The Pastoral Clinic - 9780520262089

The Pastoral Clinic takes us on a penetrating journey into an iconic Western landscapeùnorthern New Mexico's Espa±ola Valley, home to highest rate of heroin addiction and fatal overdoses in the United States. 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 a region that has endured centuries of material and cultural dispossession, and we come to see the area's 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 Espanola Valley and its residents through conversations, encounters, and recollections, The Pastoral Clinic is a devastating portrait of addiction and a rich ethnography of place.

"A formidable thinker, a wrench-in-the-works activist inside and out of the industry, Angela Garcia understands that addictions are not an 'always has been and always will be' fate. And that the path toward healing, reconciliation, and wholeness is in the land, in the hand, and the capable heart of every addict and broken community."-Luis J. Rodriguez, author of Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A.

"Timely, disturbing, and luminously written, The Pastoral Clinic is anthropology at its best, bringing into view a devastating piece of reality, highlighting larger processes and human singularities, and calling for a new public ethics of care."-Jopo Biehl, author of Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment

"This heartfelt ethnography of the geography of addiction in New Mexico reveals how formerly agricultural communities and families find themselves painfully embedded in a land of dispossession and displacement with an unresolvable past and an unlivable present."-Philippe Bourgois, coauthor of Righteous Dopefiend