Masked Africanisms Puerto Rican Pentecostalism

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Book Reviews / Pneuma 29 (2007) 131-178

Samuel Cruz, Masked Africanisms: Puerto Rican Pentecostalism (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/ Hunt Publishing Company, 2005). xvii + 102 pp.

Samuel Cruz provides a focused review of Pentecostalism in Puerto Rico by highlighting island history, political context, and relationship with other Afro-Caribbean religions. T ough brief, this ethnographically informed work is concise and stimulating. Puerto Rican Pentecostals categorize African religions as diabolical, but Cruz’s project is to reveal the African continuities of their own religion.

Cruz begins with the Azusa origins and quotes Charles Parham, who complained there about a white cultured woman who was “thrown back in the arms of a big ‘buck nigger,’ and held tightly thus as she shivered and shook in freak imitation of Pentecost. Horrible, awful shame” (in Goﬀ, Fields White unto Harvest, University of Arkansas Press, 1988, 132). This foreshadows Cruz’s thesis, which is unmasked by the title.

In 1898 a four-hundred-year colonial control of the island shifted from Spain to the United States with the invasion of U.S. troops. The colonial religion changed from Cathol- icism to Protestantism. Within two decades Pentecostalism came to Puerto Rico from Azusa via Hawaii as Juan Lugo became a Pentecostal apostle in 1916, going from the Paciﬁc to the Atlantic island. Within ﬁfteen years forty congregations were established. Lugo’s diﬀerent styles and neglect of the Protestant “comity agreement” resulted in opposition from both Catholic and Protestant churches. Nonetheless, the church grew dramatically on the island and among Puerto Ricans who migrated to New York City.

Having reviewed the colonial and Pentecostal history, Cruz describes the traits and his- toric trajectories of the African presence in the Caribbean. By 1530 Africans outnumbered Indians two to one and whites eight to one. African gods served as intermediaries between people and the supreme creator God, and Catholic saints provided equivalent intermediar- ies in the Catholic religious system. Protestantism oﬀered no such intermediaries to guide and empower believers in their daily lives and challenges. Cruz focuses on Yoruba-based religion and reviews Yoruba theology and practice, its expression in Cuban Santeria, and its style of empowering practitioners for daily challenges of life.

In the tradition of Joseph Murphy’s Working the Spirit: Ceremonies of the African Diaspora (Beacon Press, 1994), Cruz uses brief interviews and ethnographic descriptions to show how Puerto Rican Pentecostalism provided a substitute for and parallel to African religions by providing resources for daily life and struggles, and by forms of rituals that involve the body in rhythms, chants, dance, and “possession.” For theory, Cruz draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a T eory of Practice (Cambridge University Press, 1992) to describe the way in which dispositions, manners, and feelings become durable through practitioners’ bodily habits. T rough these practices along with bomma and plena music, Puerto Rican Pentecostalism became a channel for African cultural and religious expression. African inﬂuence is regularly denied by Pentecostals, but Cruz’s ethnographic comparison between Santeria and Pentecostalism suggests an African core of both. Cruz characterizes the African inﬂuence not only by bodily involvement and spirit possession, but also by the centrality of experience, and empowerment for daily life in an oftentimes oppressive world.

In Masked Africanisms Cruz highlights the syncretistic nature of all religion that relates to particular traditions, belief, practices, and morality. In the Puerto Rican case, the “awful

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Book Reviews / Pneuma 29 (2007) 131-178

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shame” of African inﬂuence is revised to suggest that African experiential religion, embod- ied engagement, and ritual empowerment can also be life-giving characteristics of Pentecos- tal syncretism by which God connects to people through the dynamic interplay of body, habit, movement, culture, and Holy Spirit.

As Genesis was drawn from and in dialogue with surrounding creation myths, as Deu- teronomy is patterned after contemporary treaties, as Mark is arranged in relation to Roman coronation ceremonies, as Paul interacts with philosophy and religion in Athens (Acts 17), so Jesus-following faith is continually reborn for new mission eras and contexts. Such rebirth always relates with neighbors and with their religions, practices, and philosophies. When neighbors come to faith in Jesus, the rebirth of mission produces new synchronisms and discontinuities with the neighbor’s traditions; this is done under the Bible’s inﬂuence/ authority, the Holy Spirit’s guidance, and the multicultural church — the joint wisdom of missionaries and converts. Church members, including Puerto Rican Pentecostals, may emphasize the discontinuities of their conversions. T ey know that the cross of Jesus calls for repentance from alienating or life-depleting thinking and habits. But the Holy Spirit, who redeems bodies of ﬂesh, also redeems bodies of corporate wisdom. And the Holy Spirit may lead some Puerto Rican Pentecostals, in cooperation with Cruz’s anthropologically informed pastoral care, to revise an absolute negative judgment against their neighbor’s religion (“diabolical”) in order to redeem relationships, people, and mission.

Reviewed by Craig Scandrett-Leatherman

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