The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande

In this chapter, Garcia visits New Mexico two years after she concludes her research. She follows up on her former research subjects and Nuevo Día. While Garcia previously lived and worked in the Española Valley, she avoided using her neighbors as subjects for her research. Nearly all her neighbors used heroin, and she knew which ones were more dangerous than others. Garcia later reads about her neighbors in a national newspaper. Their two-and-a-half-year-old son, Danny, had a cold, and Danny’s father first tried to stop his son’s crying by administering children’s cold medicine. When he continued to cry, he rubbed alcohol and then heroin on Danny’s gums. The child’s death earned national attention.

Nuevo Día was forced to close as a detoxification clinic in 2006 after only two years of operation. However, it was permitted to remain open as a center for recovery; it could still run its rehabilitation groups but could not administer anti-opioid medications. Garcia learns that Nuevo Día lost credibility for its inconsistent practices and lack of qualified medical supervision. She suggests that this view of Nuevo Día reveals a bias about citizens in the region:

The idea that Nuevo Día lacked credibility and that it was, like its patients, ‘unstable’ revealed long-standing cultural assumptions about the Española Valley—that it was essentially premodern and its people irrational and untrustworthy (186).