Angela Garcia | Stanford University (original) (raw)

Books by Angela Garcia

Ethnos, 2019

This article considers an archive of letters written by three generations of female kin as offeri... more This article considers an archive of letters written by three generations of female kin as offering a form for thinking about the nature of kin relations. It tells the story of how the archive came into being, and examines the ways writing and archiving makes visible the shifting relations that constitute kinship. Highlighting the narrative acts of selected letters, it grapples with the failure of things being properly ‘passed on’ within the web of kinship, as well as the potential that this failure generates.

The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession Along the Rio Grande, 2010

The Pastoral Clinic takes us on a penetrating journey into an iconic Western landscape—northern N... more The Pastoral Clinic takes us on a penetrating journey into an iconic Western landscape—northern New Mexico’s Española Valley, home to the highest rate of heroin addiction and fatal overdoses in the United States. In a luminous narrative, Angela Garcia chronicles the lives of several Hispano addicts, introducing us to the intimate, physical, and institutional dependencies in which they are entangled. We discover how history pervades this region that has endured centuries of material and cultural dispossession, and we come to see its heroin problem as a contemporary expression of these conditions, as well as a manifestation of the human desire to be released from them. Lyrically evoking the Española Valley and its residents through conversations, encounters, and recollections, The Pastoral Clinic is at once a devastating portrait of addiction, a rich ethnography of place, and an eloquent call for a new ethics of care.

Papers by Angela Garcia

American Ethnologist, 2023

In the past two decades, drug-treatment centers called anexos (annexes) have proliferated through... more In the past two decades, drug-treatment centers called anexos (annexes) have proliferated throughout Mexico. Run and attended by the working poor, anexos' therapeutic practices blend criminal violence and religious ritual, and they are widely condemned as abusive and unethical. Based on several years of ethnographic research in Mexico City, this article situates anexos within a larger historical frame and examines how they conjure and rework contemporary forms of affliction through a novel form of confessional practice. It shows how confession simultaneously reproduces pervasive images of violence while also disclosing projects of communitarian survival that are ethically affirmative. In doing so, this article demonstrates that anexos' confessional practices constitute an aesthetics and politics of recovery that calls for a rethinking of criminal, religious, and therapeutic domains.

Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 2015

Over the last decade, there has been a sharp increase in drug addiction in Mexico, especially amo... more Over the last decade, there has been a sharp increase in drug addiction in Mexico, especially among the urban poor. During the same period, unregulated residential treatment centers for addiction, known as anexos, have proliferated throughout
the country. These centers are utilized and run by marginalized populations and are widely known to engage in physical violence. Based on long-term ethnographic research in Mexico City, this article describes why anexos emerged, how they work, and what their prevalence and practices reveal about the nature of recovery in a context where poverty, drugs, and violence are existential realities. Drawing attention to the dynamic relationship between violence and recovery, pain, and healing,
it complicates categories of violence and care that are presumed to have exclusive meaning, illuminating the divergent meanings of, and opportunities for, recovery, and how these are socially configured and sustained. [addiction, violence, Mexico,
drug war, informality]

Alcoholism Treatment Quarterly, 2015

This article reports results from a preliminary ethnographic study of a new and largely unknown s... more This article reports results from a preliminary ethnographic study of a new and largely unknown self-help organization for Latinos with substance use disorders, known as ‘‘4th and 5th Step Group’’ (in Spanish, Grupo de Cuarto y Quinto Paso, ‘‘CQ’’). It describes the nature of CQ, aspects of group membership, and members’ experiences of the organization. Although findings are preliminary, they provide critical information on a potentially important therapeutic resource. More rigorous research with larger and more diverse samples of Latinos participating in CQ is warranted.

Social Anthropology, 2014

This article explores the changing nature of inheritance among Hispanos in northern New Mexico. S... more This article explores the changing nature of inheritance among Hispanos in northern New Mexico. Specifically, it examines how Hispano families have reworked the traditional application of inheritance, referring to property passed down the generations, to conceive of heroin addiction as ‘inherited’. It shows how this emerging formation of inheritance is shaped by, and refracts back upon, past configurations of property and belonging. This article reflects on intergenerational addiction as a modality of connection and continuity, but one that is entangled with experiences of loss. It highlights the implications of this tension for anthropological understandings of inheritance, addiction and the embodiment of history.

Ethos, 2014

Moral engagement in the setting of drug addiction is often at odds with prevailing moral discours... more Moral engagement in the setting of drug addiction is often at odds with prevailing moral discourse and is treated in punitive terms. In this article, I explore how one moral gesture—a promise between a heroin-using mother and daughter—embodies the difficulty and ambiguity of moral experience in the context of addiction and offers insight into how it is profoundly shaped by social processes. By offering a close description of the promise over time, I show how morality is lived through sentiments and practices of care and commitment, which are vulnerable to isolation, punishment, and wounding. The story of the promise thus offers a way to reflect upon morality as the blurring of these different intensities. [morality, ethics, care, incarceration, addiction]

Cultural Anthropology, 2008

In biomedical and public health discourses, “chronicity” has emerged as the prevailing model to u... more In biomedical and public health discourses, “chronicity” has emerged as the prevailing
model to understanding drug addiction and addictive experience. This approach is
predicated on constructing and responding to addictive experience in ways that underscore its presumed lifelong nature. In this essay, I examine the phenomenon of heroin addiction and heroin overdose in northern New Mexico’s Espanola Valley, which suffers the highest rate of heroin-induced death in the United States, and explore how the logic of chronicity is dangerously reworked through the Hispano ethos of endless suffering. Focusing on the narrative of Alma, a Hispana heroin addict who died of an overdose after many previous overdoses, I evoke a sense of the physical, historical, and institutional refrains in which she felt herself caught. By tracing Alma’s death back to these refrains, I describe the complex of entanglements in which her addiction took form and show how the discourse of chronicity provided a structure for her suffering and, ultimately, her death.