crime buddy of the tall black man. Big brother was recently released from prison, where he found Jesus Christ and was born again. He now raises white doves on the rooftop of their high-rise apartment building. He is determined to save his little brother, a task requiring prayers and preaching, sin and salvation.
The images of hell are terrifying. Human faces melt away in Satan’s flames, skeletal remains and teeth dropping in a damned heap. The worms and snakes eat their way through brains, slithering out of mangled ears and wailing mouths that only now—too late—proclaim the error of their ways. I looked around and every single face was transfixed, staring unblinkingly at the white sheet of hell.
Suddenly the sheet went blank. All heads turned toward the back, and we could see Isaías peering over the side of the field. The generator had gone the way of many soccer balls—it had fallen over the steep drop to the river below. We gathered around as two boys went running down the hill to retrieve what was left of the generator. Manuco shook his head and, inspired by the bottle of trago he kept tucked inside his jacket, proclaimed: “It must have been the Catholics. A Catholic must have given it a push!” Even Isaías managed a weak smile as we kept peering over the cliff.
The images that evening had awakened in the hermanos and hermanas gathered in Carhuahurán a sense of shared experiences with the actors who appeared on the screen, despite the radically different context. The audience was not passively consuming this visual feast but rather, as Michel De Certeau suggests, they were elaborating their own secondary productions.21 These secondary productions allowed them to imagine a Christian community that erased centuries as well as cultural and national differences and to script a world in which they as well as the Israelites traverse the same landscape—a landscape of exodus, struggle, and return.22 Arjun Appadurai has written that today the imagination plays a more important role than ever before in social life: “The new power of the imagination in the fabrication of social lives is inescapably tied up with images, ideas and opportunities that come from elsewhere, often moved around by the vehicles of the mass media.”23 Both the Bible films and Radio Amauta have been key players in the collective memories people have about the sasachakuy tiempo. I sat in an audience that ranged from wawakuna wrapped in shawls around their mothers’ backs to elderly men and women who had first watched these films when the Virgin Mary was still a soprano. Where do the images come from that we use to construct our memories? Can “reel images” become the stuff of “real” life?
My understanding of these questions is greatly influenced by Gauri Viswanathan.24 She suggests that religion is in part an epistemology, a way in which people both construct and interact with the real. If we understand conversion as not only a religious act but also a communicational act, an interpretive act, a way of restructuring relationships, then we can see religion as very much a thing-of-this-world. We come closer to the experiential and phenomenological aspects of conversion to Evangelismo. The familiar stories of grinding poverty, rural-to-urban migration, anomie, social mobility, and fostering collective identity are all plausible motives for conversion, but clearly they do not exhaust the motives people have for becoming an Evangélico or the legacies of that conversion. These motives and their legacies are innumerable and shape every chapter of this book. For now, we turn to a holy triad.
Bodies of Faith
What is it about the Evangelical message that resonates so profoundly with the experience of displacement? The exodus figures prominently in the testimonies I have heard, and forced migration was one product of the internal armed conflict. However, displacement occurs on several dimensions, not only in the spatial realm. Due to the political violence, many rural villagers were unable to reproduce their daily cultural practices: burying loved ones was frequently impossible, taking sacrifices to the mountains was dangerous, and fiestas and ferias were suspended at various junctures. Even for populations that remained in situ during the war, there was a cultural displacement that blocked the reproduction of individual and collective identity. As Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson suggest, even populations that remain on their land can experience changes so profound that the naturalness of a place is called into question.25
The Evangelical Christianity villagers practice contrasts with the “popular Catholicism” that characterized these communities for a span of several centuries.26 Popular Catholicism—and its emphasis on the images of the saints—was constructed on the basis of the prehispanic Andean religion, in which faith was grounded in a sacred landscape of tutelary gods, via huacas and wamanis.27 However, as Vidal has explained, Evangelical pastors urged people to burn the idols, arguing that the saints were just a “pile of rags” with painted yeso (plaster of paris) faces.
Pastor Pascual made the same argument in another conversation. It was a relentlessly rainy day and I was huddled inside my room in Carhuahurán, watching the dirt and straw mixture that held the doorframe in place slowly turn to mud, large gobs thudding to the ground. Amid this dreary scene of domestic decay, I heard a familiar voice outside my door. Pastor Pascual helped force open my door, strategically using it to shove the accumulated mud to one side of the room. He gave his striped poncho a few good shakes. His brown felt hat was also soaked, but he left it on. I never saw anyone take off their hat except in church or when singing the national anthem. I ladled up a cup of miski yaku, and we settled in for a chat. At some point I asked if the Evangélicos in Carhuahurán had destroyed their saints, and he began nodding mid-question.
“Our Señor forbids it. Before, people thought they had power. We believed in them. But they’re just yeso. I also had fiestas and placed candles and flowers—kneeling I prayed to them,” Pascual recalled, shaking his head. “But they’re the work of the devil. You place flowers, candles, but nothing happens. But when you deliver yourself to the evangelio, you’re with God and the devil hates you. The devil looks at you all bothered,” he explained, making a diabolically bothered grimace. “He tries to make you fall however he can. The saints—they’re made of yeso, dirt, rags! I could make one right now,” he scoffed. “I could make a saint or a virgin! But they worship them. What power can these have?” He shook his head. “Those who trust in the saints are trusting in the devil—not in our Señor Jesucristo but in the devil himself. God doesn’t permit that.”
While the saints and tutelary gods anchored faith in icons and a defined sacred geography, Evangelismo is simultaneously “deterritorialized” and embodied. From the conversations I had with Evangélicos, it is clear the Evangelical body is occupied by either Satan or the Holy Spirit.28 I think of this as “floating charisma”: the transformative power of faith is no longer “fixed” in religious images or moored to the landscape. So where does it inhere? In the Bible and in the body.
I recall one evening in culto in Carhuahurán. The rain did not keep the faithful from climbing up the hill to the Evangelical church next door to Michael’s corral. I was using my flashlight, a round ball of light bouncing along the path. I paused for a moment, remembering the curfew on flashlights that had been imposed at the Sunday formación. It was late 1999 and concerns that people were “walking again” (a reference to renewed Senderista activity) were fueled by sightings of flashlight beams in the hills. The ronderos had established a shoot-on-sight rule, but I checked my watch and it was only 7:30—the (flash)lights out began at 9:00 p.m.
I entered and took a place on one of the wooden slabs. After several hymns the pastor requested we stand to recite a passage from the Bible, and I noticed the women, each holding a tattered book in her hands. None of the women could read, but the formality of the book was important. That book appeared in many people’s stories of the war. The Bible had literally saved lives.
Dionisia was one of the women in culto that evening. I was visiting her a few days later and offered to take her photograph. She was delighted by the idea and carefully sat under a bush in her yard, smoothing a few rebellious strands of hair with her hands. When I began
