Converts were trained to cast old wounds aside, to shed them along with their pre-conversion selves.
My informants did not dwell on memories, but they were haunted by the lives they tried to leave behind. From my backroom conversations with Eli, at eighteen the youngest convert at Victory Academy, I learned of her childhood rape at the hands of her foster father. Each night Samaria, the leader of the women’s home, cradled Eli through violent nightmares. I knew that, the year before, Wanda had left her sleeping toddlers at home alone in search of heroin, and that she now traveled two hours to San Juan for court hearings to get them back from foster care. Yeyo, who had lost his job as a mechanic because of crack addiction, later opened an auto shop at the Academy to train young male converts in repairs. Yeyo’s ex-wife, skeptical of his conversion, disappeared with their sons. At the baptism, Yeyo was torn between his spiritual progeny in the ministry, and his compulsion to search for his sons. Additionally, despite Victory Academy’s promise to free women from abusive men, Eli and Wanda would find little room for themselves in the reinvented patriarchy of Victory Academy, where men were spiritual heads of home, and unmarried, willful women were a threat. Yeyo, Eli, and Wanda saw in the ministry a chance to renew themselves, to plaster over old wounds and build on firm ground. Unlike the motel that housed the ministry, however, the transformation of their identities and domestic lives was never complete.3
Incomplete transformations of social hierarchies are common in grassroots religious movements; examples include Muslim women’s attempt to forge their own leadership within the gendered structure of Islam, in places ranging from Egypt to African America (Rouse 2004, Mahmood 2004); and black Christian women’s church-based political activism and influence on male preachers (Frederick 2003, Casselberry 2017), and the blend of progressive and conservative politics reflected in African American televangelism (Walton 2009). Pentecostalism in particular historically has housed an array of gender and racial politics, ranging from Aimee Semple McPherson, single mother and preacher who founded Four Square Gospel, one of the largest Pentecostal ministries of the early twentieth century; and William Seymour, African American self-ordained pastor whose interracial 1906 Azusa Street revival was the progenitor of contemporary Pentecostalism; to televangelists Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker, leaders of the anti-feminist and anti-integrationist U.S. Religious Right in the latter twentieth century.
Pentecostalism serves as an adaptable framework for social organization and cultural innovation, rather than being a stable set of practices, beliefs, or politics. To see its many valences, I provide foreground on the interpretations that converts make of themselves. I try to be cautious in applying theoretical frameworks that would give me narrative control, and am mindful of the words of social theorist bell hooks:
No need to hear your voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own. Re-writing you, I write myself anew. I am still author, authority. I am still [the] colonizer, the speaking subject, and you are now at the center of my talk (Hooks 1990, 241).
Narrative control can lead to colonization akin to that which contemporary anthropologists critique; it also can lead anthropologists to miss innovations occurring at social margins.
In medical anthropology, much of the contemporary ethnography of social margins builds on concepts of social suffering, in which an individual’s suffering is “taken as a manifestation of social structural oppression/or collective experience of cultural trauma” (Wilkinson 2005, Wilkinson and Kleinman 2016), as well as structural violence: the everyday violence of exclusion, deprivation, and vulnerability caused by institutional structures and policies that create inequalities (c.f. Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004, Farmer 2005). These studies illuminate how power inequalities exact tolls on the bodies and minds of people on the margins. Global capitalist extremes of accumulation, deprivation, and war rob marginal people of their humanity. In post-industrial society, taken-for-granted bodily routines and popular discourses in themselves serve as technologies of control, theorized by Michel Foucault (1976) as biopower, in which people unwittingly reinforce their own domination as they manage and discipline themselves.
These bodies of work illustrate that individuals do not engineer their own marginality, but they leave open the question of how marginalized people can deliberately influence their own lives. Staying experience near to those at the bottom of social hierarchies, moral economy uses ethnography and popular history to theorize actions that appear self-destructive instead as acts of survival and resistance. Marxist historian E. P. Thompson (1971), who first elaborated the term “moral economy” in his study of the peasant bread riots of eighteenth-century Britain, and anarchist political scientist James Scott (1977), who popularized moral economy in his studies of Malaysian rice farmers, were both interested in peasant resistance to the encroachment of free market capitalism on the older systems of patronage and reciprocity that had ensured peasants’ subsistence. In the United States, urban ethnographers also contrasted the moral systems of the industrial poor with the dominant structures that threaten their survival. In the 1970s, anthropologist Carol Stack’s 1974 study of reciprocity among extended kin networks of African American women as a survival strategy challenged U.S. Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report depicting black single mothers as the pathological producers of a culture of poverty.
In the decades that followed, urban ethnographers adopted moral economy as a framework to understand how some inner-city blacks and Latinos came to see the drug trade as honorable, and to analyze drug-use practices as based on reciprocity and solidarity (Reinarman 1979, Murphy 1987, Bourgois 1995). These studies highlighted their logics of survival, but concluded that these logics locked them into short-term strategies that ultimately maintained their oppression rather than changing the institutions that constrained them. This analytical approach has been enriched by post-structural ethnographers such as Cheryl Mattingly, who describes hope among the families of poor, severely ill African American children as an active practice rather than an emotion or attitude. For her, hope is “the practice of creating, or trying to create, lives worth living even in the midst of suffering . . . to forge new communities of care” (Mattingly 2010, 6). She considers “larger macrostructures as powerful cultural resources . . . that inform life on the ground, not as containers that enclose it” (Mattingly 2010, 47).
The view that marginalized people have developed specific practices of hope, or—in the case of the street ministries described here—technologies of transformation, challenges the idea that social suffering is passive. It raises the question of how marginalized people imagine other ways of living; how they enter the state of openness to new relations and directions described by philosopher Gilles Deleuze as “becoming” (Biehl and Locke 2010), and how they work “to construct a livable world on the other side of their experiences of contact and colonialism” (Robbins 2013, 459). Imagining other ways of living requires vision and action; it calls for moral entrepreneurs who can name, interpret, and dramatize the areas where social hierarchies are contested (Becker 1963), and for moral pioneers who can creatively draw on “prior social relations and cultural understandings [to] condition the uses . . . [of new] technologies” (Rapp 2011, 12).
The details of how people imagine and interpret their alternatives matter. In the United States (including Puerto Rico), the figure of the inner city black or Latino addict sits in the center of debates about whether poverty is culturally or structurally determined, and about the merits of “bootstrapping” and mutual aid as opposed to a systemic political-economic overhaul. Some call on the addicted poor to discipline themselves, to earn societal inclusion and respect. Others call for a reordering of the State to address unemployment and basic needs as fundamental causes of addiction. Few ask if and how addicted poor people already are positioning themselves for change. Within a U.S. political discourse that casts evangelical politics as a product of the conservative white middle and lower classes, the complex practices and motives of evangelists from non-dominant ethnic and racial groups rarely are examined.
Puerto Rican street ministries address the social and political marginalization of ex-addicted converts with a narrative of collective
