Pentecostalism in Urban Oaxaca: Healing Patriarchy, Marriage, and Mexico

By Michelle Ramirez

An ethnography focusing on a Pentecostal church community and their pursuit of healing marriages and prosperity

Pentecostalism in Urban Oaxaca is a timely feminist ethnography set in a Pentecostal church community in Oaxaca de Juarez. Based on extensive fieldwork, Michelle Ramirez skillfully melds medical anthropology with cultural analysis to reveal the Pentecostal movement’s dynamics in the contexts of faith healing, marital relations, and economic prosperity.

Ramirez takes stock of the problematic ways that Pentecostalism has played out for Mexican women today but also reminds readers of some of its successes. Within the context of Mexican patriarchy, some women parishioners in abusive relationships see the church as a way to improve their lot. Pentecostalism seeks to rupture with Mexico’s colonial heritage, and Ramirez provides novel ways for the reader to consider how Pentecostalism can provide healing for even the “endlessness of addiction.” One case study portrays a former abusive alcoholic womanizer who underwent a spiritual transformation as a result of his conversion. Through this example and more, Ramirez examines the complex relationship between gender, modernity, and Indigeneity in the context of marriage. The book also addresses the #MeToo movement as encountered in the Pentecostal church.

Finally, Ramirez investigates how Pentecostalism addresses the “curses” of illness and poverty, highlighting the paradoxical relationship between faith healing and curanderismo. The gospel of economic prosperity holds promise for a better life, breaking free from the “disease” of poverty. To this end, Ramirez profiles some parishioners’ involvement with Omnilife, a multilevel marketing company selling vitamins and natural health products that propounds ideals similar to those of Pentecostal Christianity.

 
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Apr 30, 2024
• ISBN: 9780817394981

Book preview

PENTECOSTALISM IN URBAN OAXACA

PENTECOSTALISM IN URBAN OAXACA

HEALING PATRIARCHY, MARRIAGE, AND MEXICO

MICHELLE RAMIREZ

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2024 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Janson Text LT Std

Cover image: La Cruz de Piedra, Oaxaca; photograph by Emilio Andres/stock.adobe.com

Cover design: Sandy Turner Jr.

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-2195-6 (cloth)

ISBN: 978-0-8173-6144-0 (paper)

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9498-1

To J. H. Cotton:

Quid pro quo, my love

Contents

List of Figures

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Spread of Global Pentecostalism in Oaxaca

1. Health Care and Healing Pluralism in Oaxaca

2. Panic at the Revival: Habitus and Other Miraculous Transformations

3. The Healing of Don Pedro: A Foundational Testimony

4. Healing Marriage and Working Together Toward a Better Patriarchy

5. La pobreza es una enfermedad (Poverty Is a Disease)

Conclusion

Epilogue:Rupture and Continuity: The Divine Light Church and #MeToo

Notes

References

Index

Figures

I.1. Megachurch and storefront church, Oaxaca

I.2. La Roca church and Iglesia Evangelica Baustista, Oaxaca

I.3. Signs from La Roca and El Calvario churches, Oaxaca

I.4. Map of Oaxaca in Mexico

I.5. Map of regions and municipalities of Oaxaca

1.1. Street parade celebrating Mexican Independence Day in downtown Oaxaca

Preface

A RATHER CIRCUITOUS JOURNEY BROUGHT ME to Oaxaca, Mexico, to study Pentecostals, so I will begin at the near beginning—the PhD anthropology program at the University of Iowa. In this program the cultural anthropology students were encouraged to identify where they would conduct their fieldwork early on in the course of study. I was in my fourth year and still had not decided where this was going to be. I knew my field site would likely be somewhere in Mexico: I grew up in southern California speaking Spanish; my father is Mexican American and my mother is Euro-American, so Mexico seemed to make sense for a variety of different reasons. I had spent time in Nayarit and Yucatan doing my master’s work but did not think that either place was somewhere I would want to be for my year-long anthropological rite of passage. The summer before fieldwork would commence, mi gran profesor, Michael Chibnik, encouraged me to visit Oaxaca, sensing that it might be a good fit. This proved to be a fortuitous recommendation. When I first visited Oaxaca, I was moved by its beauty and felt reassured that the community of anthropologists who worked in the region would give me a ready-made set of colleagues and friends.

As a feminist medical anthropology student, I was inspired by Margaret Lock’s brilliant work on menopause in Japan and North America, so I decided that my PhD research would examine how social class informs the meaning and experience of menopause in urban Oaxaca. The final work certainly had a menopause chapter in it, but the overall project was about women, aging, kinship, and sexuality (Ramirez 2002, 2006). It was this research that I presented when doing the job talk for my tenure-track job interviews, even though I had done quite a bit of research on other topics during my postdoc and while earning a master’s of public health. Fortunately, the numerous talks and interviews yielded a job offer. I was a faculty member at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia from 2007 to 2022. In 2022, University of the Sciences merged with another long-standing Philadelphia institution—Saint Joseph’s University—where I have been a professor since June 1, 2022.

When I was a junior faculty member, the chair of my department was clear about the necessity of grant funding to receive tenure. During those fraught years, I discovered a grant announcement from the Templeton Foundation calling for proposals to examine the global spread of Pentecostalism. This sparked a vague recollection about my earlier fieldwork in Oaxaca where one of the women I interviewed about menopause launched into some pretty fervent proselytizing. At the time I wrote this off as an anomaly because it had only happened once over the course of sixty-plus interviews, but it occurred to me that there were likely many more evangelical Christians in Oaxaca, so why not research Pentecostalism’s global expansion in Oaxaca? My friend and colleague Margaret Everett was still actively working in Oaxaca, so we decided to submit a grant proposal together, as coinvestigators, to the Templeton Foundation. This began the Pentecostal journey in Oaxaca. We were not awarded a Templeton grant, but we eventually received a generous award from the Ruth Landes Foundation that provided the funding for the majority of the data collection for this project.

This study is set in Oaxaca’s capital city, Oaxaca de Juarez, and is based on fieldwork conducted by both Margaret Everett and me during the summers of 2009, 2010, and 2012. This was a fruitful collaboration that is unusual in our discipline, a discipline that has a dominant narrative about knowledge production being the domain of the lone (male, white) ethnographer and the solitary writer (El Kotni et al. 2020). Gabriela Torres (2019) argues that coauthorship in feminist anthropology centers on building and maintaining meaningful relationships as a mechanism to challenge entrenched patriarchal and capitalist ideas of knowledge production. I am so grateful for our collaborative efforts. It was such a joy to work with another feminist in an equal intellectual partnership. However, due to shifting professional and personal priorities in Margaret’s life after 2012, I continued follow-up research on my own in 2013, 2015, and 2018. Thus, Margaret’s presence will appear from time to time in this ethnography, but we both decided that I would write this book as part of my academic and professional development.

As Margaret and I are both medical anthropologists, we decided to focus our investigation on the experiences of healing: how people come to understand themselves as being healed through Pentecostal ministrations because healing does indeed seem to be one of the biggest draws of Pentecostalism. Writing about the history of Pentecostalism in the United States, Jonathan Baer observes that Pentecostalism originated in the body as much as the spirit. The ‘full gospel’ it proclaimed promised renewed health along with saved souls, and its embryonic ethos prized the human embodiment of divine initiative. Glossolalia and other ecstatic manifestations authenticated God’s presence and power, reflecting the reality of the Holy Spirit within believers. But the materiality of the culture that gave rise to Pentecostalism received its fullest expression in ‘divine healing.’ Suffering men and women yearned for the restoration of their broken bodies, and their faith provided it (2001, 735). There are numerous afflictions of the body, mind, and spirit that bring people to Pentecostalism, and I have learned over many years of fieldwork that for some Oaxacans this faith provides meaningful answers to some of life’s most vexing problems.

I sometimes discuss this project with colleagues who are not anthropologists. One, a religious individual gave me the impression that he was annoyed by my attempt to eff the ineffable.¹ As if by researching how religion is embedded in larger social-political-economic phenomena, I am engaging in a kind of vulgar materialism that does not pay sufficient homage to the deep meaning and reality of religious experience in the lives of the faithful. A more materialist-oriented colleague wanted to make sure that whatever benefits people receive from Pentecostal ministrations are due to nonreligious concepts like social support because surely divine or supernatural healing cannot be real. But thanks to our anthropological forbears, we know that religion is real because people make it real, that our species constructs the supernatural based on the cultural, material, symbolic, and the very real crises of human life (Geertz 1973; Malinowski 1954). Moreover, all of our human creations and adaptations are intimately entwined. Thus, I invite you to join me on this journey to discover what Pentecostal expansion in Oaxaca, Mexico, can teach us about the current entwinement of the material, symbolic, and the supernatural. To examine the existential cultural ground on which Oaxacans believe that—despite all evidence to the contrary—healing is possible.

Acknowledgments

I HAVE SO MUCH TO BE grateful for. First and foremost, I am grateful to the beautiful city of Oaxaca de Juarez. You have given me so much—my PhD work, my first book, and the love of my life—te agradesco muchisimo! To all the pastors, congregants, and friends at the Divine Light Church in this beautiful city, thank you, gracias mil, for sharing your testimonies with me. It was an honor to bear witness to your stories of healing and transformation.

Now for the very beginning: I discovered anthropology at Pasadena City College and have been hooked ever since. Thank you, Elvio Angeloni, for teaching me what a cool grown-up job could look like. San Francisco State is where my feminist anthropology journey began. Thank you, Mina Davis Caufield, for your class the Anthropology of Women. I cannot begin to tell you what a profound impact this class and feminism have had on my life, both of which led me to graduate school at the University of Iowa, where I was generously supported in my academic endeavors. A sincere thanks to all the anthropology and Latin American studies faculty when I was a graduate student from 1995 to 2002 (Dios Mio!) but especially for the following, now emeritus faculty: Michael Chibnik, thank you for the warm welcome at our very first meeting and for introducing me to Oaxaca—que bendición. Profesora Ellen Lewin, thank you so much for your intellectual contributions to the feminist canon. I am so lucky to have been your very first PhD student. You have been a tireless mentor and supporter long after that PhD was earned. I also owe a debt of gratitude to my fellow Oaxacanists: the now-late Michael Higgins, Jayne Howell (thank you for the pictures!), Martha Rees, and Art Murphy. Your support and mentorship have been invaluable. Gracias a todos.

To the anonymous reviewers of my manuscript, thank you for seeing the potential in an early first draft. Your close reading of my work and your impressive expertise in the area’s scholarship has made this book so much stronger and something, I dare say, to be proud of. The review process was skillfully and compassionately shepherded by editor extraordinaire of the University of Alabama Press Wendi Schnaufer. This entire book-writing process is the result of a very casual conversation we had at her booth at the AAA meetings in 2015 where she expressed interest in a feminist project examining Pentecostal healing in Mexico. Mil gracias for your generous support. I literally could not have done this without you.

The research for this book would not have been possible without generous funding from the Ruth Landes Foundation. Thank you for awarding this project the Ruth Landes Memorial Research Fund. The Society for the Scientific Study of Religion provided funding via the Jack Shand Award for US-based Pentecostal research and for costs associated with bringing this study of Pentecostalism in Mexico into the real world. Thank you also to University of the Sciences and my former department chair, Amy Janke, for approving a sabbatical during the fall of 2018, which allowed me to conduct a final round of data collection and the first round of book writing. You were a wonderful academic home for my first fifteen years as a professor. And to my new colleagues in the Department of Sociology at Saint Joseph’s University, thank you for welcoming me into my new academic home.

I am so fortunate to have an amazing group of friends and family who have supported me in my various academic escapades. Connie Woodland and Robert Peterson: How many times have you both listened to my complaints, whining, and existential angst with love and care? Too many to count—thank you, my dearest friends. Claire Costello, you are a blessing in my life. And my amazing family in the great state of California (northern, central, and southern): Where would I be without the love and support from each and every one of you? This is especially true for my grandma Alice Weddle who is no longer with us on this earthly plane but is still and always will be in my heart. To my parents, Muriel and Ben DeKoning: Thank you for supporting this journey, even though it did not seem like a great idea when I announced that I would be moving to San Francisco to study anthropology. I love you both. And to my spiritual family at the Dragon Spirit Arts Yoga Studio in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania: thank you for all the mind-body practices that have helped keep my body, mind, and soul together over these last ten years.

And finally, John Henry Cotton. What can I say? My personal editor in chief who painstakingly edited my first major piece of writing: Suffering, Modernity and Morality: Menopause in Urban Oaxaca, Mexico. You poor thing! How did I get so lucky? From Oaxaca to Iowa, from Iowa to Ireland, Ireland to Portland, Portland to Philadelphia—here we are twenty-three years later, and I thank God every day for the gift of you in my life.

INTRODUCTION

The Spread of Global Pentecostalism in Oaxaca

WALKING DOWN THE CROWDED STREETS of Oaxaca’s urban center, the proliferation of various Protestant religions becomes very apparent—Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Baptists, Pentecostals, among many others, all vie for new recruits. Pentecostal churches occupy several different kinds of space, everything from humble storefronts and office buildings to the more elaborate megachurches, reflecting the diversity of Pentecostal denominations and their significant growth (figs. I.1, I.2, and I.3). The World Christian Encyclopedia (3rd ed., 2020), currently counts 644 million Pentecostals/Charismatics worldwide, which include Pentecostalism’s 19,300 denominations. With 8.3 percent of the world population, that means one in twelve people today is either a Pentecostal or charismatic Christian (Wariboko and Oliverio 2020). Pentecostalism is a branch of evangelical Christianity known for faith healing, speaking in tongues, and other embodied ecstatic manifestations that are believed to authenticate God’s presence and power (Baer 2001). Many Pentecostals are fundamentalist in that they take the Bible to be the literal word of God and the only appropriate guide for life and also evangelical because they believe it is their responsibility to preach the Gospel to the nonconverted (Saunders 1995, 326).

Religious movements are interesting to study because they are human responses to perceived social crises that lead adherents to redefine what their divine powers want them to do to restore the natural, social, and/or cosmic order (Riesebrodt and Chong 1999, 59). Observing the spread of fundamentalism worldwide, Riesebrodt and Chong note that while science and technology have reduced the risks and threats to human well-being and consequently (according to some of the earliest theorizing about religion) the relevance of religion, scientific control of nature and world mastery has created new risks and uncertainties for humanity, such as environmental catastrophes and the threat of atomic war. Democratization has not only profaned politics but has opened up opportunities for charismatic leaders to mobilize mass support, often in reaction to the failures or problematic effects of Western liberalism or socialism. Capitalism as a revolutionary force has made labor a commodity, exposed people to market uncertainties, destabilized existing family structures and increased social and spatial mobility. Accordingly, these instabilities have been the source of the formation of new religious groups and movements (Riesebrodt and Chong 1999, 58).

Image: Figure I.1. Megachurch and storefront church, Oaxaca. (Courtesy of Justin Arnold and courtesy of Jayne Howell)

Figure I.1. Megachurch and storefront church, Oaxaca. (Courtesy of Justin Arnold and courtesy of Jayne Howell)

Image: Figure I.2. La Roca church and Iglesia Evangelica Baustista, Oaxaca. (Courtesy of Jayne Howell; Diana Bier Oaxaca Church/Alamy Stock Photo)

Figure I.2. La Roca church and Iglesia Evangelica Baustista, Oaxaca. (Courtesy of Jayne Howell; Diana Bier Oaxaca Church/Alamy Stock Photo)

Image: Figure I.3. Signs from La Roca and El Calvario churches, Oaxaca. (Courtesy of Jayne Howell)

Figure I.3. Signs from La Roca and El Calvario churches, Oaxaca. (Courtesy of Jayne Howell)

Latin America has certainly had its share of political and economic instabilities that many contend are directly related to the spread of fundamentalist religions, for example Vásquez and Williams (2005) note that the region’s precarious transition to democratic rule, which in many places has been marked by a steep rise in crime, is one of the factors associated with the spread of Pentecostalism. Others observe that increased economic globalization characterized as a voracious neoliberal capitalism has privatized state-owned industries, downsized the already fragile welfare state, and has further threatened subsidies for peasant agriculture and social programs for the ever-expanding urban populations living in poverty (Collier 1995; Haber et al. 2008; Hershberg 2003). These neoliberal policies have also minimized the ability of secular institutions like class-based trade unions and political parties to resolve growing socioeconomic divides, leading many poor and working-class people to gospels of health and wealth to exorcize the demons of illness and financial failure (Collier 1995; Comaroff and Comaroff 2001). Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, therefore, skeptically note that endemic to new religious movements of the late twentieth century is a second coming of a Jesus who not only saves souls but one who pays dividends . . . one who promises return on a limited spiritual investment (2001, 24).

Political-economic analyses have certainly provided important insights into Latin America’s Pentecostal expansion. In Brazil, for example Andrew Chesnut (2003) describes religious entrepreneurs and a religious marketplace that responds to consumer demand by creating new religious organizations that suit their needs and desires. Chesnut further argues that the most successful religious movements are those that offer direct contact with the spirits and place a central emphasis on healing. Carlos Garma and Miguel Leatham (2004) observe that Pentecostalism is a lower-class phenomenon that frees converts from structural inequalities, offering their congregants economic refuge that serves as an escape from the hardships and humiliations of daily life. David Martin emphasizes the stability and personal empowerment offered by Pentecostal churches and describes how conversion relates to the aspiration for a better life, broadly understood, in terms of moral standards, economic prosperity, personal dignity, and health of mind and body (1993, 281).

Sheldon Annis (1987) suggests that stressors related to economic change stimulate Protestant conversion; therefore, Indigenous rural Guatemalans, alienated from traditional modes of production closely tied to Indigenous identity and folk Catholicism, find alternative religious forms appealing, particularly those that are associated with economic growth. Some authors have invoked Max Weber’s contentions about Protestantism and economic change. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1958)