as reflected in their written and oral histories of themselves. In these histories, addicts are the unlikely instruments through which the Holy Spirit redeems an apocalyptic reality, placing addicts at the center, rather than the margins, of world events. Ironically, Puerto Rico itself is both marginal and central to global political economies. It sits at the geographical and political margin between the United States and Latin America, its burgeoning narcotraffic is the product of the Puerto Rico’s rapid social transformation to meet the needs of U.S. national corporations, originally for low-cost labor and more recently as a primary corporate tax shelter. Puerto Ricans have U.S. citizenship and aspire to the living standards of the U.S. mainland, but do not control local capital. This creates the conditions for consumption of imports and for profound debt, and creates the political conditions to blame drug trade as the cause—rather than the result—of island-wide disinvestment. In this milieu, by 2000, the island’s transition to managed healthcare emerged as the flagship of Puerto Rico’s modernity and compatibility with U.S. mainland economy. Yet the governor—a physician—declared addiction a “spiritual-social” problem better addressed by faith- and community-based organizations than by biomedicine.
Street ministries raise questions about whether techniques of spiritual transformation are ultimately liberatory, whether they are complicit with domination, and whether liberation and domination are mutually exclusive. Here I track these questions through the attempts of a group of addicted, economically displaced Puerto Ricans to build spiritual power; to reinvent gender, family, and work in the alternate social order of self-fashioned ministries.
TRADING ON MORALITY
Ramón sat under the canvas awning that, with eight rows of rusted folding chairs and a makeshift altar of unfinished wood, marked the worship space at Victory Academy. As I studied the green tattoos that wound around his arms, his voice went up in pitch, he was silent for a moment. He was telling me about his daughters, born in the same year to two different women in a “crazy time” in his life, when he was injecting heroin.
His daughters, now nine years old, had shown up at his house wearing makeup. He made no comment. Instead, he grinned, “I played a trick on them.” He made them a big breakfast, then asked them to clean after themselves. When they said “But Daddy, we’re little, we don’t know how . . . ” he pointed to the Bible, “where it says ‘Everything in its time.’ I say ‘If you’re too little to clean, you’re too little to wear lipstick.’ ”
Although Ramón was not formally employed—his tattoos and criminal record made it difficult for him to get jobs—he was being discipled, that is, trained in spiritual leadership. “Now that I’m assistant director of the Academy, their mothers come to me for advice.”
Had Ramón made the transformation that people who are exhausted by addiction dream of? Was he—now an Academy director, trusted father and advisor—no longer an addict? Who is an “addict”?
In Puerto Rico, the people that I found in treatment for addiction did not mention withdrawal symptoms or the amounts of drugs they used when describing themselves as addicts. They described the moment that they lost their position in their families—of abandoning children and losing partners, or of being evicted from their parents’ homes—as the turning point in their self-perception as an addict.
When the Puerto Rican popular press describes addicted people, it shows depraved behavior around gendered roles in families. In the period of Ramón’s heroin use, daily newspapers ran articles with lines such as: “Addicts would even push their addicted sisters into prostitution to raise money for their fixes” (Suarez 1995). Such images were presaged by temperance-era discourses in which the voices of Puerto Rican feminist elites converged with those of local evangelists (as they did in Europe and North America), arguing that male Puerto Rican laborers caused their own poverty by drinking away their income and abandoning their families (Rosario Urrutia and Barcelo Miller 1989). A 1917 prohibitionist ad campaign in a Puerto Rican evangelical newsletter, for instance, featured a man on a barstool, chained to a bottle labeled “Slave to Rum,” while in his home his crying daughter says to her mother “I’m hungry. Why hasn’t Daddy come home?” (see fig. 2).
FIGURE 2. “I’m hungry. Why hasn’t Daddy come home?” Cartoon from Puerto Rico Evangélico, 1917.
Addiction is gendered and laden with power inequalities. Davis (1994) observed that a Latin American man is labeled an addict if he is unable to fulfill his role as family provider, lowering his stature in his community; although heavy drinking is socially sanctioned, addiction (defined as alcohol or drug use that interferes with upholding social responsibilities) is associated with moral weakness. In U.S. cities, the narcotics trade has long generated its own social hierarchy. Those at the top who sell but do not use, or who use but keep their use under control, claim moral and psychological superiority (Hanson, Beschner, Walters et al. 1985). The type of drug used, the method of use, and the source of income to pay for drug supplies also figure into hierarchies. Drug users have described crack cocaine smoking as more stigmatized than cocaine sniffing, impersonal theft as more ethical than theft from friends or family, and sex-for-drug exchanges between acquaintances as more respectable than street prostitution (Inciardi, Lockwood and Pottieger 1993, Rosenbaum 1981). Drug trade itself is structured around a motif of dominance and dependence, community respectability and stigma.
Domination and dependence also are recurrent motifs in Puerto Rico’s political history. Puerto Rico has been a U.S. possession since 1898; its people are U.S. citizens and are eligible for most U.S. federal welfare benefits. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, Puerto Rico saw 60% of its population qualify for welfare benefits, and had unemployment rates as high as 20% (Cockburn 2003, Chavez 1998, Buckley 1998). Its employment patterns and federal subsidies also led to a gender reversal in family economics. Puerto Rican men saw higher unemployment rates than that of women due to preferential hiring of women by international industries. Industries noted lower absenteeism, reduced union membership, and the acceptance of lower wages among women workers. Additionally, Puerto Rican women with children qualified more easily for federally funded public assistance than did men (Safa 1995a). Excluded from both legal industries and government entitlements, men disproportionately look to the illicit drug economy with its violently enforced hierarchies of power—from cartel leaders down to the addicted consumers subject to the vagaries of daily street supplies. Many men turn to the drug economy in hopes of gaining autonomy, but find themselves violently dominated by drug suppliers and by law enforcement. The drugs on which their bodies depend thus become a medium for political control by drug cartels and by the State.
With its connotation of dependence and lack of self-determination, a gendered analysis of narcotics addiction among unemployed Puerto Rican men could frame it as the post-industrial phase of what Edward Said (1978) called the feminization of the colonized, Oriental male. Although popular images of Latin American and U.S. urban drug traders portray their hypermasculine excesses of aggression and accumulation, they portray addicted men living in those places as powerless victims.
Street ministries offer an alternative, austere masculinity. Most of the addiction ministries I surveyed in Puerto Rico used no medication for withdrawal, not even Tylenol.4 Converts fast to build spiritual strength, putting the needs of the spirit before those of the body and relying on the Holy Spirit for sustenance. Where biomedicine works to eliminate pain, in Pentecostalism pain has spiritual value; it cleanses and strengthens. Within the Pentecostal logic, suffering is not a problem calling for relief. Suffering is a test of faith and a call to transcend the body.
These relationships with spirits, the way converts distinguish themselves through ascetic practice, and converts’ growing biblical knowledge are elements of what I call spiritual capital. In tandem with religious studies scholar Verter (2003), I adapt the construct from social
