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226 Rafael Sánchez

was once a relatively posh, bohemian part of the city now teeming with
informal commerce and all sorts of criminality.
A few initial encounters with the squatters sufficed for me to grasp the
connection between the squatters’ phenomenal spatial avarice and the
notion of a “living God” instantaneously conveying His dictates to His
squatter-people. This is a God, moreover, that one does not so much believe
in, as if He was forever installed in some distant, invisible realm mediated
by some visible image or authority. Rather, one believes Him as much as
one believes or ought to believe a figure of authority that in the here and
now tells you what to expect and what to do. If the Pentecostal squatters
assert that you must “believe God” this is, indeed, simply because He, as a
living, present deity, addresses you right now as a believer who, as such, is
part of the community of the chosen, you better not merely believe in Him
but believe Him, paying close attention to all that he tells you in the very
moment that he speaks and you hear him. In what follows I hope to make
clear that, at least in Venezuela, much of Pentecostal spirituality is precisely
about obliterating the gap between God and his own creation so that, pre-
sumably, representation may give way to forms of religious presencing
pregnant with all sorts of far-reaching, devastatingly efficacious worldly
1
social and cultural effects. Before, however, I simply will note that, given
the connection between the squatters’ spirituality and their spatial orienta-
tions, it is not all that surprising if the image of a hungry Holy Ghost gob-
bling vast stretches of the cityscape by means of the squatters’ docile agency
eventually seized my imagination. Such a ghostly apparition presides over
much of what I write here.

Spirit Seizures

I credit the rapidity with which I gained some preliminary insight into the
squatters’ behavior to the very insistence with which they accounted for
their actions in terms of the Holy Spirit’s agency. A few examples will suf-
fice to give an idea of the extent to which it is the Pentecostal squatters

themselves who reflexively assume the link between the Holy Ghost’s
innermost designs and their own spatial agency.
One inheres in the insistence with which the squatters legitimate their
illegal operations through appeal to transcendental grounds, claiming that
whatever they seize is theirs “because God has given it to us.” I cannot
think of any more effective means to circumvent worldly property rights
than the claim, drawn from the Bible, that “God is the owner of the entire
world’s silver and gold.” Voiced constantly by the squatters, with syllogistic