The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession Along the Rio Grande

The Pastoral Clinic takes us on a penetrating journey into an iconic Western landscape--northern New Mexico's Espa ola 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 Hispanic 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 social inequality, drug and alcohol abuse, and material and cultural dispossession, and we come to see its experience of the opioid epidemic as a contemporary expression of these conditions, as well as a manifestation of the human desire to be released from them. With lyrical prose, evoking the Espa ola Valley and its residents through conversations, encounters, and recollections, The Pastoral Clinic is at once a devastating portrait of immigration and addiction, a rich ethnography of place, and an eloquent call to political activists, politicians, and medical professionals for a new ethics of substance abuse treatment and care.

Author: Angela Garcia
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 06/08/2010
Pages: 264
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 0.60d
ISBN13: 9780520262089
ISBN10: 0520262085
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Anthropology | Cultural & Social
- Self-Help | Substance Abuse & Addictions | Drugs

About the Author
Angela Garcia is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University.