Abstract
The long-standing marginalization of highland Peru, coupled with the terrible violence of the 1980s and 1990s civil war, make it a difficult place for political mobilization. Nevertheless, one village successfully asserted its self-determination in the face of an exploitative political economy through conversion to Evangelical Christianity. A revolutionary cultural break from the mainstream created a vibrant local subculture that stressed brotherhood and provided meaning to adherents, allowing them to seize local opportunities to assert a more egalitarian social reality. While specific to this village’s conditions, these experiences speak to broader possibilities for innovative social change through novel combinations of cultural practices and political concerns.
La marginalización de larga data del altiplano peruano, junto con la terrible violencia de la guerra civil de las décadas de 1980 y 1990, dificulta la movilización política. Sin embargo, un pueblo hizo valer exitosamente su auto-determinación frente a una economía política explotador a través de la conversión al cristianismo evangélico. Una separación cultural revolucionaria de la corriente principal creó una vibrante subcultura que ponía énfasis en la hermandad y proporcionó sentido a los adherentes, permitiéndoles aprovechar de oportunidades locales para imponer una realidad social más igualitaria. Aunque fueron particulares a las condiciones de este pueblo, estas experiencias anuncian posibilidades más extensas de cambio social a través de combinaciones novedosas de prácticas culturales y asuntos políticos.
The 1980s civil war eviscerated social life in Peru. Across history, innovative highland mobilizations for a more inclusive society have contended against the prevailing aristocratic order and experienced cycles of bloody repression and disappointing compromises (Degregori, 1994; Heilman, 2010; Hinojosa, 1998; Mallon, 1995; 1998; Stern, 1992; Thurner, 1997). The Maoist insurgency Sendero Luminoso was unique among these in its unbending stance, running against but benefiting from the leftist history of attempting to open up society (Stern, 1998). The government followed its old scorched-earth policy, using the army to attempt to put down the insurgency (Gorriti, 1999). Failing in this, the military forced peasants into poorly armed and ill-informed citizen patrols (rondas) to confront the guerrillas (Starn, 1999). The militarization of the countryside not surprisingly escalated some long-simmering local disputes into fratricidal skirmishes (Isbell, 1990; Manrique, 1995). Amidst these turbulent conditions, President Fujimori declared a “self-coup” in 1993 and reconstituted the state to resemble a military tribunal. Dissolving congress, he concentrated power in the executive through a constitution written by himself and instituted far-reaching neoliberal reforms. In a context of rampant corruption, he closely aligned himself with the military and international capital while creating a vast clientelist machine centered in the Ministry of the Presidency to curry popular favor (Gonzales de Olarte, 1998).
Life for most social sectors became increasingly insecure. Peru had enjoyed a diverse and fairly well organized left movement epitomized by the Izquierda Unida (United Left) party. Sendero’s policy of destroying “third paths,” coupled with the military’s blanket antileft stance, doubly targeted the left for violent attacks and continual threats, leaving it highly disorganized and powerless (Hinojosa, 1998; Klarén, 2000). Many other elements of civil society, including social movements, faced similar repression and disarray. In highland departments like Ayacucho, where Sendero launched its campaign and the army began its scorched-earth policy, the native populations experienced massive population displacements, violent harassment by the army and guerrillas, lawlessness, massacres, and mass burials (Poole and Renique, 1992). The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2003) estimates that indigenous people made up almost 90 percent of the war’s victims.
Yet people still had to live their lives. Along with many parts of Latin America, Peru saw a mass conversion to Evangelical religions, with 12 percent of the highland population considering themselves “believers” (Instituto Nacional de Estadística e Informática, 1996). The effects of mass conversions vary widely according to circumstances and, despite the forecasts of early observers, have never cohered into a mass movement (Freston, 2008). Nevertheless, many researchers in diverse areas found practitioners employing their religion as a strong assertion of self-determination, frequently in difficult circumstances (Stoll, 1990).
This article investigates one such instance in the small Andean village of Huaytabamba, 1 12 kilometers uphill from the city of Ayacucho. Members of this community experienced very little in the way of violence during the civil war, but it influenced much of their lives. They were part of a network of village civilian patrols; wedding guests were mistakenly slaughtered in a neighboring village; 2 the military entered periodically; many people, particularly young males, moved to either Ayacucho or Lima; and no one could escape the highly polarized political environment. This case study, however, largely bypasses these circumstances. Instead, it examines villagers’ self-assertion in the face of the reigning political economy that has long kept native peoples impoverished and marginalized. While there is a need to continue investigating the causes and consequences of the violence, an exclusive focus on it risks understating the “structural violence” that long preceded, persevered through, and fed the cycles of physical violence culminating in the civil war (Degregori, 1994; Farmer, 2004; Heilman, 2010; Stern, 1998).
Confronting these structural issues, the Huaytabamba Evangelical church revitalized community institutions after powerful local individuals had plundered village resources by shaping local development projects into a Ponzi scheme. Beyond losing most of their resources, villagers had become unwilling to participate in their most vital and long-standing community organizations. The village was left impoverished and dysfunctional. By 1998, however, the community had totally revived itself, largely through conversion to millenarian Evangelical religions. Its experience illustrates how Evangelicalism can be used at the local level to push for structural change. Because its adherents espoused many socially conservative positions, this local movement defies traditional definitions of the “left,” but its ability to generate a meaningful collective life that reoriented moribund political institutions to serve broad popular interests would be the envy of most leftists. Its successes speak to the potential for diverse mobilizations to employ similar strategies under different circumstances, creatively challenging a generally hostile political economy.
Here I explore the rise, coming to power, and rule of the Evangelicals in Huaytabamba, concluding with their potential implications for other social movements. What enabled the church to revitalize the community, and what resources did it employ to do so? What distinguished the new village incarnation, and how did it safeguard against the exploitation that had undermined local institutions? And, finally, what lessons can be learned for the broader population interested in grassroots innovations and mobilization?
I argue that the church revitalized the community through a “revolutionary culture first” strategy. This created a self-sustaining group within the village ready to seize local opportunities but also capable of weathering challenging times. As in many other cases, Evangelicalism succeeded in effecting social change by establishing a new local culture and its attendant institutions (Chesnut, 1997). This culture was revolutionary in that its ideology, practices, and organization differed dramatically from those of the mainstream, creating a dedicated group of adherents with a distinct understanding of the way the world worked and how to change it. In contrast to traditional social movements, which emphasize participating to accomplish goals, the church movement provided the additional substantive rationality of participating for the dynamic and exuberant experiences that participation regularly brought.
The village contained an autonomous revolutionary group in its midst, and when the exploitative activities of the civic leaders bankrupted the traditional secular worldview, Evangelicalism acquired the opportunity to remake the community in its own image. Rather than something entirely new, however, Evangelical community revitalization amounted to a reassertion of village ethnic identity. The Evangelical leadership used the trust inhering in church relations to reassert the group mutuality long vested in community identity. Indeed, strong local strictures and desires to work together had previously helped village leaders to fleece their neighbors, not participating in the Ponzi scheme (before it was revealed as such) being tantamount to undermining the foundation of local society. The emphasis on brotherhood and anticorruption in the Evangelical subculture, maintained by its revolutionary rupture from the status quo, revitalized these strong latent desires. In this way, the church helped reconstruct local ethnicity as working for mutual benefit rather than adhering to the plans of the powerful, resulting in improving the village’s position in the political economy.
Evangelical Social Change
The rapid, large-scale Evangelical conversions throughout Latin America inspired a heated debate between “monolithic portraits” of this movement (Smilde, 2003)—whether it amounted to widespread progressive social change or a revitalization of old forms of domination. Interest in this subject waned, however, as a consensus emerged that Evangelicalism’s highly decentralized nature was largely responsible for its rapid spread. This meant that the conversions never cohered into a major society-changing movement, the new religious practices amounting to anything to anyone, depending on the local context and application (Kamsteeg, 1998). Evangelicalism’s greatest impacts have been local and diverse (Freston, 2001). Investigations of this impact confront a laundry list of potential means, outcomes, and limitations to localized change. Researchers must therefore contextualize their findings and implications (Robbins, 2004). Outcomes depend on local conditions, and any analysis of larger meanings must control for these conditions.
All sociopolitical change stems from the cultural transformations at the core of Evangelical doctrine and practice. Evangelicalism emphasizes “rupture” with the prevailing culture. Its charismatic speaking-in-tongues rituals, ascetic code, and dualistic demonizing of the mainstream help it sustain this discontinuity (Robbins, 2004: 127). Conversion generates a self-reinforcing community that helps maintain membership and the institution itself (Lim and Putnam, 2010). Evangelicalism’s emphasis on the laity’s serving as officers has enabled it to quickly and inexpensively create the institutions through which it operates (Chesnut, 1997). Further, it has proved highly transportable, dialoguing with rather than superseding local issues. In fact, its ability to build institutions, particularly in areas of relative deprivation, greatly enhances its popular appeal. With newly established cultural practices reinforced by strong institutions, Evangelicalism has great potential for further change.
One of the most dramatic and direct changes, documented in a wide variety of situations, involves a renegotiation of patriarchy. Evangelical strictures against drinking, adultery, gambling, and fighting cut men off from traditional areas of status competition that frequently prove abusive to women. Moreover, the new churches have many managerial positions available to women, enabling them to acquire leadership skills and expectations. Evangelicalism has also reprioritized family life for men. Nevertheless, most teachings emphasize that wives should obey their husbands as the men obey God, and men continue to hold most of the highest positions. Politically, such shifts have enabled broader political participation (Brusco, 1993) and have even feminized community political priorities (Burdick, 1993).
Some studies view the origins, structures, practices, and content of the new Protestant churches as inherently and irredeemably authoritarian. It is argued that reliance on charismatic leaders and the requirements for church survival work to reproduce the despotic corporatism that pervades Latin America (Bastian, 1993; Chesnut, 1997; 2003; d’Epinay, 1967; Gaskill, 1997; Moreno, 1999). Others see Evangelicalism’s individual and otherworldly focus as driving a withdrawal from politics, and broad surveys find Evangelicals more easily pushed away from politics under difficult circumstances (Smith and Hass, 1997; Steigenga, 2001; Steigenga and Coleman, 1995).
Evangelical practices have created new “open spaces” that enrich civil society and foster greater direct participation (Hale, 1997; Stoll, 1990). Some converts hear the living word of God telling them to act directly and seize vacant properties (Sánchez, 2008). In more general terms, researchers have found that church practices and beliefs train believers to be active citizens rather than clientelist subjects, with the universal charismatic experience in which all practitioners speak directly to God enabling them to challenge church and other leaders (Burdick, 1993; Stoll, 1990). Lacking an inherent political agenda, the new religion has supported diverse political projects such as raising incomes, creating a peaceful bastion amidst civil war, helping put down extremist guerrillas, demanding resources from the state, overcoming taxing systems, and fighting racism (Annis, 1987; Brusco, 1993; Burdick, 1992; 1996; del Pino, 1996; Green, 1993; Martin, 1990; Muratorio, 1982; Stoll, 1993). Ireland (1999) argues that the more spiritualism enables control over daily life, steering practitioners away from corruption and into networks confronting the “pathologies of poverty,” the more democratic the church will be.
Research on the economic impact of Evangelicalism presents a similarly mixed picture. Employers see converts as free from corruption but also as failing to prioritize earthly labor (Chesnut, 1997; Martin, 1990; Maxwell, 1998). Ascetic practices can help in the accumulation of some limited capital (Maxwell, 1998), and the religion can serve as a critique of capitalism and consumerism (Burdick, 1993; Meyer, 1995; 1999). In contrast, many individuals join because of Evangelicalism’s U.S. origins, hoping to make lucrative social connections (Garrard-Burnett, 1993), and some churches teach that the pious will enjoy material prosperity (Coleman, 2000; Freston, 1995). While attitudes may change, however, Evangelical conversion corresponds little with increased economic well-being.
In sum, Evangelical conversion amounts to a dramatic cultural change and the forging of a new community of practitioners. These changes have variously altered social, political, and economic relations. While some instances have been progressive, conservative change has also occurred. Looking at individual cases is one of the best ways of understanding the impact of Evangelicalism. The Huaytabamba case engages most directly with the quick, cheap, and rupture-induced creation of a self-sustaining community and the relation of anticorruption mandates to more inclusive governance.
Methods
I lived and worked alongside villagers in Huaytabamba for almost two years, conducting more than 100 open-ended interviews with community members. Interviewing over 70 percent of the Huaytabamba population enabled me to put together a fairly detailed history of major village events, different people’s roles in them, and everyone’s thoughts and beliefs about their history, providing me with a rich knowledge that regularly surprised villagers. I also spoke with many external agents who worked with the village. Indeed, I gained entrée into Huaytabamba by forming a strong relationship with an Ayacucho nongovernmental organization (NGO) that had worked with the village for over 20 years. The personnel provided me with a solid historical knowledge and different perspectives, eventually revealing, for instance, the NGO’s own victimization by Huaytabamba’s Ponzi scheme. I also spoke to representatives of other NGOs and governmental agencies, including the district mayor and governor. As a measure of the “under the radar” character of Evangelical mobilization, none of the many agents I spoke to regarded Evangelicalism as anything like an assertion of popular interests. The only strong opinions were negative, viewing the beliefs and practices as contemptible and compartmentalizing the work of the Evangelically inspired village leaders in strictly secular terms.
The village itself, ringed on three sides by steep hillsides covered with patchwork fields, is a one-hour, 12-kilometer bus ride from the city of Ayacucho. Villagers regularly made the trip to the city, as it was the hub of socioeconomic activities. Therefore they did not suffer from geographic isolation, but the ability to visit the city did not readily translate into access to its institutions.
Residents spoke primarily Quechua and lived on family plots in small adobe houses, all of which sat close to the central plaza and the community house. As in most parts of the rural Andes, reproductive strategies consisted of a combination of farming on scattered land parcels and paid labor (mostly at US$3.50 per day) in the immediate area, in the city, or through temporary migration. Long-standing integrated agro-pastoralism filled most days, with local rules governing when cows could enter fields to glean and fertilize. Villagers said that the average landholding size was around 3 hectares, though plots ranged from near zero to 20 hectares. A local NGO estimated most village incomes at below US$1 per day.
Villagers practiced several forms of labor exchange, predominantly the faena, in which all families worked on village projects (such as cleaning irrigation canals), and the ayni, in which some mutuality (including limited paid labor) regulated groups working in fields controlled by individuals. The community generally governed itself, periodically electing a presidential junta. Though it was connected to a district mayor and district governor, with villagers serving as representatives of each system, no civic funding was guaranteed from these bureaucracies. The village was mostly on its own.
The Context of Huaytabamba Evangelicalism
Villagers generally experienced a tension between their desires for modernist economic development and their exploitation by the system purporting to provide it. The community supplied the main means to access external resources, mobilize collective labor, and acquire a group ethnic identity (Wade, 1997). But clientelist resource distribution made it also the primary means of extracting villagers’ wealth (Scarritt, 2011). Thus it was possible for a single villager with privileged connections to interpret and implement initiatives coming from outside on behalf of all villagers, serving as the key link between villagers’ desire to improve and the maintenance of extractive urban patronage networks. The political-economic reality of village life navigated between improvement and exploitation, with local leaders possessing near dictatorial powers in deciding which. While the disadvantageous position of the largely Quechua-speaking villagers made them prone to exploitation, different strategies within this structure generated disparate outcomes.
Beginning in the early 1980s, just as Evangelicalism started to make inroads, a man named Damian led a small group of elite villagers in a series of “development” projects that required donations of labor and funds by the rest of the inhabitants (see Scarritt, 2011). These projects spiraled into a labyrinthine strategy in which small projects promised to produce windfalls, vastly increasing local landholdings and cattle herds. Project leaders used village funds to establish tight connections with urban development officials, ultimately establishing a Ponzi scheme in which villagers contributed increasing amounts of resources in an attempt to recover what they had lost, eventually selling off most of their animals in a final, fruitless effort. In 1994 Damian disappeared, having “stripped comuneros [community members] of all their money,” as one man described it.
These events left local institutions in shambles. Villagers “lost all trust in the authorities then, and . . . they didn’t even want to work together in the fields, so the [later] authorities couldn’t do anything.” The all-important collective work parties almost completely stopped. Community meetings became infrequent, and even holidays went unmarked.
The burgeoning Evangelical church, however, remained largely untouched. The congregation was largely focused on being good Christians. People went to church for calm and for positive socializing with like-minded Evangelicals, and believers went to shed the worries of their secular lives. At this point, the politics of the church was nonpolitics. Local politics overwhelmed villagers. Their major local source of identity, the community, created uncertainty and trepidation in their lives. The church and its ethereal focus provided a third option between economic improvement and exploitation. But as the ethnic strictures for participating in local development plans were so strong, only one man was able to use church dedication to avoid some of the more exploitative development schemes. In not participating, though, he turned his back on his neighbors, potentially generating a major collective action problem, and risked constructing his church as enabling the shirking of responsibilities.
The Rise of Evangelicalism
Evangelicalism emerged in Huaytabamba largely because it allowed people to depart from the local Catholic mainstream, particularly the self-destructive elements of heavy drinking, fighting, and domestic abuse. One village patriarch, Alfonso, in desperation turned to some “brothers” from another village when he could find no other remedy for his colic. Becoming cured, he was transformed into an ardent believer, undergoing a massive personality transformation by adhering to Evangelical behavioral prescriptions. As the current pastor explained, Alfonso had been notoriously abusive, “really wicked, drunk, and crazy, and after conversion he calmed down.” During one drunken tirade, he had detached his wife’s earlobe from her head. It dangled as a living testament to the violence surrounding particular Catholic-associated practices in Andean life.
In some ways, both Catholicism and Evangelicalism were responses to the village’s impoverishment. Some aspects of the Catholic route clearly exacerbated these conditions by increasing local excess morbidity and mortality, and the Evangelical option reacted to these pathologies. Neither, however, immediately confronted the structural conditions that, in Alfonso’s case, had prevented real medical treatment from being a viable primary option. Indeed, these conditions made Alfonso desperate enough to experiment with Evangelicalism. And, some ten years later, he died a horrible death, screaming throughout the night because he could not get medical treatment for tuberculosis even though a health post stood less than 3 kilometers away.
As one of the first local converts, Alfonso founded the village church and, being seen as testimony to the truth of the Evangelical worldview, proselytized heavily. His personal turn from self-destructive habits became strong evidence for the efficacy of the radical doctrine that dedication brings salvation—or the more quotidian version of dedication improving the believer’s life. This provided Evangelicalism an inborn reinforcement mechanism: as people adopted the Evangelical culture, they began to lead healthier lives, inspiring broader dedication to the church. But the interpretation remained in fully Evangelical terms: “According to the Word that God explains to us, only through faith and believing in God can we become cured and will He cure us from sickness. So we see the brothers who were very sick and could not get well, and with nothing they were cured; with this we believe there exists the power of God.” Believers generalized from their extreme cases 3 of domestic violence and sickness to extend the formula to all other troubles of people’s lives, unashamedly exploiting this connection in their attempts to expand the church. Proselytizers maintained that, since Evangelicalism did not specify any one malady, the formula was universally applicable, whether the problem was a lost cow or cancer. Since these minor successes required a radical universal doctrine, the agents were, in a sense, correct: in order to make the actual changes—the cultural leap—people had to believe that all changes were possible through the exact same means.
The converts applied their new worldview to everybody’s problems, warning that they would get worse and that the only remedy was Evangelicalism. They claimed that almost any ailment was fatal, requiring the dedication not only of the sick but also of the entire family. A man who had swollen hands from tending cows in high, cold pastures said, “Don Alfonso said to me, ‘Enter Evangelicalism because this sickness you have will enter your heart and you may die, but in Evangelicalism you will be healthy.’” And church authorities exploited maladies other than poor health care. One woman explained how the pastor persuaded her to become more dedicated to the church: “He told me that I would suffer a lot, that something bad was going to happen to me. ‘It could be the death of your husband or another serious thing.’ . . . After he told me this, about three days went by and all my animals were stolen.” Because of the pastor’s words, the woman easily interpreted her problems as at least partially resulting from her failings as an Evangelical. And, even though I did not necessarily ask for them, well over half of active churchgoers related similar instances about the level of their dedication. Another woman said, “We thank God because He gives us what we need. For this I feel what happened to me was a miracle, because if I had not remembered God I would not have a cow and I would be wanting to drink milk and eat cheese.” Thus, as long as people faced difficult conditions, the church had a vibrant tool for recruiting and retention.
Evangelical Dedication
Establishing the church proved very difficult. Vehement hostility from Catholics meant, among other things, that adherents had to be particularly dedicated. The first practitioners faced persecution because their practices were regarded as weird and threatening from a Catholic perspective. In the early years, people said, the other villagers hated them: There was a plant behind the house [where the Evangelicals were meeting] where they placed dynamite and detonated it; my cousin Hilario [a later convert] and other people did this; I wanted to go out and see and they told me, “Don’t go out. If they’re the terrorists, they will leave us papers.” When we went to see in the morning, they had left a paper where they told us to quit being Evangelicals.
This initial attitude was widely confirmed. One current stalwart said, “Back then I did not like the Evangelicals, I hated them; I told the others to take them and kick them out of this village.” Malicious rumors spread: “The people who are now Evangelical said that we slept around.” This is a rumor that persists in some Catholic circles today, with one man claiming that “the Evangelicals are womanizers” and that an Evangelical man in another town had offered up his daughters for a sexual liaison.
This persecution removed any middle ground: “Yes, they tried to throw us out; but the pastors told us to not to pay them any mind; ‘If they hit one cheek, offer the other; they are not hitting you but they are hitting God,’ they told us.” Practitioners strove to transform their regular experiences with persecution into a means of strengthening and promoting the religion, thus developing a much more intense sense of purpose.
The Evangelical Revolution
Beyond having a universally applicable formula and dedicated adherents and overcoming Catholic-associated excesses, Evangelicalism also thrived because it successfully competed with existing secular worldviews. Villagers struggled to find good health care, income, and protection against violence in the institutions of the urban-centric world. For example, a woman who had been raped said, “I filed a complaint according to the law, believing in the law, but there is no justice.” Therefore, Evangelicals could easily interpret sickness, robbery, violence, and economic windfalls in religious rather than secular terms. Evangelicalism prospered because villagers had no access to urban institutions.
As documented elsewhere (Robbins, 2004), Evangelicalism possessed a self-reinforcing appeal by providing a community of like-minded individuals safely enjoying the dynamic practices of their new culture. As in other communities (Burdick, 1993; d’Epinay, 1967), villagers attended church because they enjoyed it. “I like the singing and the praying,” said a typical practitioner. As the congregation grew, the locale for engaging in wondrous spiritual activities became a new focus of village socializing. People found that the church gave them new, more fulfilling life priorities: “With Evangelicalism we are with our families and I am more united with my children and I always think of my family.” Further, people looked to the church to solve many of their everyday problems. One woman “prayed to God to get a cow” and thus considered an easy loan from her father-in-law a miracle. In other words, seeing positive “consequences” from their participation, villagers had instrumentally rational reasons for participating.
Further, one of the most valuable aspects of Evangelicalism was that it enabled an escape from the tension and uncertainty of daily life, particularly as Damian pulled more and more money out of the village. Damian had tried to head the Evangelical church just as he tried to control all local institutions, but his younger brother admitted to me that the church would not have him. As one man explained, people were elected pastor almost exclusively on the basis of their dedication to Evangelicalism. Damian’s unparalleled skills, which had gained him a leadership role throughout the rest of the village, were based on his engagement with the outside world. He did not choose to fulfill the onerous time demands of proving church dedication. The congregation’s interests were focused on what went on inside the chapel, and this neutralized his appeal.
In sum, with its universally applicable doctrine, its successful demonstrations, its dramatic break from the mainstream culture, its heavy persecution, its peaceful environment, and its active incorporation of all subscribers, Evangelicalism in Huaytabamba represented a revolutionary change. Rather than incrementally altering different facets of social life for churchgoers, it transformed all major aspects of their lives. Instead of challenging the community’s structural constraints, it simply employed their limited resources differently.
Evangelicalism Takes Charge
With Damian’s sudden departure in 1994 marking the failure of traditional secular institutions, the role of the church began to shift outward. In effect, the church began to apply its universal doctrine to the social institutions of the village rather than restricting it to individual behaviors. Church stalwarts, motivated by their Evangelical beliefs to serve their brothers and sisters, began filling the community leadership vacuum. As Evangelicalism bled into the community, brothers and sisters became fellow community members, not just fellow believers.
A man the community had once wished to exile because of his abusive drunken behavior, Pedro, stood out among the new leaders. As has occurred throughout Latin America (Garrard-Burnett, 1993), religion inspired these individuals to take village leadership positions. “I want to do something for my brothers and sisters,” Pedro explained, “so I have always tried to serve in a [community] office.” But the church also provided a different hierarchy to acquire status and leadership positions. In contrast to Damian, Pedro and others distinguished themselves by working for the church: “The people admire Don Pedro; he is always at services; he always helps; he is a good Christian.” Pedro held the positions of pastor and president simultaneously from 1998 to 2000, and in these roles he revitalized moribund village abilities to engage in community projects.
A few people, such as Alfonso, criticized Pedro for politicizing the pastorship, and several Catholics complained that Evangelical rule undermined the village, some going as far as saying it “brought us disorder even for the dead.” The vast majority, however, regarded Pedro as one of the most effective presidents in village history. With few exceptions, church stalwarts praised him for his political work, and 12 of the 15 Catholics I spoke with about the issue similarly commended him. As one put it, “In his period [Pedro] achieved many works; he did more works than any recent president; others could not gain the support of the community.” These programs included communitywide outhouses, a new school, metal roofing materials for the entire community, a children’s food program, and revitalization of the potable water system. In this, Pedro said that he would never hate Damian because Damian taught him how to access such resources from urban agencies. Just as they had under Damian, however, villagers relied on Pedro as a single intermediary with outsized powers.
Besides being inspired by his religion to enter civic service, Pedro saw civic projects as serving church needs. For instance, he told me that he acquired the outhouses for the village so that visiting “brothers” would have a place to go. For him, there was little dividing the church and the community, and as pastor-president he blended these institutions. He “always admonished the congregation and in this way got the members of the church to rise up and contribute to the community.” Pedro used the pulpit to push believers into doing their civic duty and participating in community events and work parties. For him the village was a family, and good Christians had to work with and on behalf of their family. And he himself worked hard for the community, soliciting multiple urban institutions for projects.
Pedro’s techniques appear to have worked. The entire village—now majority Evangelical—once again worked on community projects and in each other’s fields. But Pedro not only relied on the perseverance of the church subculture and bonds of trust but exploited it. He fused the church and the village and employed the recently created church network for tasks formerly under community auspices. In one instance, he easily persuaded Catholics and Evangelicals alike to tear down the Catholic chapel in order to make room for a new school. Only years later, when a new chapel failed to materialize, did villagers complain about having been manipulated. “The Evangelicals destroyed our church. . . . Yes, I helped tear it down; but they said a new one would be built, and this has not come,” one man among many exclaimed. Thus, tying the church and village so closely together overcame historical problems within the community but ran a serious risk of having religious priorities trump general village needs.
These changes, however, represent more than the revitalization of communal work parties. Such collective labor is a principal component of Andean identity and culture (Allen, 1988; Flores, 1988; Gose, 1994; Isbell, 1978; Mayer, 1985). In Huaytabamba, Damian’s machinations caused villagers to identify the community with their exploitation and degradation. Now, however, through Pedro’s fusing of the Evangelical subculture to the community, villagers associated community membership with fulfilling the promises of development. In essence, Pedro helped recast the community-based ethnic identity as one of mutuality rather than exploitation. The key to this transformation was the Evangelical church. Specifically, the church provided important local measures of success. These were initially confined to the congregation, but Pedro’s actions expanded them to embrace much more of the community. Success came to be understood in terms of building the village infrastructure and working with fellow villagers.
Evangelical Impact
The success of Evangelically inspired governing largely depends on its ability to steer practitioners away from corruption and into networks confronting the “pathologies of poverty” (Ireland, 1999). Regarding the former, Pedro’s regime engaged with the corrupt clientelist agencies responsible for rural resource distribution but largely prevented them from becoming a means of wealth extraction.
The case of constructing the school illustrates the characteristics and limits of these anticorruption activities. Fujimori’s patronage machine, the Ministry of the Presidency, made the funds for a new school available (Gonzales de Olarte, 1998), and the district mayor presented the project as a quid pro quo for villager votes. The edifice, however, promised no educational improvements, simply replacing the old adobe school with one made of the “noble materials” of cement and brick. Further, the benefaction proved useless when 10 inches of stagnant water covered its floors. As one aid worker put it, “The mayor got them all to vote for him, and now this school is flooded.” This project was tied directly to the patronage mechanisms of the state, but it was positive in that it gained resources for the village and helped people work together again. The other projects, such as road building and new metal roofing, were not so fatally flawed. The orange outhouses and the orange bowls of the children’s meal program, however, were the color of Fujimori’s party and served to advertise his generosity. As did the school, these public works came directly from the presidential patronage machine.
Economically, the Evangelical government undid the worst facets of developmentalist exploitation. Indeed, the Evangelical church enabled Pedro to navigate the structural tensions between development and exploitation in a new way. The anticorruption stance stopped leaders from using projects to acquire personal wealth. Combined with the individualized character of village power, this helped prevent the exploitative aspects of development from entering the village. In so doing, this new form of leadership considerably improved the village’s position within the exploitative political economy. These successes played on the contradiction between Fujimori’s cheap vote-getting machine and more regional forces interested in leveraging these funds to fortify their extractive clientelist networks. Pedro was able to achieve a net gain from urban resources, though at the cost of the ubiquity of Fujimori propaganda and popularity.
Regarding Ireland’s (1999) second issue of positive networking, the civil war had seriously stifled social movements, including those of an indigenous character, leaving little opportunity for networking (Garcia and Lucero, 2004; Yashar, 2005). Under Pedro’s regime, however, the village successfully confronted a growing right-wing movement. Among Fujimori’s neoliberal reforms was the 1995 Land Law advocating the privatization of village land tenure systems and creating land markets in the name of efficiency (Ministerio de Agricultura, 2004). This change meant a regressive redistribution of land and power (Ministerio de Agricultura, 2004; Spalding, 1975) and increased the resources available for extraction by local clientelist networks. Villagers could be forced to take out loans or even sell their lands, thereby losing the primary basis of their reproduction and becoming more dependent upon the locally powerful. The four most powerful families, considered the founders of the village, pushed the privatization effort. Three of the four patriarchs were Evangelicals, including Alfonso. The remaining 36 families desired to preserve the comunidad campesina system that protected lands from taxation and expropriation and helped villagers obtain labor and external resources. While the patriarchs presented privatization as a means to make lands more valuable and secure, all the others viewed it as threatening their livelihoods.
Under Pedro, the village dispatched this threat in a straightforward and formal way, demonstrating the new governance brought about by Evangelical revitalization. Damian’s schemes had fleeced villagers mainly through the various informal, clientelistic networks that ruled the countryside. Pedro’s regime, in contrast, insisted that privatization had to occur through the formal governing mechanisms of the village. As the patriarchs visited individuals in their homes and tried to persuade them of the value of privatizing, Pedro called the matter up for vote at a general meeting in 1998. Villagers rejected the motion en masse, and the issue faded from people’s concerns.
Thus, by bolstering the major communal institutions, Evangelical revitalization prevented the locally dominant from using their high status, resources, and powerful external allies to intimidate reluctant villagers. By placing the matter in the official arena for debate and decision making, Pedro’s regime further strengthened village institutions by staving off a direct threat to them. 4 This method did not stifle dialogue but enabled the egalitarian discourse that is essential for empowered citizenship (Baiocchi, 2001; Dijkstra, 2005; Evans, 2004; Morrison and Singer, 2007; Nylen, 2003; Wampler, 2004; 2007).
In contrast to the highly individualized intermediation of development projects, the privatization struggle was characterized by diffuse and democratic power. Fellowship and anticorruption strictures translated into participatory governance. Rather than breaching the rural-urban divide, this democracy relied on confinement to the segregated community. Staving off exploitation entailed control by robust village institutions and preventing the powerful from leveraging their external connections to supersede local decision-making processes. The church thus helped provide an empowered alternative to the normal despotic form of rural authority and as such fended off regressive structural adjustments.
Conclusion
Mass Evangelical conversions can have dramatic political consequences, but these impacts have been disparate and localized, not enabling broad social movements or easy academic generalizations. In Huaytabamba, church participation meant many things to many people. Its most far-reaching political impact, however, was a renegotiation of ethnicity. This in turn revitalized the collective decision-making infrastructure of the village and thus enhanced its position in the political economy.
The church created a vibrant, self-sustaining, and revolutionary local subculture ready to seize local opportunities to assert long-standing popular priorities around group mutuality. In the church, all interested people could participate fully, and the vibrant rituals’ unpredictable events enticed people to attend (Brouwer, Gifford, and Rose, 1996; Burdick, 1993; Corten, 1999). The new institution, quickly established and cheaply sustained, became a safe venue for camaraderie and a new center for village social life.
In the village, the “strong discourse” of local ethnic mutuality remained latent even after it had been terribly exploited. People believed in it and wanted it to happen, although their recent experiences made them wonder how it could. Such ethnically based dynamics represent a deeply ingrained facet of Andean reality, in which the system is maintained by keeping discontent focused on local relations—backed by the real threat of military reprisals (Heilman, 2010; Scarritt, 2012; Stern, 1992). In this highly unequal contest, ethnic relations occupy an opaque, contested middle ground between serving group interests and supporting elite-run projects more prone to exploitation (Scarritt, 2011).
The church’s fraternal ideology kept the spark of ethnic affinity alive and spread it once Evangelical forces took civil power. The church provided new community leadership unwilling to perpetuate the corruption through which Damian had extracted windfall resources. This leadership provided a novel means to employ the village’s limited resources and navigate local structural constraints. Following the anticorruption, fraternal Evangelical ideology helped reinvigorate the principal means of democratic participation and accountability. By valuing village-level organizations, the church challenged the individual exercise of power. Accountability remained noninstitutionalized: a single villager still served as representative to the urban core but was accountable only to the village institutions because of his Evangelical beliefs. This enabled the village to fend off extractive development and privatization, resulting in an improved overall position for the village within the political economy.
Although particular to this one village, the success lends support to the strategy of generating innovative social change through novel combinations of formerly disparate cultural practices and political concerns. This strategy aims at employing interstitial social spaces— places not overtly politicized—to create hybridized, solidary groups capable of launching creative experiments in social change. This can be an inexpensive form of institution building: the new combinations can simply redeploy already existing practices or take the place of some activity that incurs similar costs or even turn a profit.
As with the works on “new” social movements, this strategy shifts the emphasis from group cohesion through shared ends to the potential for cultural practices to bring political-economic change (Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar, 1998; Aminzade et al., 2001; Tarrow, 1998). While works on cultural politics emphasize the power of dynamic, long-standing cultural practices (Rubin, 1997; Warren, 1992; 1998; Warren and Jackson, 2002), this case stresses the employment of novel cultural forms to revitalize long-standing practices, generating grassroots innovations in imaginative and unforeseeable ways. Examples of the strategy abound on the left. Liberation theology combines Marxism with church doctrine and fellowship (Levine, 1992). In the United States, “drinking liberally” groups provide a safe venue for positive socializing and serve as a base for more direct political activity (Vatrapu, Robertson, and Dissanayake, 2008). And an anarchist collective of punk rockers in Washington, DC, has even appropriated enterprise from capitalism, running a highly profitable dog-walking business according to its own principles (Farnam, 2011).
One important avenue for future research focuses on the less contingent, more transferable ways in which novel cultural combinations develop into social movements, how these can help open up the opportunity structure, and how they scale up to create more impact. Close observation of such movements promises to shed light on the processes involved, while comparative studies can speak to the more transportable factors contributing to creative mobilizations.
CODA
In 2000 the Huaytabamba Evangelical church hosted the largest celebration the village had ever seen, but by 2003 only the pastor and his wife attended services. In late 2000 Damian returned to the village and, working with urban organizations, took over the leadership of the moribund land privatization movement. The Evangelical community provided coherence to the villagers’ opposition and leadership in the person of Pedro, but after years of struggle local resistance proved insufficient. Even the most pro-campesino antiprivatization organizations denied their support for the village majority as the powerful articulated privatization in particularistic village terms. Privatization’s eventual triumph raises the question whether the isolation that made the church’s revolutionary cultural break possible made the village vulnerable to neoliberal-based forms of manipulation.
Footnotes
Notes
Arthur Scarritt is an assistant professor of sociology at Boise State University. His teaching and research explore people’s strategies in confronting austerity. He thanks Tony Lucero, Maria Elena García, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, and Caroline Yezer for help and encouragement, all in Peru for their patience and good humor, Edilberto Jiménez Quispe for invaluable research assistance, and most of all, Jill, Fred, Margo, and Luther. He is also grateful to the reviewers from Latin American Perspectives for their thoughtful and supportive comments. The research was partially funded by a Fulbright-IIE Fellowship.