Yemaya comes from Yoruba religion as the name of the sea mother goddess and nurturing divine mother.
Yemaya — also spelled Yemoja, Iemanjá, or Yemayá depending on the diaspora tradition — is one of the most powerful and widely venerated names in the African spiritual world and its descendants in the Americas. In the Yoruba religion of West Africa, Yemoja is the orisha of rivers, motherhood, and the origin of all waters; her name derives from the Yoruba "Yeye omo eja," meaning "Mother whose children are like fish" — an image of infinite, uncountable nurturing. She is the great mother of the orishas, source of life and abundance, and her domain extends from the fresh waters of the Ogun River in Nigeria to the saltwater expanses of the Atlantic.
When enslaved Yoruba people were transported across the Middle Passage, they carried their spiritual traditions with them, syncretizing them with Catholic saints in Brazil (where she became Iemanjá, identified with Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception), Cuba and Puerto Rico (Santería/Lucumí, where she is Yemayá), and Trinidad and Tobago (Spiritual Baptist traditions). In Brazil, her feast on February 2nd draws millions of devotees to coastal cities to offer flowers and gifts to the sea. She has become one of the most recognized figures of African diasporic spirituality worldwide, celebrated in art, music, and literature from Candomblé ceremony to the poetry of Lucille Clifton.
As a given name, Yemaya has been used within Afro-diasporic communities to honor this ancestral spiritual tradition, claiming African heritage with directness and reverence. In recent decades it has moved into broader use among parents drawn to names with deep spiritual resonance, mythological weight, and connections to the natural world. It is a name that carries an entire ocean of history — the beauty and the grief of it, and the survival.