to narcotraffic.
At the time of Victory Academy’s baptism, addiction also had other economic implications, accounting for more than 10% of U.S. health expenditures and 60% of prison sentences—to a total cost of $468 billion per year in the United States and Puerto Rico (CASA 2009, U.S. Department of Justice 2005). Both U.S. President George W. Bush and the Puerto Rican Governor Pedro Roselló ushered in the twenty-first century by espousing evangelism as a primary answer to drug abuse in the Americas, while many grassroots ministries resisted governmental support, seeing it as an encroachment on their practice of faith (Hansen 2005). The politics of addiction and evangelism were publicly debated, yet there was little sociocultural analysis of addiction ministries and the symbolic, relational, and political work they did for converts. Historically and to the present, we can see Puerto Rico—“Rich Port” in English—as a port of entry for Latin American narcotics and rum to the United States, and simultaneously as a port of entry for North American ascetic Protestantism to Latin America. In the crosshairs, the impact of street ministries’ efforts to reconfigure bodily practices, identities, relationships, and society has yet to be determined.
Puerto Rican street ministries strive to overcome addiction by re-imagining relations of power. This book begins by asking how spiritual transcendence, self-transformation, and enchantment of the world are cultivated in street ministries: that is, how Pentecostal healing of addiction “works” as a social technology. It ends by asking how these techniques ultimately influence a convert’s marginality—that is, if they “work.” I take up Pentecostal technologies of transformation that street ministries adapt to addiction: mysticism, ascetic practice, and the alternative power structure of ministries as “in the world but not of the world.” I then track converts’ gender-based attempts to establish moral authority in their ministries, their families, and communities. I end with elements of spiritual renewal and alternative community building that I recognized in the creative arts therapies and community gardening of a biomedical addiction clinic years after my research in Puerto Rico, elements that challenge the narrow pharmaceuticalization of addiction and mental health treatment. Pentecostal practices of identity change and re-valuation begin to answer the question to which I return at the end this book, of what clinical practitioners can learn and adapt from the other-worldly ministries encamped in Puerto Rico’s abandoned storefronts and motels.
1
The Cosmology of Conversion
Pentecostal knowledge is experiential. It is based on a sensory theology, a theology of emotional and tactile encounter—some call it possession—that is all-encompassing. The encounter heightens awareness of the motives of others, and of one’s own interior state. Street ministers describe the encounter as intimate contact with the Holy Spirit, marked by the sensation of being filled or embraced. They use the encounter to retrain desire, by giving personal testimony, by reinterpreting sensory experiences as signals from an occult spiritual realm, and by reframing setbacks as spiritual tests. The ultimate goal of the encounter is to achieve a complete break with pre-conversion ways of seeing the world, and to re-people the world with enchanted experiences, beings, and passions. Christian knowledge, then, only is gained through radical rupture with everyday perception.
This concept of knowledge presented me, a non-Pentecostal, with a dilemma of understanding. As Pentecostals are fond of saying, to know it, you have to live it. I could have dismissed their point as a ploy to convert me, but I sensed that it was also correct. The core of what sustained them and shaped their view of the world was not available through books, charts, or scientific instruments; not in the way that I’d acquired biomedical knowledge. To appreciate Pentecostal knowledge, I had to travel new ground.
• • •
The road to Restoration House is lined by wild grasses and mango trees, crossed by chickens and thin, balding dogs. The route passes old Spanish colonials of the town plaza—their boarded windows covered with graffiti, rows of tin shacks with peeling paint—over bridges, through fallow fields, and past shirtless men sipping beers in the heat on the porch. After a half mile on a dirt road up a mountain, I came upon a tall white gate attached to a twelve-foot iron fence. A young man sat in the guard’s booth. He greeted me with “Te bendiga” (“God bless you”). I explained that I was there to see the director, and the gates slowly drew open.
Inside the gate, trimmed hedges, planted flowers, and rocks painted with biblical quotations contrasted with the wild grasses outside. The asphalt driveway from the gate implored those exiting the program in white and blue paint: “Detente, Piensa: Cristo te Ama” (“Stop, Think: Christ Loves You”) (fig. 5). The muraled stucco buildings encircling the grounds read “Cafetería,” (Cafeteria), “Capilla” (Chapel), “Barbería la Fe” (Faith Barbershop) (fig. 6), “Biblioteca” (Library), “Dispensario” (Dispensary). The quiet of midday siesta penetrated the banana grove and the basketball court (fig. 7), as well as the dormitories, each named for a book of the Bible, including “Corintios” (Corinthians) and “Romanos” (Romans). I noted how much the Christian programs resembled each other physically: on a mountain, with carefully groomed grounds and open space for games and gardens. The grit of condemned buildings and abandoned cars in the urban neighborhoods from which converts came was washed away in this bucolic rendition of a home for addicts. No more than five miles from the town center, the small compound nonetheless evoked the pilgrimage of prophets into the wilderness, its elevation conjured Moses on the mountain. The gates might have referenced New Jerusalem had the twelve-foot iron fence that enclosed it not been topped with barbed wire, as much to keep residents in as unwanted visitors out.
FIGURE 5. Gate to exit Restoration House. The sign reads, “Stop, think: Christ loves you.” Photo by Helena Hansen.
FIGURE 6. Faith Barber Shop at Restoration House. Photo by Helena Hansen.
FIGURE 7. The basketball court at Restoration House. Photo by Helena Hansen.
The guard led me through a glass door to Director Menocal’s desk. Stocky and gray-haired, Menocal was flanked by plaques from the city recognizing his service to the community, and from a seminary in San Juan for his scholarly achievements. His curriculum, he explained, involved three basic steps: Detoxification in the dormitories for six months, recuperation while living on program grounds for up to twelve months, and spiritual growth in the community after that. As residents reached the recuperation stage they got weekend passes to leave the compound. They attended culto, or religious services, Bible classes, and were assigned tasks such as cleaning or cooking. They also learned potential occupations such as frame making, lamination, and barbering.
In the last phase, that of spiritual growth, some took university courses or got married to the women with whom they’d been living before treatment. Menocal pointed to wedding photos of program graduates on his desk. Success, he told me, is that the residents work, attend school, have a family and children, and that they are a Christian presence in their community.
Twenty-eight years prior, Menocal himself was a heroin user, living on the streets of San Juan. He went to prison and was rehabilitated in Silo, one of the original evangelical addiction treatment programs in Puerto Rico. He found the Lord there, and his calling in life; he graduated from seminary in Bayamón, then came to the
