter the ordinary world at night, associated with the forest, guava fruit, and nocturnal beings such as bats and owls.
This material must be read humbly. Pané’s Account of the Antiquities of the Indians is a decisive early source on Antillean religion, but it was commissioned within conquest. Scholars have described its failure of translation: complex Taíno concepts were forced into Christian categories such as idol, god, or superstition. We do not possess a transparent window into the fifteenth century.
That limitation belongs inside the card. The Jupías cannot become archaeological decoration or generic ghosts. They also remind us that this memory arrives in fragments produced by people participating in its destruction.
In light, the Jupías signify ancestral memory, dream, continuity, counsel from the absent, and nonlinear time. In shadow: an invasive past, arrested grief, idealization of the dead, or inherited voices that prevent life.
The Jupías ask: What part of my life belongs to those who are gone, and what must I return to them?
Faith, archive, apparition
Together, the cards ask who has the right to remain.
Papá Liborio persisted because followers refused to accept that a political death canceled his meaning. The Jupías persisted because even a colonial archive could not entirely erase the Taíno idea of an active relationship between living and dead.
Memory is not passive. It heals, organizes, warns, and makes claims. It can also manipulate. These cards do not automatically celebrate everything ancestral or sacred. They ask what we do with it.
Four numbers and an absence
- 1876: Olivorio Mateo’s birth.
- 1908: the beginning of the Liborista movement, according to the National Archives.
- 1922: Liborio’s death during military persecution.
- 14 years: the interval between the movement’s formation and its leader’s death.
- One unquantifiable absence: the Taíno knowledge lost or distorted through conquest.
The final figure matters most. Responsible research does not fill every gap with fantasy. Sometimes it marks the opening and allows the viewer to feel its weight.
Giving form without taking the body
Papá Liborio’s card must preserve the man inside the myth: mountain, community, a human gaze, traces of persecution and healing. It needs no easy halo. Its power rises from the tension between vulnerability and presence.
The Jupías should feel multiple—not European white ghosts, but presences moving in and out of landscape: unstable bodies, nocturnal eyes, guavas, wings, roots, faces almost recognized. The image may conceal more than it reveals because the source itself arrives incomplete.
In The Arcanos of the House, both figures meet at memory’s threshold. He reminds us that a community can turn the persecuted into a symbol. They remind us that the dead never fully accepted the language conquerors used to name them.