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Seized by the Spirit 235

one’s head at night. A true crossing of the desert, as witnessed by the many
stories, signs, uncanny voices, or visions that proliferate among the
Pentecostal squatters around this traumatic absence of home, such a quest
raises the whole issue of the dwelling from physical to metaphysical
proportions.
It is from such a world and otherworldly visions that Hermana Juana
rose as some Moses-like figure ready to lead her squatter-people into the
Promised Land of the building. The comparison with Moses is entirely
hers, not mine, as well as the insistence on assimilating the building to a
Promised Land overflowing with rivers of milk and honey. Her life before
seizing the Yaracuy as the quasi-millenarian leader of a relatively large fol-
lowing of mostly Pentecostal squatters is not unlike that of many living in
Caracas’ poor neighborhoods: a continuous struggle to merely stay afloat
where charm, cunning, hard work, or, in the case of Hermana Juana, an
obvious native intelligence along with considerable entrepreneurial skills
barely suffice to keep the head above water. 11
When Hermana Juana seized the Yaracuy, she did so as the hub of a con-
centric network of alliances among individuals and families formed over
time, mostly around the many Pentecostal churches that increasingly dot
the poorer neighborhoods of Caracas. Such groupings are what spontane-
ously forms in a sociality like Venezuela’s that, in the wake of a failing insti-
tutional network, increasingly looks like a landscape of new tribes. It is not,
therefore, surprising if minutes after Hermana Juana and her Pentecostal
following seized the building, a rival band of heavily armed squatters showed
up at the gates, threatening to shoot everyone in sight unless immediately
allowed into the building. From the squatters’ many retellings of this inci-
dent and its aftermath, a disturbing scenario emerges of two rival “peoples”
crashing head on, each more or less fleetingly summoned into being by rival
forms of sovereignty or alternative politico-theological regimes—a phe-
nomenon that is highly symptomatic of the fates of sovereignty in Caracas
today as well as of the mutations that a construct like “the people” is pres-
ently undergoing there.
What followed the two consecutive seizures by the rival bands of squat-
ters were months of intense fear and uncertainty, of clandestine meetings

in the Pentecostals’ apartments with members of this camp secretly fabri-
cating weapons, including rudimentary hand guns, in order to fight their
oppressors, something that they eventually did, as well as plotting in
hushed voices about what to do next; and armed patrols coursing the cor-
ridors throughout the night, often banging in deafening succession on
their doors, awakening them with the occasional gun to the head, all to
summon such a godly bunch at godless hours to perform the most menial
of tasks, for example, washing the building’s main stairway clean as rivers