Review: Latino Pentecostal Identity - Evangelical Faith, Self, and Society by Arlene Sanchez Walsh

In the last days
God pours out God’s spirit upon all flesh
Sons and Daughters prophecy
The elders see visions
The youth, dreams[1]

Modern day Pentecostalism sees itself as an extension of the Luke-Acts narratives. It is an open-ended book with a seemingly anticlimactic ending, Paul proclaiming the gospel through his personal expenses. The beginning of the book is much more fascinating: tarrying in the upper room, the tongues of fire resting on heads, the speaking in various languages proclaiming the wondrous works of God and Jesus the Christ, 3000 persons baptized and added to the church during that glorious first day. Because of the open-ended, almost seemingly unfinished, structure of the Luke-Acts accounts, modern day Pentecostals live into the history, appropriating the memories of Luke, making them their own. The narrative is ongoing and we modern-day Pentecostals are apart of the story.

For the crux of Sanchez Walsh’s analysis, Pentecostalism seems to be locally and experientially based. The “Pentecostal baptism”[2] or “Spirit baptism” refers to speaking in tongues as evidence of the Holy Spirit living in the lives of believers. Spiritual gifts such as prophecy, healings – both of the self and of others, interpretation of tongues, dreams, visions and words of knowledge along with tongues serve as the foundational understanding for an analysis of Pentecostal experience[3]. Biblical authority and inerrancy are tangentially mentioned but there is a privileging of the experiential nature of Pentecostalism.

In my estimation, SW intimates that Pentecostalism exists as one expression on the continuum of Evangelical Christianity. It is the expression of the spiritual gifts that creates a Pentecostal episteme – a uniquely Pentecostal system of understanding and body of ideas which give shape to the knowledge of any given time – not the theological constructs surrounding it. More poignantly, the performance of gifts creates a system of knowledge of the self within the framework of a religio-cultural tradition. The more (or less) pronounced and encouraged the exercising of spiritual gifts within a particular church community, the more (or less) charismatic and thus Pentecostal, they are. Latino Pentecostals exercising the gifts of the Spirit fashion their identities in ways that either rupture or foreclose ethnic identity.

Praise & Worship – Methodological Approaches

In many church services recounted by SW and those with which I am familiar from my life, the time of praise and worship, singing of praise songs, contemporary hymns and exhortations, frames the service, or, “sets the atmosphere for worship.” Praise and worship during a service allows the congregation to “bring in their wandering minds” and begin to reflect communally. Responses to those moments by the audience can gauge the intensity of the rest of the service. Fervent singing, dancing, hollering and raising of hands are all signs of connection with the community of worshipers and with God. Songs are utilized to invoke memory of one’s history with God, with self and with their sinful past. They likewise point to a victorious present and a hopeful future. What can we learn of SW’s approach from the PW paradigm?

In my purview, SW uses historical analyses as a Praise and Worship moment. She grounds her work by looking at the history of Latino Pentecostals in the United States. She wants to create a collective memory that subverts dominant discourse and accepted notions. A collective memory which 1) does not assume, quoting Alice Luce, that the “color line had been washed away in the Blood,” [4] but rather questions beliefs that Pentecostalism was a race-neutral spiritual practice; 2) decenters Azusa Street as the birthplace of modern-day Pentecostalism, rather placing it as part of a mythic imaginary[5]; and 3) disrupts the idea that Pentecostalism is a new phenomenon for Latinos.[6] She wants to untangle a muddled history that has historically served to misrepresent and silence Latinos within Pentecostal discourse. The song she sings allows Latino Pentecostals to speak out of the depths of their bellies, out of the breadth of their experiences.

SW successfully demonstrates how there was a “cognitive distancing”[7] of Pentecostals from other, more controlled, less charismatic Euro American Evangelicals. Pentecostalism became marginalized as the adherents were imagined “as poor, misguided country cousins who let their emotions get the best of them”[8]. Posing a threat to patriarchy, the “role of women and loosening of tightly proscribed boundaries of idealized feminine spirituality,”[9] certainly was problematic as well. Pentecostals were thought of as superfluous in their practices.

The project of Pentecostalism, while accepting of Latinos even from the early days, still tended to treat Non Euro Americans as “a mission field, as converts…not equals”[10]. In this way, Latinos were nothing more than repositories for doctrines, souls that needed saving from their savage impulses and libidinal charges. They were not simply humans with whom missionaries wanted to share and learn. Even when converted, Latinos were “supervised” by Euro Americans to be certain that they taught the correct doctrine: “That Euro Americans thought enough of their own spiritual grounding to be able to supervise Latinos says much about the dynamics of the missionary/convert relationship”[11].

Performance Theory – A Brief Overview

It is useful for my discussion to look at Pentecostalism as a particular construction of gender and utilization of spiritual gifts. This is desired in order to foreclose the somewhat slippery manner in which Evangelical, Charismatic and Pentecostal are used throughout the text. “Self” and “identity” also seem to be utilized interchangeably[12] throughout the work, though they are not coterminous generally. Because of this elusiveness, I want to limit the meanings of the terms.

Thus, In order to analyze SW’s text, I take a performance theory approach. I will briefly sketch some contours of performance theory which informs my reading of her work. J.L. Austin’s linguistic theory has been seminal discussing “speech acts” that have within them the capacity to perform. Summarily, Austin says of performative speech acts that they, “are not ‘true or false’,” and that “the uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of the action”[13]. His work has found employment in other areas outside linguistics including feminist theory, sociology and performance studies.

Within performance studies, performances for Diana Taylor “function as vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity through reiterated or…‘twice-behaved behavior’”[14]. As one such example of transmission of knowledge, SW asserts that Latina Pentecostal women tend to function as “transmitters of the faith”[15]. For Taylor, performances are concurrently “real” and “constructed.”

Additionally, instead of focusing on performances as either true or false, performance studies asks how “efficacious” a particular performance is: “In their respective historical and cultural contexts, various kinds of performances are efficacious in all sorts of ways”[16]. Simply, when performance is the analytical framework of analysis, one asks if the performance successfully completes its intended goal. For SW’s work, I want to look particularly at the performance of gender constructs and of spiritual gifts in order to make a claim that Latino Pentecostalism privileges an embodied expression of a theological construct. Simply, since one “has” the Holy Spirit, one performs gender correctly and exercises gifts of the Spirit freely. Church doctrine and even the pedagogical practices of schooling and transitional homes utilized this model of proper gender performance and implementation of gifts.

“Things I used to do, I don’t do no more” – Performance of Gendered Identity

The above aphorism is often used in black Pentecostal preaching and singing moments. What it implies is that there is a way to live in the world that is not consistent with what God desires and requires for believers. Further, in order to please God, one must abstain from certain behaviors. As such, I want to turn to the performance of female gender in the Latino Pentecostal context.

As SW notes, “to become Pentecostal…means to experience a transformative spiritual event that instills a larger worldview but also allows one to retain the male-dominated Latino culture.”[17] Thus, the production of the self as working in concert with patriarchal expectations of gender is consistent towards the inculcation of a Latino Pentecostal identity. It is important to note that some of the women interviewed and surveyed by SW did not grow up in “traditional” households but come to accept, reflect and espouse these traditions.

For women, there is a focus on those exterior markers on the body that would indicate that she was, indeed, a woman. These exterior markers are what Halberstam calls “cultural genitals”[18]. With cultural genitals, there is an assumption of one's gender based on what appears on the body; the face, makeup, indentation of breasts and hands. We rarely see the actual genitals of the subject. As such, we normally read individuals as productive of the "correct" gender as they correctly perform culture. “Victory Outreach women have been refashioned into godly women ready to fulfill their traditional roles by acting like ladies, which means walking in high heels and dressing modestly [emphasis, mine]”[19].

“The places I used to go, I don’t go no more…” – Performance of Pentecostal Identity

Again, an aphorism from my context, it intimates that along with behaviors, there are certain places that a person should not go as a child of God. This necessarily means that there are places that one should go as well. Through SW’s many interviews, we see a growing reliance on what she terms “the ritual life of Pentecostalism”[20] for defining Latino Pentecostal identity. Speaking of the Latin American Bible Institute, she says that students there “are ritualized into a life that centers on routine, spiritual discipline, and work…The ritual life consists of prayer, worship, testimony, song, and witness”[21]. I postulate that these ritual practices are the “places” that they should go.

What is produced, staged, and put on display through these rituals? What does the performance of the ritual life of Pentecostalism create for the Latino Pentecostal adherents? SW contends that a new identity is performed, ambiguous at times, but uniquely Pentecostal. “Charismatic experience solidifies, in an existential way, that they are changed people – they live differently, pray differently, read the Bible differently”[22]. Their identity places them squarely within the narrative of the Luke-Acts account, and apart of the prophecy of Joel.

Along with an identity, a memory is created as well, both individual and collective. Individuals constantly refer to their lives of crime, of drug abuse, of sexual violence, of sexual deviance but also proclaim that they are no longer “there.” Each individual has transcended some past, sinful self in order to realize life anew in Christ.

Another result of the performance of the holy identity through the ritual life of Pentecostalism is the ability to participate in a wider Christian culture, one that is not theoretically bound to racial, age, or gender classifications. The groups like Victory Outreach and Vineyard display the tension between trying to remain relevant to contemporary times. Identity can be “composed of shifting and inherently unstable substance”[23].

Conclusions

Performance creates. Within the context of Latino Pentecostalism, the performance or production of the correct gender, by heels, makeup and modest dressing as well as the production of a Pentecostal identity through spiritual gifts creates a pious, holy, separated, saved identity. This is possible because the performance of proper gender and of spiritual gifts is not an end of itself but has the ability to inculcate the quality of holiness within the subject. The identity is re-created as holy and separated, causing Latino Pentecostals to “have an ambivalent relationship with their ethnic identity” [24]. Through this production of gender and culture, Latino Pentecostals are not foreclosing mores of ethnicity, nationality, Western culture or religion, but are opening up occasions for flourishing within and giving shape to those cultural norms.

The donning of cultural genitals has the ability to produce, not only a correct gender, but a correct sexuality. Interviews with Miriam note that in order “to reorient her from homosexuality,” that she needed to become more “ladylike” [25]. The pedagogy employed by Pentecostals includes practical and spiritual strategies to reorient gender. “Miriam credits Sister Julie for teaching her about clothing, makeup, and prayer, and believes that these aspects resulted in her changing her sexual orientation”[26].

It is important to note that these rituals invoked above are all bodily practices. Whether in LABI or in the transitional homes, the physical body becomes manageable through the power of the Holy Spirit working within the subject. Jobs engage the full body; prayer and worship, through a charismatic, Pentecostal lens, is a full-bodied practice; testimony, song, witness and speaking in tongues all utilize the mouth. The body is accentuated in Pentecostal ritual. The body becomes the medium for ritual and integral to sanctification. “One might say…ritual performances are understood to be disciplinary practices through which pious dispositions are formed, rather than symbolic acts that have no relationship to pragmatic or utilitarian activity”[27].

To close, one may ask, where the agency in performing these various gendered and ritual acts is. We should again note that performance studies analyses are not primarily concerned with the felicity or fecundity of performances, but with their efficaciousness. “Enforcing moral codes builds a Pentecostal identity because these codes provide a correlate between right belief, right conduct, and right living…Pentecostal catechism”[28]. The question becomes: are the individuals performing the moral codes correctly, are they utilizing their agency to adhere closely to doctrine and practice? The Holy Spirit is the one that produces the desire to behave, perform, properly. In this way, agency is produced in the subject by virtue of submission to the hg. The people can claim that they live right because “it’s the Lord's doing and it's marvelous in our eyes”[29]

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[1] Acts 2:17, (my translation).
[2] Sanchez-Walsh, Arlene M., Latino Pentecostal Identity: Evangelical Faith, Self, and Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 17.
[3] Ibid, 177.
[4] Ibid, 1.
[5] Ibid, 13.
[6] Ibid, 1.
[7] Chidester, David, Salvation and Suicide: Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and Jonestown (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2003).
[8] Sanchez-Walsh, 5.
[9] Ibid
[10] Ibid, 30.
[11] Ibid, 3.
[12] Ibid, 77.
[13] Austin, J.L. How To Do Things With Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 5.
[14] Taylor, Diana, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 2-3.
[15] Sanchez-Walsh, 9.
[16] Sax, William S., Dancing the Self: Personhood and Performance in the Pandav Lila of Garhwal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 3.
[17] Sanchez-Walsh, 117.
[18] Halberstam, Judith, Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).
[19] Sanchez-Walsh, 119.
[20] Ibid, 20.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Ibid, 180.
[23] Sax, 11.
[24] Sanchez-Walsh, 1.
[25] Ibid, 121.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Mahmood, Saba, Politics of Peity: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 128.
[28] Sanchez-Walsh, 48.
[29] Psalm 118:23 (NRSV).