Addicted to Christ. Helena Hansen
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 as the result of, and a necessary condition for, shifts in the island’s economic base from agriculture and manufacturing 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