Javier had sold nearly everything.Footnote 1 His shoes. His mother's boiling pot. A modest set of shelves once hung on the wall. They had held a bucket, a few dishes and a picture frame, but Javier sold those too, and then he pulled down the shelves and hawked the wood. The money he made, which was not very much, bought him some cocaine. ‘I got so angry when Javier sold the shelves’, his mother told me. We spoke inside her home, a modest structure in the outer suburbs of Guatemala City. Built with breeze blocks and aluminium, the house quietly folded into the urban landscape. It rarely caught anyone's attention, but Fernanda took pride in her home, even if her son kept disrespecting it (and, by extension, God). ‘This house is sacred’, Fernanda told me as we sat in her kitchen. She then opened her bible to read Ecclesiastes 10:18. ‘Through laziness, the rafters sag; because of idle hands, the house leaks.’ Committed to Pentecostalism, with all its bootstrapping individualism, Fernanda connected her son's soul to the state of her home until the latter became a reflection of the former. Once Javier had stripped Fernanda's house bare, leaving his mother with nothing more than a table and a few chairs, Fernanda felt morally obligated to act. ‘Yes’, she told me, ‘I had Javier hunted.’
Having someone ‘hunted’ (cazado) in Guatemala City is shorthand for the act of committing a drug user to a Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centre.Footnote 2 Pastors stage these centres inside abandoned factories, garages and apartment buildings; these are often low-rent opportunities that they then renovate for rehabilitation with razor wire, steel bars and iron gates. Most pastors also cap the entrances with a heavy door equipped with an even heavier lock. The hope is that these centres will keep pace with Guatemala's continued rapprochement with illicit drugs by warehousing users (often against their will) for months, sometimes for years. The faithful call the process ‘hunting’ because pastors literally pull drug users out of sin by dragging them into rehab, routinely manhandling them until they stand (in the words of the faithful) ‘before the saving grace of Jesus Christ’. Of interest here is that while husbands, brothers and sons sit inside these all-male institutions, women act as social-service providers in the shadows of a criminally negligent state. They serve as de facto judges and jurors as well as social workers and parole officers for what amounts to a largely unregulated system of community-based drug courts. ‘He threatened my home’, Fernanda told me as we continued to sit at her kitchen table, ‘and so I had him locked up [internado]’.
This article is a response to the conflicted loyalties that Fernanda felt between her son and her home, and more broadly to the gendered and extralegal system of forced rehabilitation. As such, this article explores this Pentecostal defence of the home in Guatemala City, assessing not only the Christian impulse to domesticate sinners but also the extent to which a cult of domesticity organises the outer edges of Guatemala's war on drugs. Central here is the argument that a superficially maternal domesticity serves at least two functions in and around these Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centres.Footnote 3 The first is that it stands as a motivation for removing drug users from the home and, once they are removed, for keeping them away. The second is that this domesticity serves as an organising influence on these centres’ projects of rehabilitation, compelling women not only to pay for the capture and captivity of their loved ones but also to volunteer their labour to support these centres. For the home is an important point of reference in Guatemala City for defining boundaries, and as homes change so do ideas about what and who can be inside them. Throughout Central America, but especially in Guatemala City, women have managed these boundaries while becoming agents of the state, providing the kinds of services that a government focused on social welfare would offer its citizens. As unpaid and unofficial representatives of their homes and these Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centres, women police neighbourhoods, assess drug users and sentence repeat offenders. And they do all of this for the greater glory of God. ‘The devil wants to invade my home’, Fernanda insisted. ‘The devil wants to rob me of my children.’ With a full 50 per cent of Guatemalans self-identifying as Pentecostal Christian,Footnote 4 a growing number of women defend their homes from the devil by locking up their loved ones.Footnote 5
One observable effect of this ideology is a vision of domesticity that stands in constructive tension with today's research on gender and drugs, and on gender more broadly, in Latin America. Scholars and activists rightly cite the high rates of sexual abuse, incarceration and gender-motivated homicides faced by women in Latin America.Footnote 6 Many have also observed how the extant research on drugs, drug trafficking and drug-related violence obscures the role of Latin American women in the drug trade.Footnote 7 Some have attempted to correct for this oversight by focusing on women's experience, but nonetheless continue a much longer tradition of depicting women as victims.Footnote 8 The intervention that this article proposes is that research on the politics of domesticity in Latin America provides an alternative framework for considering the governance of bodies, desires and communities. Happily, the extant research on maternalism in Latin America is already exceedingly robust, with the literature on the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo providing its own centre of gravity, but opportunities exist to complement the insights of this work with scholarship on domesticity elsewhere in the Americas, namely New England.Footnote 9 This study of drug rehabilitation centres, the devil and domesticity in Guatemala City presents a slightly different story from what has been addressed in the literature, one that does not disaggregate the actions of men from women but rather considers the formation of a maternal domesticity (understood here as mobile, shifting and political). Of interest is how this cultural construct produces boundaries – between what belongs in the home and what must be excised from it – and how those boundaries function to justify different forms of control over different populations. On the one hand, the framework of maternal domesticity functions to justify the captivity of male drug users as a group of people who are constructed as a risk to the domestic sphere. And on the other hand, the same framework that nominally protects the female relatives of drug users from the domestic risks these men pose also justifies a form of control over those same women, whose money and unpaid labour are enlisted by drug rehabilitation centres in order to keep them economically viable. To which this article ultimately asks: how has Pentecostalism elected women as sovereign agents of Christian righteousness? And to what effect have these women found themselves on the front lines of not just the war on drugs but also a battle against the devil – which in this case means a battle against drug use and the social and familial disruption it brings about.
Guatemala
These centres appear across Guatemala City but they are not unique to Central America. Versions of them operate throughout South-East Asia, the former Soviet Union and much of the Americas – in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Peru, Ecuador and Brazil, for example. Some even exist in Philadelphia, and most of them rely on a strident vision of salvation.Footnote 10 To understand their crusade, at least in Guatemala, means considering four post-war developments. Together they set the conditions for a countrywide commitment to captivity. The first development is urban violence. Over the last 15 years, the rise of transnational gangs has made Guatemala City one of the most dangerous places on earth. At one point, fewer civilians were killed in the war zone of Iraq than shot, stabbed or beaten to death in Guatemala City.Footnote 11 The average criminal trial also lasted more than four years while less than 2 per cent of homicides resulted in a conviction.Footnote 12 This includes violence against women. In 2008, amid an unprecedented wave of violence against women, the Guatemalan Congress passed Decree 22-2008. This is the ‘Law against Femicide and other Forms of Violence against Women’.Footnote 13 The intervention strengthened existing government entities, created a specialised court scheme to prosecute gender-motivated crimes and criminalised several acts of violence against women.
The second development is drugs – or, to be more specific, hundreds of tons of Andean cocaine.Footnote 14 The short story is that cocaine corridors once connected Medellín to Miami and Cali to Northern Mexico – all by way of the Caribbean. The United States responded with hugely militarised anti-drug policies, with its navy and coastguard patrols ultimately prompting traffickers to shift their transport operations from sea to land and making Central America their principal transit route.Footnote 15 Today, planes, boats and submarines ferry cocaine along the Pacific coast to northern Guatemala. There, beyond the reach of US interdiction efforts, traffickers prepare their product for its eventual trip north, and they do so at a growing pace. Today some 80 per cent of Andean cocaine headed for the United States touches Guatemalan soil,Footnote 16 with the movement of this material coming with considerable logistics. Traffickers need equipment, labour and infrastructure, but they pay for none of them in cash. Instead, they pay with cocaine, which holds very little value in Guatemala.Footnote 17 There are not enough Guatemalans who can afford the drug. To monetise this material, to turn cocaine into cash, laboratories mix the drug with baking soda to make crack cocaine. Now sold throughout Guatemala City, crack cocaine is a far more affordable and far more addictive version of powder cocaine.
The third development is an extreme lack of social services. As a part of economic restructuring – which has included the privatisation of state enterprises, the liberalisation of trade and the relaxation of government regulation – less than 2 per cent of Guatemala's total health budget addresses issues of mental health, with its hospitals flatly denying medical service to those patients seeking support.Footnote 18 Neither has the Roman Catholic Church prioritised drug use as a charitable concern. The Church runs a detoxification centre in Guatemala City for alcoholics. Expensive even by middle-class standards, the centre has six beds. Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centres, when taken in the aggregate, have 6,000 beds. This radical disparity in beds mirrors equally disproportionate rates of conversion. Once overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, Guatemala is today as much as 60 per cent Pentecostal and Charismatic Christian. This shift in religious affiliation is the fourth development, with a growing number of believers viscerally hitched to an apocalyptic theology.Footnote 19 Pastors draw on their Pentecostalism to subject sinners to something called teoterapia, or theological therapy. Its most basic assumption is that captivity will give way to conversion. It rarely does. Yet this bald fact has done nothing to slow the growth of Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centres because these centres provide a practical solution to a concrete problem. The net result is a shadow carceral system infused with assumptions not just about sin and salvation but also about who can be held captive, and why. Today more Guatemalans find themselves tied up in Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centres than locked up in maximum-security prisons.Footnote 20
A broadly shared sense of certainty supports the activities of these centres. The police condone these centres, families pay for the service and centres profit from it, both financially and spiritually. The only open questions are about time: when should a family have their loved one hunted? And for how long should a drug user sit inside a centre? Of interest to this article is that it is women who tend to answer these questions, and they do so based on the perceived symptoms of drug use. These symptoms can include violence and theft but also more subtle signs of disquietude: unkempt rooms, brooding attitudes and tense atmospheres.Footnote 21 Any of these affects can trigger a hunt, for the decision to commit a loved one to a Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centre often takes place amid a milieu in which the home serves as a moral metric for the soul. Javier's most critical misstep, in fact, was not stealing from Fernanda so much as stealing from her home. And, truth be told, Fernanda did not have Javier hunted because he ruined his life but because he ruined her home. ‘I have to protect my home from the devil’, Fernanda told me as we sat in her kitchen: ‘My duty is to defend my home.’
Domesticity
A Christian commitment to the home has at least some of its roots in nineteenth-century New England, but this ideology circulated throughout Latin America because of Christian missionaries.Footnote 22 As the United States doubled its national territory and US churches radically expanded their global reach, the likes of Catharine Beecher (1800–78) and her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–96) wrote Protestant manifestos about the home that found an international, Church-centred audience. These books include A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1848) and The American Woman's Home (1869).Footnote 23 Both books link women's work inside the home to an expanding vision of Christian empire, with nothing too inconsequential to contribute to the mission. The Beechers wrote chapters on US diet and hygiene, on cleanliness and clothing, on washing and sewing. ‘Children should be taught to take proper care of their nails’, Catharine Beecher writes; ‘Long and dirty nails have a disagreeable appearance.’Footnote 24 The two sisters even wrote about the proper tone with which to discipline children: ‘A woman can resolve, that, whatever happens, she will not speak, till she can do it in a calm and gentle manner.’Footnote 25 All of it advanced Protestantism's great moral enterprise to save not just souls but also nations, with what Amy Kaplan has called ‘manifest domesticity’ – that is, those moments in the antebellum United States when the regulation of the home facilitated (at least in Christian spirit) the defence of the nation.Footnote 26 ‘The family state’, the Beechers write, ‘is the aptest earthly illustration of the heavenly kingdom. [The mother] is to rear all under her care to lay up treasures, not on earth, but in heaven.’Footnote 27
US missionaries pressed this ‘manifest domesticity’ onto Latin America, calling on the masses to prepare for Christ's Second Coming.Footnote 28 The campaigns included direct evangelisation: door-to-door pamphleting as well as so-called ‘progressive’ interventions that involved literacy programmes, dental hygiene workshops and emphasis on physical comportment. These were all missionary impositions from the United States that Protestants sought to thrust upon different Latin American countries, but it is important to flag the fact that sometimes the supposedly lost asked to be found. This was the story of Guatemala. While the Guatemalan government restructured its economy towards the cultivation of coffee in the late nineteenth century, with notions of order and progress guiding efforts at liberal reform, the president and Congress implemented anticlerical programmes that seized church property, expelled foreign clergy and abolished religious orders.Footnote 29 To further undercut the power and authority of the Roman Catholic Church, which liberal reformers understood to be a barrier to progress, Guatemala's president travelled to New England in 1882 to recruit Protestant ministers.Footnote 30 He wanted these men of faith to ‘civilise’ his country by advancing a Protestantism that would instil enough literacy to read the Bible as well as a much-touted work ethic. Reverend Edward Haymaker, a graduate of the Yale Divinity School, eventually moved to Guatemala in 1887. ‘When the people of Guatemala begin to develop along modern lines’, Haymaker wrote, ‘when they learn sanitation, motherhood, education, thrift, Guatemala will be one of the greatest little countries in the world’.Footnote 31 For Haymaker and the Beechers, civilisation started inside the home – with cleanliness and hygiene but also with an appreciation for the proper tone with which to discipline a child.
Historical and ethnographic work on women in Guatemala provides some context as to why, more than a century later, Fernanda's pastor preached in the domestic spirit of Haymaker and the Beechers. Martha Few's scholarship on women sorcerers and spellcasters in Santiago de Guatemala, the capital of colonial Central America, demonstrates long-standing assumptions about the supposedly proper place of women in Guatemalan society and especially the kind of ritual labour that goes into defending the home. Few describes the work of one spellcaster: ‘The area under the door to the street was an important gateway linking the public world to the internal, domestic world, and so it was a logical place to establish a ritual barrier to protect the home and those inside from evil.’Footnote 32 The advent of Protestant Christianity only intensified this imperative to both define and defend the home, as one sees not just in a generation of historical work about women in Central America but also in an important surge in reports on violence against women in Guatemala.Footnote 33 Throughout the literature, there is consistent evidence regarding the policing of boundaries that divide the private from the public, the female from the male, and the home from the streets. From the works of Santiago Bastos and Manuela Camus on Indigenous women in Guatemala City to the historical origins of women's political lives in Guatemala City, as detailed in the works of Ana Lorena Carrillo, Susan Berger, Anna Leticia Aguilar and Sonia Álvarez, there exists an agreed-upon history that women in Guatemala must defend the home as well as themselves inside the home.Footnote 34
Fernanda's own pastor often drew on these deep assumptions for ministerial gain, and he could do so because a wave of Christian conversions throughout the region has only strengthened ecclesiastical connections between Guatemala and the United States. Guatemala's transformation into a Pentecostal nation, in fact, famously began with an act of God: At 3.03 a.m. on 4 February 1976, an earthquake measuring 7.5 on the Richter scale rocked the country. As residents braced themselves for aftershocks, Protestant aid agencies from the United States provided much-appreciated relief in the short term, while in the long term they ‘saturated [Guatemala] with Scripture’.Footnote 35 But rather than the progressive themes of literacy and hygiene, newer Pentecostal denominations exuded an anxiety over sin and the devil. Protestants from the United States still very much wanted to save Guatemala for the greater glory of God, but these missionaries no longer focused on reading and brushing one's teeth so much as on expunging sin in defence of the family. Whereas Haymaker and the Beechers connected the home to the nation vis-à-vis Protestant Christianity in the late nineteenth century, Pentecostal Christianity has associated this language of domesticity with the devil himself.Footnote 36
With second-hand speakers framing a makeshift pulpit, Fernanda's pastor confirmed that the devil wants to rob Christians of their homes. ‘Do you have the power to deny the devil?’ the pastor asked his congregation. Families sat in folding chairs as a gentle breeze passed through the church. ‘Your kids, your livelihood, everything you have stood for – you can sell it out to the devil. Because [as a sinner] you have no power. You have no spiritual authority. You have nothing.’ The pastor then described the devil as knocking on the front door, literally banging at the gates. ‘Can you hear [the devil]? He is fighting his way into your home!’ Sin began to sound like an extended home invasion, with the pastor quickly pushing his logic to its most graphic conclusion. He announced: ‘The devil can come into your home and rape it (violarlo) and take everything you have.’ The pastor screamed that last part.
Wild
Fernanda also screamed a lot. ‘Javier makes me so angry’, she once told me, ‘and so I yell at him. I scream at him. I say such horrible things.’ Her outbursts usually took place at the lip of Javier's bedroom, which Fernanda once described to me as a ‘crime scene’ (escena del crimen). Stripped bare of anything valuable, the bedroom always seemed to be tumbling into deeper states of disorder. There were the obvious signs of disregard, such as piles of dust and dirt, but Fernanda fretted far more openly about the half-smoked joints that Javier kept by his bed and the centrefolds of topless women that he salvaged from the daily newspapers. They littered the room just as Javier lazed about the house. He did not work or even look for work. Instead, Javier brooded about the house, occasionally stepping outside to get high. In the end, it was not surprising that Fernanda's descriptions of Javier's physical and moral states began to blend into one another, with her announcing that his room and his soul were both dirty (sucio).
Mary Douglas once noted that where there is dirt, there is a system.Footnote 37 Since at least the days of Haymaker, the home has been one of Guatemala's most important social systems for distinguishing dirt from earth.Footnote 38 In fact, only a generation after Haymaker's ministry, the Guatemalan government staged a series of national fairs in Guatemala City, with its most popular exhibits displaying the homes of Indigenous communities.Footnote 39 Staged in the tradition of human zoos, or ethnological expositions, these were full recreations with houses built from scratch and villages populated by Maya from various highland communities.Footnote 40 Asked to perform their domestic duties for an audience of US, German and Guatemalan tourists, these Indigenous men, women and children wove textiles, made bars of soap and played music amid a decidedly non-Indigenous city. The government wanted these fairs to stimulate international tourism, but their exhibits also had the added benefit of forging a national identity by establishing an isomorphic relationship between home and nation.Footnote 41 By staging Indigenous houses as tourist spectacles, these national fairs actively monitored the borders between civilisation and savagery by conceding (and thus controlling) Guatemala's untamed elements. Presenting something of a photographic negative of the homes to which a liberal, Protestant citizen should aspire every day, these exhibits announced for all to see that domesticity has never been ‘a static condition’ so much as an active ‘process of domestication’.Footnote 42
A parallel process of urbanisation also took place in Guatemala City during the mid-twentieth century, with new modes of construction attempting to guide the country's emerging middle class towards reportedly modern styles of living routinely found in the United States.Footnote 43 These included single-family homes for government bureaucrats and multilevel apartment buildings designed for nuclear families. Each emphasised an orderly aesthetic that neatly divided the basic functions of home life. Architects and designers separated bedrooms from the living room as well as the kitchen from the dining room. These interventions actively reordered everyday life in Guatemala City with a new mode of domesticity, one in which new systems of order set the conditions for new kinds of dirt. Douglas observes, ‘If we can abstract pathogenicity and hygiene from our notion of dirt, we are left with the old definition of dirt as matter out of place.’Footnote 44 These emerging structures of domesticity made the act of eating in bedrooms dirty and sleeping in living rooms lazy. All of which contributed to the idea of domesticity that defined Fernanda's opinion of Javier, for all of it easily folds into Pentecostal theologies of demonic possession.
Fernanda's pastor preached that mothers should tame the wild. ‘I am here to tell you that Satan is out to get your family’, he preached, not long before Fernanda had Javier hunted. ‘The devil wants to destroy your marriage. He wants to destroy your home. There is a demonic invasion beyond anything you can imagine.’ The message struck a chord with Fernanda, but she was not alone. Almost everyone inside the church seemed sensitive to the idea that the devil lay in wait for each and every one of them. ‘There are homes that are devil-proof’, the pastor conceded, ‘and I thank God for these devil-proof homes. The father prays. The mother prays. The children are in divine order. And the home is in divine order.’ But the threat remains, he insisted. ‘The devil throws everything he has at these homes, but they survive. The devil can't touch these homes because there are walls up around these homes.’ The pastor then made his main point. ‘There are two kinds of homes in Guatemala’, he said. ‘There are walled homes and there are un-walled homes.’
Fernanda already knew that the devil had breached the walls of her home – so much so that she often felt like a visitor gazing upon Javier's room. Fernanda found herself getting increasingly angry. ‘I looked at my son's room, and I looked around my home, and I just started to cry’, she told me. Fernanda was visibly upset. ‘And I was just trying to make adjustments. I was telling myself that it wasn't so bad. But I was running from [Javier]. I was scared to confront Javier.’ Fernanda mentioned an episode with her mobile phone. ‘I would hide my mobile phone from him because [otherwise] he would steal it.’ This became something of a cat-and-mouse game, which Fernanda eventually lost. ‘And when he eventually found [the mobile phone and sold it] I blamed myself for having left [the phone] on the kitchen table.’ It was at that point that Fernanda called her pastor. ‘I needed to defend my home from the devil. I needed to win [my home] back.’ This meant having Javier hunted.
Fernanda's pastor recommended a Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centre on the other side of the city. Housed inside an abandoned shoe factory, the centre held 30 to 40 captives at a time. Camilo, the director, was a young man in his early 30s. A former drug user and self-professed pastor, he had an evangelist's zeal for hunting. ‘I bring sinners to Christ’, Camilo told me. ‘I bring them home [al hogar].’ But these homecomings often meant pulling users from their beds with well-timed visits from a few of his men. In Javier's case, the hunt happened in the middle of the day. Camilo and his men waited in front of the house, just outside the front door, while Javier lay in bed. Fernanda called out to her son, asking him to help her with a chore. She said that she needed him to carry a package to her neighbour's house, but Javier declined by calling out an almost inaudible excuse. He would do it later, he said. Fernanda then insisted, but Javier waved her away one more time. This time he raised his voice in frustration at this mother. Eventually, after some coaxing, Javier reluctantly got out of bed, stepped through the front door and fell into the arms of Camilo's hunting party (grupo de cacería). There was a struggle, and Javier did his best to escape. He even separated from the men for a moment, but Javier proved too slow to make much use of his near escape. Instead, Camilo's men moved him from the front of his home to the back of their car within moments. The men then drove Javier to the centre while Fernanda paid Camilo the equivalent of US$50 for the hunt.
Work
Fernanda would pay Camilo several more times over the next few months. Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centres are for-profit enterprises. With some 200 centres operating in or around the capital city, directors compete for souls amid an ever-expanding marketplace of options. And while every centre offers more or less the same service, they do so at different price points. Camilo positioned his centre near the bottom of the market, with most of his clients coming from the city's working poor. These included Guatemalans who drove taxis, worked in retail for family businesses and hawked goods at local markets. Focusing on such a class of Guatemalans meant a growing customer base, but it also meant that it was difficult for Camilo to set a standard price for his services. Few could consistently pay a set price. Instead, he often had to negotiate with the wives, sisters and daughters of these drug users to determine how much they could pay. ‘But you can tell what a family can offer’, Camilo once told me as we sat in his office. Inspirational posters hung on the wall. One compared the rehabilitation of a drug user to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. ‘You look at the way [the family] dresses, and the way they [all] act. I also get to see inside their homes [because of the hunt].’ Higher payments meant higher profits for Camilo, and so he often pushed families to their limits. ‘I think of a price that the family can pay’, Camilo said, ‘and then I usually double it’. In Fernanda's case, after she insisted that she could only pay the equivalent of US$50 a month, Camilo set the price of Javier's captivity at the equivalent of US$100 a month. ‘She can find [the money]’, he told me.
It was not obvious (at least to me) where Fernanda might find this money. Fernanda is the single mother of two adult children. Javier, the youngest, had been stealing from her for years while Fernanda's daughter worked in the United States. She sent Fernanda the occasional remittance, but these gifts were so infrequent that Fernanda never planned on them. Instead Fernanda often used the money to buy appliances, such as a convection oven, a DVD player and a television. However, to Fernanda's frustration, Javier ended up stealing and selling all of these items to support his drug habit. Eventually, instead of purchasing a new microwave, Fernanda used the money from her daughter to have Javier hunted. Otherwise, to make ends meet, Fernanda sold cleaning supplies at the local market. She cut vats of concentrate with water, and then bottled the liquids in plastic containers that she salvaged from the streets. The hustle allowed Fernanda to maintain a house that she had inherited from her parents. It was a simple structure that once sat just outside of Guatemala City, but the capital had grown so quickly over the last two decades that the home now rested comfortably inside one of the city's suburbs. With this sprawl came a reliable set of clients. They included two dozen families and a handful of hotels. Fernanda had met all of them at church, with each client appreciating her work ethic and reliability, but none of them (no matter the reason) would have paid a higher price for cleaning supplies.
In search of an extra US$100 a month, Fernanda called in favours with two of her clients. They needed help maintaining their hotels, and together they offered Fernanda a little more than 40 hours of work every month. It was domestic labour. Fernanda washed sheets, mopped floors and made beds. On occasion, she also cooked food for the owners and ironed their clothes. Her duties suffered from a slight definition creep, with her responsibilities at the hotel slowly expanding to include personal labour for the hotel owners. But none of this work was remarkable. Women across the capital support their families with domestic jobs that they often piece together in ad hoc ways. Five hours here. Three hours there. There is even something akin to vertical integration when it comes to domestic labour in Guatemala City, with most domestic workers hiring their own domestic workers to care for their homes while they work in other homes.Footnote 45 The presumption of this second shift, in fact, seemed to motivate Camilo's sense that Fernanda could indeed find that extra money. I asked Camilo why he thought Fernanda could pay the equivalent of US$100 a month for Javier's captivity when she had insisted that US$50 was all that she could manage. ‘She's not even working in someone's home’, he told me.
As Fernanda's domestic labour underwrote the pastor's efforts at domestic security, this second shift soon gave way to a third, with Fernanda effectively volunteering her time inside Camilo's centre. For the cult of domesticity justifies the captivity of young men, but also functions to compel labour from their female relatives. In fact, Camilo did not pay Fernanda or even ask Fernanda to contribute to the centre, but Fernanda ended up visiting Javier three to four days a week. Regardless of the traffic or the rain, Fernanda brought Javier fresh food, clean clothes, toilet paper, bars of soap and toothpaste. She also brought Javier new razors to shave himself and a small brush to clean under his fingernails.Footnote 46 All of this labour amounted to Fernanda's own update to the Beechers’ Treatise on Domestic Economy. ‘When children wash, in the morning’, Catharine Beecher writes, ‘they should be supplied with an instrument to clean the nails, and be required to use it’.Footnote 47 Fernanda also handed Javier small books during her visits. These tracts told tales of tremendous personal transformations, of people brought to the very brink of damnation and then pulled back by the love of Christ. One story featured a young man, not unlike Javier, literally wrestling with the devil for his soul. The heroic, deeply masculine Christian tract tried to depict a moral drama as an actual fist fight, with the grace of God always emerging victorious. It was a storyline that Fernanda began to read onto the body of her son. For the centre quickly caught up with Javier. Completely sober and cleanly shaven, with a fresh pair of trousers, Javier soon embodied the kind of transformation that Fernanda's Christianity promised her family, with captivity allowing Fernanda to mother her son back to health. ‘I can talk to Javier [inside the centre]’, she told me. ‘He listens to me here.’
Fernanda also found her voice inside the centre – so much so that she began to mother Camilo alongside her own son. But this too was not remarkable. The centre holds 30 to 40 captives at a time, with most of these men supported by mothers, sisters and wives. Most of these women cook and clean for their loved ones in ways that effectively release Camilo from including anything other than captivity in the price of his services. These men's women provide the centre with food, laundry and toiletries and, in doing so, bolster Camilo's bottom line. ‘It's a blessing’, Camilo once told me. ‘It's a blessing that these women work so hard to save these men.’ But with dozens of women visiting the centre every day, Camilo also found himself confronted with innumerable demands on his time. The most pressing, in the words of these women, was to make the centre ‘feel like home’. This was a challenge. ‘These women get really demanding’, Camilo complained to me. ‘They want the house to be clean. They yell at me if the dishes aren't washed.’ These women were also quick to escalate their complaints. ‘One woman threatened to call [the Ministry of] Public Health’, Camilo told me. ‘Another actually called [the Ministry of] Human Rights.’ An agent of the state arrived the next day to survey the centre, threatening to close the operation if Camilo did not renovate the centre's only bathroom.
Women
Of all the demands that these women placed on Camilo, the most consequential for his centre as well as for the city was their insistence on single-sex captivity. The vast majority of centres in the city are for men only. ‘There should never be women inside the centre’, Fernanda told me. We spoke in Camilo's front office. Like every other centre in the city, Camilo's house maintained a clear division between two very different kinds of space. The first is for the general population. These are austere rooms where male captives wait for a miracle, for Jesus Christ to save them from sin. The second is the front office, where the wives, sisters and daughters of these captives visit with their loved ones. Women are never allowed into the general population. ‘Women would make [the general population] dirty’, Fernanda said. ‘Women would let the devil in.’ Suffused with the language of domesticity, Fernanda's anxieties about dirt and the devil flagged much larger concerns over the centre's ability to police a presumed border between civilisation and savagery. ‘Women will distract the men’, Fernanda added. ‘Women will tempt Javier.’ She then folded her concerns back across the binary: ‘And what if women were inside [the general population]? Men might attack them.’ Effectively paraphrasing the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18–19), Fernanda's piqued concerns over sexual comportment foreclosed the possibility of a mixed population. ‘I would pull Javier out of this centre if there were women here’, she proudly announced in a way that seemed to heighten a conflicting sense that women are both saviours and sinners, protagonists and temptresses. Up until the door that separates the front office from the general population, women contribute to the purification of these men, and yet they pollute this very same population once they cross this line.
Camilo had no reason to fight Fernanda on this point. The stakes were too high. Not only would Camilo's business bottom out, losing not just Fernanda's payments but almost everyone else's, but Camilo might also end up in jail. Decree 22-2008, the ‘Law against Femicide and other Forms of Violence against Women’, constructed additional prison space to detain those accused of violence against women. One of those actions against women was kidnapping, which is the principal means by which directors, such as Camilo, bring users to Christ. ‘There's no other way to bring someone to the centre’, Camilo explained. ‘We have to pick them up. It's why we call it hunting.’ While the scene can remind the faithful of a young Christ with a lost lamb slung across his shoulders, the actual optics of four men dragging an adult woman into the back seat of their car are very different, suggesting an act that is a prosecutable offence in Guatemala. Ultimately afraid that his efforts at saving souls might place him behind a set of bars, Camilo has not hunted women since 2008. He even purged his centre of the few women he did have once the law went into effect. ‘I pushed them out the door’, he told me. ‘I just opened the front door and asked them to leave. I didn't want anything to do with them anymore.’
Decree 22-2008 ultimately helped to make Camilo's centre a ‘devil-proof home’. For, as Fernanda's pastor once preached, there are two kinds of homes in Guatemala. There are walled homes, and there are un-walled homes. And while the pastor might have been speaking metaphorically, the literal locks and actual bars fortifying the windows and doors of Camilo's centre have certainly contributed to the women's aspiration to make the centre feel like a supremely Christianised version of home. Daily sermons and compulsory prayer circles combine with forced celibacy, sobriety and hygiene to make this centre the ideal site to enact the full fantasy of Christian domesticity. ‘He listens to me inside the centre’, Fernanda told me one day. ‘He will sit there and listen to everything that I have to say.’ For the equivalent of US$100 a month, Fernanda can visit the best version of her son, speak to him and even preach to him about the saving grace of Jesus Christ. And he will not wave her away or rifle through her belongings to find something (anything) to sell. Instead he will sit on a stool and listen to everything that his mother has to say – about drugs, sin and God. Because Fernanda not only pays Camilo to hold her son captive; she – and she alone – also has the power to release her son, to tell Camilo that Javier is ready to leave. Javier knows this, and so he finds himself obeying his mother (even to the point of biting his tongue) to perform the kind of lasting change that Fernanda so desperately wants. ‘I act like a nice little Christian when she comes’, Javier told me. We were milling about the general population, passing time between prayer sessions. ‘She has all the power’, he said. ‘She tells the pastor whether I am ready to leave or not. So I try to convince her.’
The power that women like Fernanda have over the lives of these captives is observable. Camilo has a vested interest in keeping these men inside his centre for as long as he can. Not only does he gain from their steady streams of payment, but he also firmly believes that they are safer inside his centre than walking the streets of Guatemala City. Like the directors and pastors of most other centres in the city, Camilo has seen too many men leave his centre only to die days later. They are killed by gang members or die in the streets in hit-and-run accidents. This is why Camilo maintains that the centre should be a near permanent home for many of these men. While conversion and rehabilitation are Camilo's stated goals, the pastor is often far more practical. ‘They are safer here inside the centre’, he often told me. His captives, of course, disagree, but they are ultimately unable to voice their concerns to their loved ones. Instead, these men communicate their eagerness to leave by making their conversion to Christianity as visible as possible. They do their best to turn their soul inside out such that their outward comportment reflects their inward change. Javier, for example, shaved daily with the razors that Fernanda brought him. He also took time during the day to wash his clothes and often wore his most formal clothes on the day Fernanda would visit him. Rather than a T-shirt, he wore a shirt with a collar. Rather than athletic shorts, he wore slacks and a belt. He ultimately crafted his Christianity with his Sunday best, even if he himself had doubts about his own ability to keep up the act once he left the centre. ‘All I want is to get out of here’, he mentioned to me. ‘I just want to convince my mom that I'm ready and that means looking as clean as I can.’
This incredibly contrived dynamic between mother and son is the symptom of an idea of Christian domesticity that has two observable effects in Guatemala City. The first (to which this article cannot direct as much attention as it deserves) is that the Christian commitment to single-sex captivity has effectively shut women out of nearly every Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centre in and around Guatemala City. At first glance, this might seem like a good thing. Clandestine, compulsory drug rehabilitation centres can become sites of abuse. For the optics are accurate. Four men dragging an adult woman into the back seat of their car is, in fact, a kidnapping. But there is little other recourse for women in Guatemala City, with only one centre in the city that works with women. It is a small house located on a quiet residential street. Positioned near the top of the market, at least in terms of price, the house only holds 15 captives. Much like its male counterparts, this centre deploys its own version of theological therapy, pressing its captives to apply make-up, practice etiquette and pursue something called Christian servitude. This one centre is hardly a workable vision of what the political theorist Fiona Terry might call ‘a second-best world’.Footnote 48 Ill-equipped to address the demands that drug addiction has placed on women in Guatemala City while at the same time pushing its clients towards a very conservative vision of femininity, the centre is nonetheless the only option for a city awash with women in need of help.
Wait
If the first observable effect is that this Christian domesticity locks women out of these centres, then the second effect (deeply related to the first) is that it also locks men inside these centres – for months, sometimes for years. The Pentecostal drug rehabilitation industry constructs devil-proof homes brick by brick, enclosing users in material but also deeply moral ways. For these centres present Fernanda with a highly curated space in which to mother her otherwise delinquent son, and this has an observable effect on Javier's behaviour as well as on Fernanda's mood. Immense relief seemed to wash over this woman once her son began to listen (or at least began to act as if he were listening) to her words. Fernanda finally felt as if her efforts in homemaking had gained traction, with the proof sitting on a stool right in front of her. Javier had shaved his face, washed his clothes and brushed his teeth. His bodily comportment, even down to his posture, externalised an altogether internal transformation. Fernanda seemed to beam with optimism. ‘He can change’, she once mentioned to me right before meeting with her son inside the pastor's front office.
But Fernanda's optimism also came from the fact that her actual home life had suddenly gained a level of peace and quiet that she had not known for years. At one time, architects and designers had separated her bedroom from the living room as well as the kitchen from the dining room, and these emerging structures of domesticity made the act of eating in bedrooms dirty and sleeping in living rooms lazy. And this was the plan. For if in the mid-twentieth century new US-influenced forms of domestic architecture helped create new systems of ordering dirt and non-dirt in Guatemala, then in the twenty-first century the Pentecostal domestic space of the Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centre not only marks a new system of ordering; it also combines with actual homes (like Fernanda's) to form a larger-scale system, with the two reinforcing each other. But purity and danger were no longer a concern for Fernanda. Everything and everyone were suddenly in place. With Javier behind bars, Fernanda could sleep soundly. She also did not need to hide valuables, to constantly remain one step ahead of her son. Fernanda also cleaned out Javier's room, finally ditching the joints as well as those posters of topless women. She struggled more to make ends meet, now shuttling between the market, the hotels and the centre – but when she returned home, she found a welcomed level of serenity. In the wake of arguments and heartbreak as well as deception and disappointment, Fernanda finally felt at home.
Fernanda had also done the maths. Javier had not worked in months. He moonlighted for a bakery and would on occasion contribute to the household with some money, but this had not happened in a long time. His interest in cocaine as well as a larger constellation of substances that included marijuana, solvents and the occasional prescription drug had also clouded his sense of responsibility to his family. And so even at his best Javier contributed nothing to the family, and unfortunately Javier was rarely at his best because he often stole from Fernanda. This included cash from her pockets but also items off her shelves. In very real terms, Javier bled Fernanda's net worth nearly every day he lived inside her house. Never contributing and always taking, Javier's presence inside the house ultimately ravaged Fernanda's bottom line, with Camilo's centre the only real option to curtail the slow damage he was doing (to her, to himself, to their family – and to her home). Without stumbling into the affectively unsatisfying world of cost-benefit analyses, Fernanda nonetheless stood at a crossroads. She could either spend almost every waking moment of her life anticipating her son's next move in the hopes of hiding her mobile phone for another day, or she could pay a lump sum to have her son hunted by a pastor and then negotiate with this pastor for a monthly fee to cover the cost of captivity. Countering the precarity of substance abuse and all of the indignities that it can bring to a family, the centre allowed Fernanda to render the moral failings of her son into a budgetary-line item that she could conceivably meet with a second shift at the hotels and then a third shift at the centre itself. The hunt and captivity provided Fernanda with a thus far unknown level of control (over her son, her life, her home – and even her faith).
If US, German and Guatemalan tourists once gazed upon full replicas of houses built by Maya – all to present a photographic negative of the homes to which a liberal, Protestant citizen might aspire – then it is the work of captivity that has finally made this dream of Christian domesticity possible for the aspiring middle class of Guatemala City. For Fernanda was finally at peace. With Javier secured inside the centre, Fernanda and I spoke one more time at her kitchen table. Her son had already endured two months of captivity, and it was unclear to Fernanda how many more he would have. At some point, the brute reality of captivity effectively outpaced any hope of rehabilitation, and this was alright for Fernanda. She had never looked happier. She told me:
I sleep at night. I'm very tired because of the work. I spend so much time on the bus. I walk to the market and then I travel to the centre. I work at the hotels. And the hotels are not close to each other. I have to take a bus to get from one hotel to the other hotel. Every Sunday I take a bus from church straight to the hotel to work five hours. I'm tired, but I can sleep. I'm not worried about Javier stealing from me or hitting me or leaving in the middle of the night to be with his friends. I don't have to ask Javier to look for a job. I don't have to explain to the neighbours why Javier is not working. Or apologise to the neighbours because Javier was rude. I can sleep at night.
The actual recording of this conversation is much longer. For the sake of expediency and argumentation, I divided Fernanda's comments into sentences, following the intonations of her voice. But for Fernanda, it was one long interlocking story of Christian redemption – of how she came to have a devil-proof home amidst an extraordinarily difficult moment in the history of Guatemala City. For what Fernanda could not see, but what is ethnographically evident, is that her commitment to Christian domesticity has organised not just her family's battles with substance abuse but also the outer edges of Guatemala's war on drugs. A Pentecostal appreciation for the home – for its affects, aesthetics and atmospheres – sets not just the tone but also the logics of compulsory drug rehabilitation, with extended bouts of captivity now seen throughout the city as the most effective technique for maintaining the home as sacred space. And while a complementary ethnography could be completed to detail the thousands of women locked out of the industry, literally left to the streets, this article renders visible how a Christian cult of domesticity forces men such as Javier not only to enter but often to remain inside these centres. ‘When will you let Javier out of the centre?’ I asked Fernanda. ‘I don't know’, she answered.
Acknowledgements
This article draws on extended fieldwork in Guatemala. Juan Bautista Mesa provided research support; Philip Sayers provided writing support; and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada provided financial support. This article began as an invited talk at the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. I thank my host Lalaie Ameeriar and those in attendance for such a robust engagement. I also thank a pair of anonymous reviewers who engaged this essay with tremendous generosity and acumen. Thank you.
