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Seized by the Spirit 239

endemic to their existence. Albeit in a more extreme police register, such
an experience simply replayed the myriad humiliations, dispossessions,
and losses, the sense of constantly having to start anew from scratch, which
forms the fabric of their every day. 13
This, I suppose, is one of the reasons why the squatters repeat so often
that “even if we are in this world, we’re not of this world.” Because, includ-
ing the seizure of the Yaracuy, which, given its illegality, at any time may
be undone by the state, the sovereign acts that the Holy Ghost perpetrates
through the mediation of the squatters unfold in a kind of parallel uni-
verse. A phantasmatic double of the “real” world as it is defined by norma-
tive expectations, symbolic affiliations, and existing power relations, from
movies to rap songs, ideally, at least, in such a religiously inflected realm
everything that is of this world must have its “spiritual” counterpart in the
other, hence the profusion of “Christian” CDs and DVDs that one can
find serially displayed in the stalls of informal traders or buhoneros special-
izing in this kind of commodities. Trying to attract a clientele these buhon-
eros often blast the music of their religious CDs through loudspeakers or,
if not, show their Christian DVDs to an absorbed audience of onlookers
on the TV sets that they often keep in theirs stalls. I submit that double-
ness is an attribute not just of the “Christian” commodities that the squat-
ters endlessly acquire; it marks everything that they do or seize on behalf
of the Holy Ghost or, better yet, that such a Ghost seizes through them,
imbuing with spectrality, as not quite of this world, every worldly thing,
good, place, or space on which they put their hands.

Showtime

Given how promiscuous the exchanges between “religion” and the “elec-
tronic media” are in our times, it is not surprising that whenever the Holy
Ghost arrives through the squatters to such a radically dispossessed world,
He does so in fully televisual terms (see also de Abreu in this volume).
Arriving to the bodies of the Pentecostal squatters, so to speak, in “real

time,” such a televisual possession goes a long way to account for these
squatters’ sense that, as opposed, for example, to the Catholics’ “dead”
deity, theirs is a “living God” instantaneously conveying His messages and
14
dictates to His squatter-people. Indeed, swiftly seizing the bodies of the
believers as “vessels” through which to reconnect with the living, whether
in tongues or the vernacular, the Holy Ghost’s messages and dictates
directly erupt in broad daylight to more or less sensationalist effects, and
often in the television studio-like stage of the various Pentecostal churches