Lecture: David Gonzalez

DGlecture.jpg

David Gonzalez. Photo: Laurel Angrist. © 2007 Laurel Angrist.


When Danilo Florian, the pastor of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem, agreed to meet with David Gonzalez in spring 2005, the New York Times reporter rushed home to shave and change into pressed khakis and a white shirt. Gonzalez had already spent two months researching the Pentecostal movement in New York City. To his distress, he still hadn't found the right church to focus his reporting on. This interview might turn out to be the linchpin for the series of articles he was writing, and Gonzalez wasn't taking any chances. He even got a haircut.

Planned as a special reporting assignment that would culminate in a three-part print and multimedia series for The New York Times and the paper's website, respectively, the story grew into an intense year-long endeavor for the 49-year-old reporter. Speaking before a packed audience in NYU's journalism department on January 24, 2007, Gonzalez told NYU students and faculty that he eased into the project, conducting background interviews with religious scholars and Pentecostals. But he was aware all along that the key to the series' success was finding the right congregation to anchor the story.

“It’s very easy for an outsider to just think that these folks are nuts. But the reality is a lot more complicated.”

Gonzalez knew exactly what he was looking for. He wanted to find a Spanish-speaking church in the South Bronx or West Harlem where the pastor, like many Pentecostal clergymen, was still working a day job. Most important, he was searching for a relatively young church. "I wanted them to still be in that period where they don't know if they're going survive or not," he told his listeners. "That's a really crucial period. I wanted that uncertainty to be part of the story."

Then, one day, a friend casually pointed out Ark of Salvation for the New Millenium, a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem made up mostly of immigrants from the Dominican Republic, where Pastor Florian preached to a small but fervent flock.

The reporter and the preacher met the next day to discuss Gonzalez's reporting project. "It was funny, because they were scoping me out just as much as I was scoping them out," said Gonzalez. "And they're looking at me like they're really suspicious." Despite his initial wariness, Pastor Florian agreed to let Gonzalez write about his congregation.

DGlecture2.jpg

David Gonzalez. Photo: Laurel Angrist. © 2007 Laurel Angrist.

Gonzalez and his "partner-in-crime," as he called Times photographer Angel Franco, immersed themselves in their reporting. They accompanied the congregation "everywhere," Gonzalez said, spending almost every night of the week attending worship services and social occasions, such as birthday parties, gatherings at other Pentecostal churches, and weekend revivals.

During the first few weeks, Pastor Florian announced their presence to the congregation, but Gonzalez and Franco didn't take notes or photographs. Instead, they watched everything going on around them. "We were trying to get a sense of how this place functioned," Gonzalez said. "It's almost like doing ethnography."

Eventually the congregation became accustomed to their presence at church services and social events. As the reporters' relationships with church members developed, they were able to ask more probing questions. "You spend that much time with people, and they really bare themselves to you," Gonzalez said. "They told me stuff they didn't tell each other."

In turn, Gonzalez and Franco tried to blend in, reporting almost entirely in Spanish and participating in worship services. "There were some basic things that you did out of respect. Like when they'd stand up, you'd stand up," Gonzalez said.

By the fall of 2005, Gonzalez and Franco scaled back their reporting and began to focus on telling the story. Metro Editor Joe Sexton decided the best way to handle the story was as a three-part print and Web series, and the reporters met with Times Web producers and picture editors to plan the multimedia component of the project. Almost immediately, they hit on an innovative idea: making the online offering available in Spanish as well as English.

Franco began sifting through the nearly 3,500 photographs and 20 hours of video that he'd shot. Meanwhile, Gonzalez began the arduous task of transcribing and organizing a year's worth of notes, followed by months of writing and rewriting. A friend lent him a small room in a South Bronx church office, and that winter, Gonzalez settled in to work in solitude and silence. "I really went crazy," he said of this, the hardest part of the project. The cloistered quiet of the little room was useful "during the hardcore writing," Gonzalez said. It helped him "get [his] arms around" the story.

Throughout the project, the two reporters' Latino roots gave them unique cultural insights into the story and helped them build a deeper, more nuanced rapport with Pastor Florian and his congregation. Gonzalez strove to make his writing capture the Latino perspective. "A lot of people don't understand this world of Latinos in New York," Gonzalez said. "I grew up in the South Bronx...and so these things were not unfamiliar to me. You could always hear the tambourines and the singing, and depending on what kind of Puerto Rican family you grew up in, most likely you had a cousin or an aunt who was, as they call it, aleluyas, [Pentecostals] were always there."

Portraying Pastor Florian's congregation honestly meant including the excesses of Pentecostalism: people crying, screaming, speaking in tongues, and falling down unconscious in the course of daily worship. "It's very easy for an outsider to just think that these folks are nuts," said Gonzalez. "But the reality is a lot more complicated."

Anne Noyes is a graduate student in the journalism department at NYU. She is co-managing editor of Bullpen for the spring 2007 semester.

ARTICLE URL

/publishing/archives/bullpen/david_gonzalez/lecture_david_g/