The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande

The Española Valley has the highest rate of heroin-induced deaths in the United States, as well as extreme poverty and high rates of domestic violence. The impact of heroin is felt by everyone; nearly everyone in the region knows at least one person who has overdosed on the drug. When Garcia returns to New Mexico in 2004, she finds hypodermic needles everywhere: roadside ditches, schoolyards, restaurants, and her own front yard. Heroin-related deaths are marked by descansos, small memorials like those found by the roadside, often in the shape of a cross. Garcia is interested in how New Mexico’s landscape, immortalized by writers and authors within the pastoral tradition, which idealizes rural life, relates to individual experiences with drug addiction.

Garcia opens the chapter with a description of a heroin rehabilitation clinic—a small house in the Española Valley countryside. John, Bernadette, and Lupita, patients at the clinic, sit outside with Garcia while they wait for their next round of medications. Garcia took the job at the clinic to expand her ethnographic research on heroin addiction in the area.

People who use heroin describe a sense of losing themselves while using the drug.