theses might be oversimplified—African American religious practices that resemble West African oratory or musical practices also resemble Welsh and Irish bard traditions (Pitts 1993, Jacobs and Kaslow 1991, Raboteau 1978)—it is true that Pentecostalism emphasizes bodily enmeshment with spirits. Additionally, though Pentecostal theology is certainly monotheistic, in Puerto Rican street ministries the Holy Spirit is the ruling member of an unseen realm peopled with lesser spirits—both good and bad. This rich pneumatic universe resonates with other religious traditions with which Puerto Rican Pentecostal converts are familiar, including Catholic saints and angels, and the Orishas of Santería. Pentecostals call upon or exorcise lesser spirits with the help of the Holy Spirit.
In Restoration House, a good culto is one where the group really feels the Holy Spirit, where worshipers are moved to tears, to speak in tongues, and to rest in the Spirit, where they are held unconscious on the floor by a supernatural force. It is one where the preacher does not speak but lets the Spirit speak through him, pulling new converts to the altar to accept Christ even against their own volition.
The most devoted converts talk about the Holy Spirit as dominating and obsessing them, as something they crave: once they have felt the Holy Spirit’s presence, they cannot stop thinking of it. They talk about the touch and voice of the Holy Spirit in the way that heroin and cocaine users talk about the rush from an injection or inhalation: as a euphoric sensation spreading throughout their bodies, removing their earthly cares. They talk about looking for the Spirit as a way of life, the way that habitual drug users talk of their constant search for drugs. They talk about wanting to reach a state of constant communion with the Spirit, much in the way that drug users talk about their fantasy of a high that never ends. They are willing to endure hunger, physical pain, and public ridicule to make contact with the Spirit, just as they had endured to score drugs before their conversion.
Alternately, worshippers speak of their relationship with the Holy Spirit in romantic terms. They speak of always wanting to please the Spirit, of wanting to show the Spirit their love and wanting to feel love in return. They speak of their guilt when they betray the Spirit, of their efforts to win the trust of the Spirit again, to prove their devotion, to grow in their relationship with the Spirit over time, and to maintain their relationship with the Spirit in the long haul. As the director of an addiction ministry in Yauco told me, “Knowing Christ is like your first love.” Bomann (1999) points out that this language of love is characteristic of Pentecostals in Latin America and elsewhere. Cox (1994) relates this ecstatic devotion among Pentecostals to ancient and medieval erotic mysticism in Europe, in which saints described their desire for physical union with Christ (see also Burrus 2004). It is notable that, in contemporary times, active drug users also talk about drugs as a romantic love object, describing their first experiences with drugs as falling in love, and joking about their drug of choice as if it were a demanding spouse (Courtwright, Joseph, and Des Jarlais 1989).
In street ministries, however, the Holy Spirit is idealized; it is not seen as the source of temptation, cruelty, and destruction as drugs are. In their view, the Holy Spirit in itself is perfect. It is the object of desire because it is never fully attained by mortals for more than fleeting moments. In fact, as Chapter Three illustrates, Christian historians write that such fleeting moments inspired the Pentecostal movement itself. The emotional pull of Pentecostal worship—its affective concentration on the Holy Spirit as the singular object of ecstatic devotion—resembles the self-conscious monotheism of early Christianity, in its language of saintly passion and desire for Christ.
Pentecostal cosmology holds that power is located not in people, but in spirits. In this cosmos, freedom is not human autonomy, it is liberation from evil spirits, enabling individuals to submit their will to the Holy Spirit. As an observer of Pentecostal treatment for alcoholism in Brazil noted, for Pentecostals,
Being free means being free to reject evil. . . . According to this model, the individual is fragile and the force of his own will is not strong enough to escape evil. . . . For this reason, accounts of conversion do not stress repentance of sins but deliverance from evil (Loret Mariz 1998, 205, 219).
In the eyes of its charismatic Christian leadership, the most successful graduates are those who learn to inhabit the dimension of spirits that discretely directs the events around them. In this dimension, converts weave a new web of relations with spirits that disrupt their over-determined relations with people and with drugs. Holy Spirit possession, for instance, channels supernatural forces through discarded addicts, disrupting not only the intrapersonal, but also the social, order.
Ethnographers of spirit possession in a wide range of contexts have analyzed it as a mode of resistance to hierarchies of power; Alexander’s (1991) study of African American Pentecostal spirit possession identified it as ritualized social protest. In his analysis, the speaking in tongues and unpredictable body movements of possession contradict middle-class European American behavioral norms, simultaneously rejecting dominant definitions of the worshippers’ social status as inferior and affirming their sense of personal worth through union with the Holy Ghost. Janice Boddy (1989), in her study of trance possession among women in a gender-stratified Muslim Sudanese society, found that possession allowed them to speak in the voice of powerful men. Aiwa Ong (1987), in her classic study of young women factory workers in Malaysia, highlighted the ways that their spirit possession disrupted factory routines, and thereby the dehumanizing conditions of neoliberal expansion.
In this vein, conversion dislodges everyday social and conceptual relations, and opens an altered state of consciousness in which “a new and richer dimension of the old reality is envisioned and embraced” (Whitehead 1987: 25).
To achieve this altered state, Pentecostal converts disrupt routines through sleep deprivation, fasting, prayer, and drone-like incantation. They induce a state in which mental activity becomes less structured, and the normal rules of hierarchy, class, and causality cease to apply.
Themes of rupture and the discontinuity of the Spirit from the worldly or profane predominate in Pentecostal discourse internationally (Robbins 2004), ruptures that alter the social coordinates of converts. Pastor Mendoza of New Faith Academy, who had served in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War, put it to me this way:
When you accept Christ, you see things differently. Your priorities change . . . if you know [about God] but haven’t experienced Him, you are not saved. It is an experience. . . . I didn’t understand what happened when I converted. I [went through it] first and explained later. Suddenly I read the Bible. I saw my wife and children differently. I didn’t see myself as Puerto Rican. I didn’t see Vietnam. I didn’t see racism.
I understood him to be pointing out that death of his old, carnal self on conversion also meant the end of his subordination, as a Puerto Rican on the U.S. mainland, and as a veteran of an unpopular war. His new self was sacred, above the reach of human oppressions. In Juan’s words, “God is a pottery maker, molding me.” In the words of Samaria, a former heroin user at Victory Academy, “God breaks you up and puts you back together again the way He wants you.”
The pastor’s reference to losing his perception of himself as Puerto Rican also alludes to what Arlene Sanchez-Walsh (2003) has described as a current within Latino Pentecostal movements to reject ethnic solidarity in favor of an idealized global, Pan-Pentecostal community membership. This re-imagining of community as expansive and inclusive is appealing to Latinos who have experienced ethnic and racial marginalization in the United States, and perhaps even more so to ex-addicted converts who struggle with rejection from their own families and neighbors.
Converts speak of this re-imagined Christian self as timeless, as unmarked by ethnicity or class. Among Puerto Ricans, this re-imagining contrasts with struggles over identity politics that contend with anti-Latino, nativist sentiments on the U.S. mainland, and with Puerto Rico’s liminal status as a U.S. territory without statehood or U.S. voting rights, in the midst of economic crisis and pervasive drug trade. Pentecostals across Latin America espouse total
