Intimate Enemies. Kimberly Theidon
up on the far side of the field. The table legs were uneven and after trying several rocks, Feliciano slipped a large flat one beneath one of the legs and the table finally stopped wobbling. An extension cord ran the length of the field, hooked up to the big truck battery that sat in Feliciano’s store.
Isaías pulled two enormous reels from his backpack and opened a worn cardboard box. He had brought along a projector, the sort we used in grammar school when Mrs. Hauser threaded the thick brown coils into the machine and we took flight. He set his generator up on the table as far away as possible so the noise would not drown out the film. The crowd grew as the motor began and the white sheet came alive with Bible scenes.
I did not catch the title of the first film. I had run up to our room to bring down a pocketful of Sublimes—chocolate squares loaded with almonds. By the time we settled into my poncho again, the Virgin Mary was already pregnant. There were lengthy scenes of Joseph and Mary heading across the desert on a mule, prompting several people in the audience to remember how they had been forced to flee their homes with only the clothes on their backs. They, too, had walked for days on aching feet only to have people refuse them shelter, shouting, “Filthy chutos [savages]! Get off my land before you dirty it.”
Mary’s eyes were cast downward for virtually the entire film, thick eyelashes resting piously upon milky white skin. On the few occasions when she did look up, it was to heed the voice of God speaking to her from heaven. The films were worn, and the generator was not working at full force. Manuco suggested it was suffering from sorroche (altitude sickness) and thus the films were slow, as though a tired arm was turning a handle at too slow a pace. The soundtrack was garbled and the speed lowered all of the voices to the baritone-bass range. It was a bit of a shock to hear the Virgin Mary respond to God in the same thundering bass voice He used with her. I heard laughter coming from behind us. A group of men were standing at the back, the ronderos with both guns and blankets thrown over their shoulders.
In a few turns of the reel, the Assyrians appeared in chain metal gear, enormous men outfitted for war. As night fell upon the battlefield, two spies sneaked up outside a tent to eavesdrop and learned the following day’s battle plans. The Spanish dubbing was virtually inaudible, and most of the villagers were Quechua speakers anyway. So it was the audience that provided the script. The spies were just like the ronderos, and spying was part of vigilancia to see what the Senderistas had planned. Film viewing was improvisational theater.
When the first film garbled to a close, Isaías gave a thirty-minute lecture on family and community life. The main theme was simple: he exhorted the women to stay home and fulfill their roles, leaving the men to go out and work hard. While he preached, Feliciano carried over a can of gasoline to stir the generator out of its sorroche.
The crowd was eager for more, and Isaías threaded Heinz Fussle’s My Brother’s Keeper into the projector. The opening scene consists of three little gringos shoplifting in a large department store, gleefully stuffing merchandise inside their jackets. The boys run up and down the aisles on a spree. However, as they turn up the fateful final aisle, three security guards close in on them. As the guards tower over the boys and begin to lecture them on the sins of shoplifting, the sneakiest little gringo breaks loose and manages to escape on his newly acquired skateboard. The next scene shows the same mini shoplifter, defiantly eating an orange as he swaggers down a blind alley.
In the alley, juicy orange in hand and mouth, he encounters a tall black man. Racist stereotypes dictate his role: he is dressed in tight polyester pants, and his lunar-sized afro is straight out of Shaft. People in the audience began pointing: they recognized this man from the department store, where he had watched the scuffle between the boys and the security guards. He begins by praising the boy for his clever escape, suggesting he consider the benefits of a life of crime. Fade out to evil chuckles.
The little brother’s keeper appears in the next scene. He is the boy’s older brother, a former crime buddy of the tall black man. Big brother was recently released from prison, where he found Jesus Christ and was born again. He now raises white doves on the rooftop of their high-rise apartment building. He is determined to save his little brother, a task requiring prayers and preaching, sin and salvation.
The images of hell are terrifying. Human faces melt away in Satan’s flames, skeletal remains and teeth dropping in a damned heap. The worms and snakes eat their way through brains, slithering out of mangled ears and wailing mouths that only now—too late—proclaim the error of their ways. I looked around and every single face was transfixed, staring unblinkingly at the white sheet of hell.
Suddenly the sheet went blank. All heads turned toward the back, and we could see Isaías peering over the side of the field. The generator had gone the way of many soccer balls—it had fallen over the steep drop to the river below. We gathered around as two boys went running down the hill to retrieve what was left of the generator. Manuco shook his head and, inspired by the bottle of trago he kept tucked inside his jacket, proclaimed: “It must have been the Catholics. A Catholic must have given it a push!” Even Isaías managed a weak smile as we kept peering over the cliff.
The images that evening had awakened in the hermanos and hermanas gathered in Carhuahurán a sense of shared experiences with the actors who appeared on the screen, despite the radically different context. The audience was not passively consuming this visual feast but rather, as Michel De Certeau suggests, they were elaborating their own secondary productions.21 These secondary productions allowed them to imagine a Christian community that erased centuries as well as cultural and national differences and to script a world in which they as well as the Israelites traverse the same landscape—a landscape of exodus, struggle, and return.22 Arjun Appadurai has written that today the imagination plays a more important role than ever before in social life: “The new power of the imagination in the fabrication of social lives is inescapably tied up with images, ideas and opportunities that come from elsewhere, often moved around by the vehicles of the mass media.”23 Both the Bible films and Radio Amauta have been key players in the collective memories people have about the sasachakuy tiempo. I sat in an audience that ranged from wawakuna wrapped in shawls around their mothers’ backs to elderly men and women who had first watched these films when the Virgin Mary was still a soprano. Where do the images come from that we use to construct our memories? Can “reel images” become the stuff of “real” life?
My understanding of these questions is greatly influenced by Gauri Viswanathan.24 She suggests that religion is in part an epistemology, a way in which people both construct and interact with the real. If we understand conversion as not only a religious act but also a communicational act, an interpretive act, a way of restructuring relationships, then we can see religion as very much a thing-of-this-world. We come closer to the experiential and phenomenological aspects of conversion to Evangelismo. The familiar stories of grinding poverty, rural-to-urban migration, anomie, social mobility, and fostering collective identity are all plausible motives for conversion, but clearly they do not exhaust the motives people have for becoming an Evangélico or the legacies of that conversion. These motives and their legacies are innumerable and shape every chapter of this book. For now, we turn to a holy triad.
Bodies of Faith
What is it about the Evangelical message that resonates so profoundly with the experience of displacement? The exodus figures prominently in the testimonies I have heard, and forced migration was one product of the internal armed conflict. However, displacement occurs on several dimensions, not only in the spatial realm. Due to the political violence, many rural villagers were unable to reproduce their daily cultural practices: burying loved ones was frequently impossible, taking sacrifices to the mountains was dangerous, and fiestas and ferias were suspended at various junctures. Even for populations that remained in situ during the war, there was a cultural displacement that blocked the reproduction of individual and collective identity. As Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson suggest, even populations that remain on their land can experience changes so profound that the naturalness of a place is called into question.25
The Evangelical Christianity villagers practice contrasts with the “popular Catholicism” that characterized these communities