the end of the twentieth century, Pentecostalism was the fastest-growing religious movement in Latin America (Cleary and Stewart-Gambino 1997), having increased from 4% to 28% of the population between 1970 and 2005 (Pew 2006). In the early 2000s, Pentecostals were also the fastest growing Protestant denomination in the United States (Warner 2004). Pentecostals are characterized by the doctrine that any worshiper can establish direct contact with the Holy Spirit and receive its gifts as described in the biblical Book of Acts, including speaking in tongues, prophecy, and healing by faith. Pentecostalism gives ultimate authority to personal experience: to a communion with the Spirit that is available to all regardless of literacy, income, or previous knowledge of the Bible. As one worshiper in a Puerto Rican addiction ministry told me, “Pentecostals believe in personal sanctity, in long skirts and long sleeves. The experience of being saved is very clear, there is no doubt about the presence of God.”
Pentecostalism is not one denomination, it is a multi-denominational movement characterized by charismatic worship and a theology of gifts. Although many of the ministries I studied referred to themselves simply as Christian or evangelical rather than Pentecostal, I use the term Pentecostal because it describes a worship style that unites most of the street ministries in Puerto Rico.
Street ministries target beleaguered neighborhoods much like those of the early twentieth-century American cities from which Pentecostalism first emerged. Like the Azusa Street Mission of 1906 inner city Los Angeles, that unified African American, Mexican, and white American worshipers in what many historians identify as the first Pentecostal revival, contemporary Puerto Rican street ministries blend a clean-living doctrine of abstinence from substances and from sex outside of marriage, with an expressive worship style drawing on African and Latin American music and oratory, that is designed to elevate worshipers to a state of contact with the Holy Spirit.
The Pentecostal movement has deep roots in Puerto Rico, where Pentecostalism was well established by 1920, and produced several generations of Puerto Rican leaders and missionaries (Moore 1998). Notably, anthropologist Sidney Mintz’s classic 1950s biography of a Puerto Rican sugar-cane worker ends with the worker’s conversion to Pentecostalism (Mintz 1960).
Upon U.S. occupation of the island in 1898, the Catholic Church—which had been intertwined with the Spanish colonial government—no longer could exclude Protestant sects from missionary work on the island. North American Protestants rushed to missionize Puerto Rico, envisioning it as their portal to the rest of Latin America. Puerto Rico became a training ground for a Puerto Rican clergy who went on to found missions in the rest of Latin America (Milham 1951). Puerto Rico thus was evangelized earlier than its Latin American counterparts, due to its political and geographical proximity to the United States.
Early Protestant evangelists strove to solve problems of poverty and respectability in Puerto Rico. They opened hospitals and schools, and gained converts as a result (Sprinkle et al. 1964). Protestants supported temperance and prohibition; they identified widespread drinking among the rural poor as signs of moral depravity. The Protestant clean-living program—including abstinence from substances, legal marriage, and fidelity—appealed to Puerto Ricans looking for upward mobility (Martinez-Fernandez 2000). As in other parts of Latin America, Protestant conversion promised to affect male consumption and behavior—for instance, to reduce money spent on alcohol and mistresses—to elevate the image and income of their families (see Brusco 1995). Male abstention through Christian temperance therefore has been a recurring theme in Puerto Rican society for longer than it has throughout the rest of Latin America—where the Catholic Church was enmeshed with the state (Clark 1995).
In fact, in Puerto Rico (as in other former Spanish colonies) Pentecostals see themselves in opposition to Catholics, as an anti-establishment movement that challenges the rigid social hierarchy of Catholicism, and that challenges what they see as Catholicism’s empty moral pronouncements—the hypocrisy of lax personal practices among Catholic laypeople and clergy, who are said to drink alcohol and to be motivated by personal gain rather than spiritual connection. For Pentecostals, substances and material consumption detract from the spiritual authority of Catholics, whereas personal discipline builds the authority of Pentecostals.
Ironically, until the 1960s, many of these ascetic Pentecostal men worked in sugarcane fields, and thus helped to make Puerto Rico a major producer of rum for local consumption and for export to the United States. Beginning in the 1960s, however, Puerto Rico rapidly urbanized, becoming a manufacturing center for U.S. corporations seeking a lower-wage workforce and an import tax shelter. Later, as manufacturing plants sought even cheaper labor in Asia, Puerto Rico became a center of narcotraffic. As a U.S. possession, Puerto Rico’s customs procedures were minimal compared to those of other nations bordering the United States. By the 1980s—when the U.S. heightened narcotics surveillance at the Mexican border—Puerto Rico became the main Caribbean transfer site of Colombian cocaine and heroin to the United States (Abel 1998). Soon after, Puerto Rico saw a rate of injection drug use–related AIDS greater than that of New York City (CDC 2001), and a drug-related homicide rate greater than that of the mainland United States (Booth and Drummond 1996, Abel 1998, Goodnough 2003).
The baptism that I observed at Victory Academy took place in 2001, the dawn of the new millennium. The last quarter of the twentieth century had been punishing for families like Eli’s, Wanda’s and Yeyo’s. Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty had become what many called the War on the Poor. A key element in this shift was the War on Drugs, declared by Richard Nixon in 1971 to appease middle-class white voters shaken by black inner-city riots in Watts, Newark, Harlem, Detroit, Chicago, and Washington: voters anxious about alienated Vietnam veterans who had returned to an economy bankrupted by the war. The War on Drugs was intensified by Ronald Reagan starting in 1981 as he signed into law mandatory minimum sentencing for drug convictions, abolished parole for those convicted, and instituted the death penalty for “drug kingpins.” Since Reagan’s presidency, progressively more punitive drug-control legislation has been proposed every election year, leading, for instance, to disqualification of those convicted of a drug charge from receiving federal welfare or food stamps, even if disabled (Baum 1997). These laws coincided with structural adjustment in international economic policy, and national austerity in the United States: historic cuts in social welfare programs, industrial deregulation, growth in income inequalities, and growth in narcotics trade between Latin American and North America.
By the time I reached Puerto Rico, the effects of mandatory minimum sentencing for crack cocaine possession and targeted searches in poor neighborhoods across the U.S. mainland and territories were clear, with one in three black men and one in six Latino men in the United States serving time at some point in their lives (Maurer and King 2007). In the 1980s through the 2000s, U.S. Congress spent more than $600 billion total on supply-side drug control, including narcotics interdiction in the Caribbean, at the Mexican border, and through U.S. street-level arrests in the War on Drugs (Chalk 2011). In response, narcotraffic between Latin America and the United States grew more organized, technologically sophisticated, and murderous—becoming an industry of an estimated $100 billion per year in the United States alone (Kilmer et al. 2014). In the ten years since 2001, the War on Drugs led to more homicides in the United States than deaths in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (Conroy 2012). By 2011, Puerto Rico had almost twice the per-capita murder rate of Mexico (Latin American Herald Tribune 2012), and six times that of the mainland United States (Connor 2013), with more than 70% of homicides directly attributable to drug trade (Shoichet 2012).
Ethnographies of U.S. urban drug use and trade at the end of the twentieth century depicted them as alternative routes to income and respect among Latinos and African Americans excluded from capitalist mobility in the formal economy (cf. Williams 1989, Anderson 1990, Duneier 1999, Dei 2002). Instead, the excluded cultivate “oppositional identities” which reflect the skills and knowledge that are valued and rewarded in narcotraffic (Bourgois 1995). In those ethnographies, addiction was not seen as a problem of depleted opiate and dopamine neuroreceptors—what I had been taught in medical school—but as a problem of capital. In fact, in Puerto Rico, it might be more precise to describe widespread addiction
