Addicted to Christ. Helena Hansen

FIGURE 1. A baptism at Victory Academy. Photo by Helena Hansen

      I fumbled with my camera as Eli and Wanda chattered in the festive mood of the morning. They were discussing whether to get in line; neither wanted to be left out. Eli was dressed for the occasion in shorts, a loose T-shirt, and rubber sandals—clothes that she would not be permitted to wear at the Victory Academy on any other day, when exposed knees and toes were taboo. Wanda was less certain about baptism, as it would require her to change out of her long rayon dress. Meanwhile, Yeyo, the assistant director of the home, found a microphone and urged candidates to line up.

      The pastor’s sons, playing synthesizer and drums, began singing “Libre, yo soy libre—¡Las cadenas del pecado han sido rota!” (Free, I am free—the chains of sin have been broken!)² in an upbeat alabanza, a song of praise. Men gathered arm in arm, and started to brincar para Cristo (“jump for Jesus”) to the rhythm. Even the normally reserved wife of the pastor got carried away and began to hop in place. The band wound down with an adoración, a slow song of thanks. Tears streamed from the faces of a few brothers. A newly baptized man embraced the pastor, the tattoos on his muscular shoulders heaving with each silent sob.

      Water baptism is a ritual of purification and consecration dating to pre-Christian Judaism. First-century Christians saw it as a reenactment of the death and resurrection of Christ. At this ministry, being reborn meant not only that the individual was no longer a marginal drug addict, but also that he or she joined the ranks of the privileged; the chosen. And that the chosen had an alternative addiction; one that—like drugs—altered their consciousness, heightened their senses, and provided moments of ecstasy, but—also like drugs—required total absorption and vigilance: an addiction to Christ.

      Rings of onlookers surrounded the baptismal pool. Rebirth attendants stood knee deep in water preparing for delivery, lifting the heads and shoulders of the baptized from the water, one by one. Their vision was that those at the periphery of the pool would someday work their way toward the center, preaching, baptizing, and making room for new converts at the circle’s edge.

      Even the building that housed converted ex-addicts embodied renewal. An abandoned motel destroyed in hurricane Hugo, ministry recruits had patched its walls, rewired its electrical system, and landscaped its grounds with flowers. In the ministry office, a photo of the motel’s crumbling entrance just after hurricane Hugo hung next to the current entrance, smoothed over with fresh plaster. On the motel’s exterior wall was a mural of a man, syringes littering the ground at his feet, his arms reaching up to a great cross.

      THINKING AT THE MARGIN

      Watching the baptism, it seemed that a natural experiment was unfolding in front of me. Working-class addicted people were attempting to take matters into their own hands, to create and invest in a form of life outside of narcotraffic. Some of them had converted days before, and were now only blocks away from the crack houses and heroin shooting galleries they had known. Yet, in the buoyant mood of the baptism, they seemed to be in another world.

      This effort to create another world is the focus of this book. Clinical approaches to addiction presume an intrapersonal imbalance or deficit that must be corrected to return individuals to “normal” social functioning. In contrast, Victory Academy presumes that “normal” social functioning is itself corrupt, that it must be transcended through a transformation of the relationship between self and society and, ultimately, a transformation of society itself. My research for this book took me from society—recognizing street ministries as social movements that resist the logic of narcotraffic; to self—examining the individual spiritual practices of converts that enable them to resist; and back to society—the ways that self-making creates collectivities that redefine what is “normal.”

      How do people with nothing make something? How do these people gain a sense of purpose, self-respect, and, ultimately, power?

      The baptism at Victory Academy began to offer answers to questions that I had asked as an anthropologist and as a doctor who specialized in addiction; I was interested in the ways that people coped in the face of great odds. I knew that Puerto Rico’s narcotraffic was the result of a crisis of capital, just as it was in the decimated cities of the mainland United States. It was a crisis of post-industrial ways of life, of waning personal security, of lack of trust in the future, and of uncertain social reproduction. Lack of capital—not just economic, but also social, cultural, and symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1986)—leads to destabilization, displacement, and disengagement that further drains capital. This is the vicious cycle faced by Puerto Rican workers when manufacturing disappears, faced in U.S. inner cities when urban renewal and planned shrinkage policies dislocate residents, and faced globally by non-dominant religious and ethnic groups in the wake of war and disaster. In this vortex, homes are lost, neighborhood social networks are shredded, and disconnected individuals turn to addictive substances for momentary relief (Fullilove 2004, Saul 2013, Erikson 1976). Victory Academy attempted not only to heal individuals from loss, but also to create new collective capital.

      In 2000, by the time I moved to Puerto Rico to begin field research street ministries like Victory Academy made up three-fourths of all substance-abuse treatment centers registered with the Puerto Rican state (Melendez et al. 1998). Rather than “treatment,” however, they offered a millenarian vision of redemption and transcendence of a corrupt world. Unlike clinics that identify biological or psychological predispositions to addiction, or that try to help patients to come to terms with traumatic memories, street ministries trained converts to fix their gaze forward and not dwell on the past. The only space they allotted for retrospection was in evangelical testimony, which contrasted past with present to narratively enact transformation and renewal. 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